BALTIMORE — Things are going the Padres’ way.
They are playing a good brand of baseball. Very good.
“We’re doing everything pretty well,” Manny Machado said Saturday evening. “… There’s not just one thing. We’re doing everything pretty well.”
That is accurate to say at this point — with their road trip verging on being the best in franchise history and having achieved their best record so far this season.
But the Padres’ 9-4 victory over the Orioles on Saturday was also testament to the idea that a season’s ebbs and flows are sometimes guided by the vagaries of luck.
What the Padres could bask in Saturday was how they grabbed the favor they were handed and didn’t let go, because that is what often separates winners from wannabes.
The Padres appear to be winners after they added on and then added on some more against the shockingly charitable American League East leaders.
“We got lucky, but that doesn’t fly (on its own),” Machado said. “They’re a playoff-caliber team. They’re going to score. Look what they did. For us, we capitalized on it.”
Whatever got the game going in the right direction, Michael King (9-6, 3.26) inarguably deserved his win after leaving the game having not allowed a run and yielding two hits through 6⅓ innings.
Every player in the Padres’ lineup had at least one hit. Xander Bogaerts had three of them — two doubles and a triple. Machado had three hits as well, the middle one a three-run homer that put the Padres up 7-0 against his former team.
Manny Machado homers in his old stomping grounds! pic.twitter.com/sj5ChAnieh
— MLB (@MLB) July 27, 2024
That seventh-inning blast, which gave him 1,000 RBIs for his career, came after the Padres built a 4-0 lead with help from a very good opponent playing very poorly.
“Those … runs they gave us with those errors, we knew we had to continue,” Machado said. “We knew we had to put up some runs. Those (few) runs weren’t going to keep them back.”
Because they did, the Padres have won seven consecutive road games for just the fifth time in their existence and are one win away from matching the franchise record set in 2006. This is just the second time all those victories have come on the same trip.
They are 7-1 on this trek that began with a 7-0 loss on July 19 in Cleveland. A victory in Sunday’s finale of the longest trip of their season would conclude the most successful trip of at least nine games in Padres history.
They have in the seven consecutive victories, also a season-high streak regardless of venue, outscored the Guardians, Nationals and Orioles 43-12.
“We’ve had some really good pitching,” manager Mike Shildt said. “We’ve coupled it with — we’ve just played some really good baseball.”
King’s outing, which began with him recording an out after picking up the 109 mph line drive that struck him on his left calf, was the Padres’ seventh quality start in eight games.
An MLB season is too long and too grueling to apologize for any manner of victory.
“Teams gift us some runs?” Bogaerts said. “You take anything you can get.”
The Padres took a 2-0 lead in the second inning when Orioles shortstop Gunnar Henderson and third baseman Ramón Urias both went for a ball that fell between their gloves as Urias stood directly in front of Henderson in shallow left field. The error, charged to Urias, allowed Jackson Merrill and David Peralta, who had both singled, to score.
The popup that fell to allow two runs to score after the Gunnar Henderson and Ramon Urias' miscommunication pic.twitter.com/Qcfo0Unp9L
— Jacob Calvin Meyer (@jcalvinmeyer) July 27, 2024
“That doesn’t come by (very) often, especially with teams like that,” Machado said. “That’s rare.”
The Padres’ only earned run off Orioles starter Dean Kremer (4-7, 4.20) came in the third, but that arguably could have been prevented as well.
Jurickson Profar led off the third with a walk, and Machado’s single gave the Padres runners at corners with one out for the second consecutive inning. Bogaerts followed by grounding a ball at 102 mph directly at Urias, who simply got his glove down too late as the ball sped past him and Bogaerts got an RBI double.
Kyle Higashioka’s one-out single in the fourth led to another unearned run when he moved to second on Luis Arraez’s single and scored on a fielder’s choice grounder by Profar and the ensuing throw by Henderson into the photo well near the first base dugout.
The Padres’ lead was 8-0 in the seventh when Bogaerts followed Machado’s homer with a triple and Merrill drove him in with a sacrifice fly. Merrill also drove in Machado with a sacrifice fly in the ninth.
The Orioles scored twice in the bottom of the seventh inning after a leadoff walk and one-out single allowed by King. Stephen Kolek replaced King with runners at first and second and got out of the inning — following a two-run double by Cedric Mullins. They added two more in the ninth against Logan Gillaspie when Colton Cowser lined a one-out single and Mullins homered.
None of that mattered because the Padres executed the philosophy Shildt instilled from his first spring training address — that they would be a team characterized by giving nothing and taking all they could.
“We took advantage of some opportunities early,” Shildt said. “A lot of relentless at-bats. Kept adding on.”
