Ty France hit his first home run at Petco Park in more than five years. Ramón Laureano and Jackson Merrill added shots late. The Padres paired their burgeoning slug with small-ball sensibilities in a 7-2 win that extended their win streak to five games and upped their total to 10.
Only the two-time World Series champion Dodgers have more.
Yet amid all the positives in a four-game sweep of the Colorado Rockies, the Padres’ biggest question mark got all that more complicated on a gloomy Sunday afternoon at Petco Park.
Admittedly under the weather to start the game, right-hander Nick Pivetta walked off the mound with a trainer in the top of the fourth inning with elbow stiffness, casting quite the shadow on the turnaround following the team’s 2-5 start to the season.
“I think it’s too early to tell for me,” Pivetta said after the Padres improved to 10-6. “I just tried to go out there, do the best I could, get as deep in the baseball game as I possibly could. Obviously, didn’t feel good. I came out of the game. But the bullpen picked me up. Team did a great job. A lot of home runs, a lot of great plays. Was able to get a really good sweep and build some good momentum as well.”
Nick Pivetta exited with an injury after retiring the first nine Rockies hitters he faced pic.twitter.com/4ZeQTUFYMi
— Talkin’ Baseball (@TalkinBaseball_) April 12, 2026
Pivetta was topping 95 mph in the first inning Sunday, but dropped to 92 mph on two fastballs thrown to Edouard Julien to start the fourth inning. That second sub-par four-seamer on a 2-1 pitch prompted manager Craig Stammen and head athletic trainer Mark Rogow to hop out of the dugout and join Pivetta on the mound.
It was a brief conversation, with Pivetta biting his glove during the visit with Stammen and Rogow before exiting the game.
Afterward, Pivetta dismissed the idea that Sunday’s stiffness was similar to what he felt in April 2024, when he went on the injured list with a mild flexor strain — “No, not correlated to that,” he said — but not the arm fatigue that set him back a touch this spring.
Pivetta was not feeling well enough to even man the ping-pong table as he does ahead of most starts. Neither he nor Stammen cited a particular pitch that led to concern on Sunday, just overall stiffness that did not subside as he got deeper into his start.
“To be honest, I’m perplexed,” Pivetta said. “I think just take it day by day. I’m not going to put a single thing on it. … (The) human body is different. People feel things differently. I’m just trying to process it, work through it myself. I think the next coming days, I’ll probably see how it feels and be able to dictate what type of plan I want moving forward.”
Pivetta struck out four over three no-hit innings to begin Sunday’s game, looking more and more like his 2025 self.
Pivetta began this season as something of a known commodity in a rotation that lost Dylan Cease to free agency, re-signed Michael King after an injury-plagued year and was hoping for both the continued maturation of Randy Vásquez and Joe Musgrove’s return from Tommy John surgery.
Now if Pivetta is forced to miss time, the Padres will have to further dip into the depth pooling below the majors.
Knuckleballer Matt Waldron could be first up, as he’s thrown 12 shutout innings across three rehab starts for Triple-A El Paso, including 58 pitches over five shutout innings on Thursday. He is returning from a spring hemorrhoid surgery that knocked him out of the competition for a spot in the back of the rotation.
Right-hander Griffin Canning (Achilles injury) is also rehabbing at Triple-A El Paso. But he’s just two starts into that process and likely won’t be an option before May. Musgrove has yet to resume throwing bullpens following his spring setback. Left-hander JP Sears is also on the 40-man roster.
“We’ll see how he feels tomorrow,” Stammen said of Pivetta. “There’s a world where he makes his next start. So I think we’re optimistic that we caught it the right time, and then he just needs a little breather, maybe get healthy and get some vitamin C in him, and we’ll feel a little bit better.”
France’s fifth-inning homer — his first at Petco Park since Aug. 20, 2020, before he was traded to the Mariners — opened up a 3-2 lead. By the time Merrill led off the seventh with a homer, the Rockies were on their fourth pitcher as left-hander Kyle Freeland was scratched just before the game with shoulder soreness.
The Padres countered that curveball with small ball as Merrill bunted runners to second and third in the first inning ahead of Manny Machado’s sacrifice fly to center. The next inning, Bryce Johnson bunted France to third base after France’s leadoff double and Freddy Fermin gave the Padres a 2-0 lead on a sacrifice fly to left.
“I hope (Freeland) is all right; we were just ready to play,” Merrill said. “We don’t really care who’s ever on the mound. Doesn’t matter. Throwing 100. Throwing 85. Just be ready at all times.”
Machado’s run-scoring single in the fifth inning, Laureano’s two-run homer in the sixth and Merrill’s seventh-inning blast allowed the Padres’ bullpen to keep the Rockies at bay, even after Pivetta’s unexpected exit.
Left-hander Kyle Hart allowed two runs in 2⅓ innings, right-hander David Morgan struck out four of the six batters he faced, Wandy Peralta turned in a scoreless eighth and Bradgley Rodriguez did the same in the ninth.
All told, that quartet combined to allow just two hits — Brett Sullivan’s two-run double in the fifth inning off Hart and Hunter Goodman’s two-out single in the ninth off Rodriguez — after Pivetta’s untimely exit.
“Those boys all stepped up,” Stammen said. “I mean, when Nick went down, they called down and said everybody’s available. They all wanted to pitch. They all wanted to be the person that helped the team get through the game and help us get a ‘W.’
“Made a former bullpen guy pretty proud.”
