SEATTLESEATTLE — If news about Major League Baseball was slow to travel to the South and Emerson Hancock had not heard how disappointing the Padres lineup has been this season, he would know after Wednesday night there isn’t much to fear from the players wearing uniforms with the big names on the back.
There was that Ha-Seong Kim guy who created some havoc. But not much else.
The Padres lost 6-1 to the Mariners in large part because they couldn’t score more than one run in five innings against a pitcher making his major league debut and then did close to nothing against a string of relievers.
“Unacceptable,” Manny Machado said after a postgame team meeting that lasted 20 minutes. “… I mean, he made some good pitches. We just couldn’t capitalize on it. But yeah, we’re way better than that, than what we did today.”
It was Cal Raleigh’s two-run homer, a 450-foot blast to right field off Steven Wilson, in the eighth inning that provided the difference for the Mariners before they added three more runs against Wilson and Tom Cosgrove.
But the Padres’ offense continued to be meager and had scored one run while losing two games here.
“It’s hard to win a game when you have — what? — two, three hits,” Xander Bogaerts said. “Let’s start off with that.”
The Padres finished with four hits. Jake Cronenworth’s one-out walk and Luis Campusano’s two-out single in the ninth gave them their only base runner in the final three innings, as they lost their fourth consecutive game and fell to 4½ games back in the race for the National League’s final wild-card spot.
The meeting afterward was at least the fourth the team has held after a game this season to address issues pertaining to its lack of execution, mainly on offense.
“We’ve got to play as a team,” Juan Soto said. “We’ve got to go out there grind every day. Grind every at-bat. … It’s been really inconsistent. Some days we do, some days we don’t. We gotta do it every day. Days like this series, we just give up. Like literally, we just give up instead of keep grinding, keep pushing. We’ve got to forget about yesterday and keep moving.”
Being that it is 2023, it is almost certain Hancock was very much aware of the Padres’ plight, even though he grew up and went to college and played minor league baseball almost exclusively in Georgia and Arkansas. Maybe that helped him. He certainly pitched against them just as successfully as many other major league pitchers this season.
“Definitely would have wanted a different outcome, especially going up against a young kid who probably will be a little overamped,” Bogaerts said. “But I’ve seen young kids come up and debut and they shove. some kids the moment might get a little too big for them and they can’t throw strikes. But for the most part, this kid was actually around the zone.”
The Padres could not manage much against the 24-year-old who was called up Wednesday from Double-A and allowed just one run in five innings. The Mariners’ top-rated pitching prospect surrendered two singles and walked three, and the Padres went 0-for-6 with runners in scoring position while he was in the game and 0-for-9 in all.
“We just weren’t able to execute,” Bogaerts said. “It’s not like he had anything special. But he threw strikes, had some movement on his pitches. First time seeing the kid. But we definitely should have played better, for sure.”
The Mariners scored just one unearned run off Padres starter Yu Darvish through the first six innings, and Robert Suarez bailed him out after the first two batters reached base in the seventh.
Kim made the Padres’ lone run of the series happen in the first inning by walking at the start and then tying his career high for stolen bases in a game in a span of two pitches.
Kim, who has reached base in 18 consecutive games, stole second on the second pitch of Fernando Tatis Jr.’s three-pitch strikeout and then stole third on Hancock’s first pitch to Soto.
Kim ran home on Soto’s soft grounder back to Hancock, which the rookie elected to throw to first rather than try to get Kim on what would have been a close play.
It was Tatis making the correct and bold decision on a throw in the bottom of the first that prevented a run.
After Eugenio Suárez’s two-out single past a diving Machado, Raleigh grounded a ball down the right field line and rounded first to try for a double. Tatis ran in, picked up the ball after it caromed off the side wall and threw to second base in time for Bogaerts to tag out Raleigh well before Suárez reached home.
Kim also got the first hit off Hancock, with one out in the third inning, and stole second base during Tatis’ 10-pitch at-bat. But he was stranded there when Tatis and Soto grounded out.
The Mariners took advantage of a poor throw and an off-line throw by Tatis to tie the game in the bottom of the third inning.
Cade Marlowe led off with a line drive to right field and rounded the bag aggressively, drawing an aggressive throw from Tatis, which ricocheted off Marlowe’s foot and bounced into foul territory.
Marlowe moved to second on the error, to third on Josh Rojas’ groundout to the right side and scored on J.P. Crawford’s fly ball to Tatis, whose throw home was up the first base line. An on-target throw would have made the play close.
Machado walked to start the fourth but was left at second.
Hancock was replaced by Justin Topa to start the sixth, and he faced just three batters. The right-hander got Soto on a fly ball to the warning track in left field before Machado walked and Bogaerts lined a single to right field.
Left-hander Gabe Speier was brought in, and he ended the inning on Cronenworth’s fielder’s choice grounder and a pinch-hitter Garrett Cooper’s 108.2 mph lineout to left field.
Darvish, who yielded a leadoff single in both the fourth and fifth before escaping those innings unscathed, got help from another fine throw in the sixth.
Teoscar Hernández lined a two-out single off the left field wall that bounced directly to Soto, who grabbed the ball and threw to Kim waiting at second base to apply the tag to Hernández’s leg and end the inning.
Darvish had thrown 79 pitches to that point. He would not get another out.
Mike Ford led off the seventh inning with a walk and was replaced at first base by pinch-runner José Caballero, who stole second before Darvish’s final pitch of the game hit France.
Suarez struck out Marlowe, retired Rojas on a groundout to first and got Crawford on a line drive to Bogaerts at shortstop.
That would be the last of the good things to happen for the Padres.
“You can’t ask for the pitching staff to do a better job than what they have done,” Bogaerts said. “Wilson didn’t pitch the way he wanted to in the last inning, but for the most part he’s been one of our best relievers. You can’t always ask him to throw zeros. We know it’s been the offense. We know it’s been extremely streaky. It’s hard to win games like that.”
