Dylan Cease was not horrible. Again.
While not horrible is far short of what the Padres need from Cease, what he is doing could be overcome if the Padres could score more frequently.
But on Saturday night, the offense was horrible. Again.
The Padres put up virtually no fight against the Pirates and lost 5-0.
It was the Padres’ first loss to the Pirates since 2023, stopping a winning streak against them at 10 games, which was tied for the second-longest winning streak in team history against any opponent.
That the streak against the team with the second-worst record in the National League (22-37) ended with the Padres getting two hits and not scoring seemed appropriate at this point.
The Padres have five hits in the past two games, the first time since 2015 they have had that few hits in successive games.
They are batting .203 over the past 14 games and are 5-9 in that span.
They hit .254 and scored 25 runs while winning three of four from Sunday through Wednesday, which was far more in line with how they were hitting the first month-and-half of the season.
But they beat the Pirates 3-2 Friday despite getting just three hits and Saturday managed two hits against Pirates left-hander Bailey Falter and nothing against three Pirates relievers.
“Tonight clearly wasn’t a night that is representative of us,” Padres manager Mike Shildt said. “But, you know, if you look at three, four or five games, you can go, ‘Wow, it’s pretty darn good.’ You look at, you know, four, five, six games (before that), you can go, ‘Eh, it’s not quite us.’ So I look at it from both lenses. … We’ve had successes. We’ve won games. We have a chance tomorrow to win our third series in a row. So that feels pretty good. And then, you know, games where guys have pitched well, like Falter did tonight.”
It is important to note the Padres faced one of the hottest pitchers in the major leagues on Saturday.
Falter finished May with a 0.76 ERA in six starts (35⅓ innings). The left-hander allowed three baserunners in 6⅔ innings Saturday after beginning the month by holding the Padres to one run on two hits over seven innings on May 2 in Pittsburgh.
Fernando Tatis Jr.’s leadoff single in the first, Martín Maldonado’s one-out single in the third and Gavin Sheets’ one-out walk in the fifth gave the Padres their only baserunners against Falter (4-3, 3.14). Maldonado and Sheets were erased by inning-ending double plays.
Such offensive impotence magnifies any misstep by a pitcher.
Padres pitchers have a 4.63 ERA over the team’s past 14 games. That is sixth-worst among all major league teams. But a top-10 ERA might not have been enough to change many results in that stretch.
In half of those 14 games, two runs were enough to beat the Padres.
That doesn’t let Cease (1-4, 4.66) off the hook or make his lack of dominance any less concerning.
The 29-year-old right-hander has not found the rhythm that he put together for long stretches in 2024 and in the way the Padres are counting on for ‘25.
For the fifth time in 12 starts, he did not make it through the fifth inning. He has gone longer than five innings just five times.
This is a pitcher who finished fourth in National League Cy Young voting last year and second in American League Cy Young voting in 2022.
But coming off a season in which he threw a no-hitter and had a 3.47 ERA in 189⅓ innings, Cease has a 4.66 ERA and is on pace to throw fewer than 180 innings for the first time since 2021.
He barely survived the fourth inning last night, as Yuki Matsui was warming up when Cease’s 29th pitch of the inning and 84th pitch of the game struck out Oneil Cruz to end the fourth.
Cease took a few batters to find the feel for his slider, and the Pirates took advantage right away by jumping on a fastball he continued to struggle to locate.
Cruz began the game with a double grounded just inside first base on a fastball down and in, though not enough of either.
Cease then threw six sliders in seven pitches to Andrew McCutchen, and four of them missed the strike zone by a fair amount. Bryan Reynolds then flared a first-pitch fastball to left field to bring in Cruz.
Cease struck out the next two batters and ended the inning with a lineout.
He worked an uneventful and fairly efficient two innings and got two outs into the fourth inning before a double by Adam Frazier and single by Ke’Bryan Hayes put the Pirates up 2-0.
Isiah Kiner-Falefa followed with a single that prompted the Padres to get Matsui up.
After getting through the fourth, Cease hung a slider to McCutchen on the first pitch of the fifth, and it ended up in the seats beyond left field.
Cease retired the next two batters, which got him to 95 pitches, and manager Mike Shildt replaced him with Sean Reynolds.
“I definitely didn’t get into a good rhythm,” Cease said. “Just frustrating. I didn’t execute pitches. … I didn’t think my command in general was very good. And it was kind of one of the issues why the pitch count was high and just, you know, just a lack of excellence.”
Matsui replaced Reynolds with one out and nobody on in the seventh inning and did not record an out of his own while the Pirates scored twice.
Matsui left two runners to Bradgley Rodriguez, who in his major league debut got a comebacker to the mound from Alexander Canario that he turned and fired to second base to start an inning-ending double play.
That left the Padres with three innings to try to make up a 5-0 deficit.
And they did not get another hit.
The Padres’ only scoring opportunity that mattered was in the first inning. It ended with Tatis on third base.
The only other time they got a runner to scoring position was in the eighth inning after walks by Sheets and Jake Cronenworth.
