The San Diego Padres are having a pretty awful week.
Earlier this week, the lowly Pads fell behind the Seattle Mariners by 13 runs before losing 16-4. The Mariners pounded high-paid starter James Shields for 10 runs, eventually leading Padres chairman Ron Fowler to publicly lambaste the pitcher and the team in a radio interview, calling them “miserable failures.”
A return home hasn’t changed much for the Padres, and their season hit a new low point Thursday night.
For a while, things looked pretty good for San Diego. The Padres scored four runs in the first inning before seemingly blowing things open with a seven-run fifth.
The Padres led 12-2 as the game entered the sixth, and then disaster struck. The Mariners cut the lead to five with five runs in the sixth before exploding for nine runs in the seventh.
When it was all said and done in the top half of the seventh, the Mariners scored the aforementioned nine runs on eight hits. And as you can see in the highlights, it was a death by a thousand paper cuts. Or, more appropriately, death by seven singles as the Mariners essentially went station to station for seven consecutive batters.
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“It’s one of those things that’s borderline inexplicable,” Padres manager Andy Green told reporters after the highest-scoring game in Petco Park history, per The Associated Press. “I’ve been around baseball a long time and you don’t see teams come back from 10. It’s just not something that happens very often. … They were all clean hits.”
The Padres now have lost nine of their lost 11 and have fallen to 12 1/2 games back in the National League West. They might want to keep Fowler away from any interviews for a while.
The silver lining? The Padres, who were shut out in their first three games of the season, have 27 runs in their last two games. So there’s that.
Thumbnail photo via Jake Roth/USA TODAY Sports Images
