Walker Buehler rested his elbows on the dugout railing and witnessed his gem and the Padres’ chances at victory falling apart.
“You’re trying to watch a teammate get out of a jam that they came in to try and help you get out of,” Buehler said later.
When Adrian Morejón allowed both runners Buehler left him in the sixth inning to score, that was pretty much it for the Padres, who would lose 3-0 to the Phillies on Wednesday at Petco Park.
It was a rough day to have pitched so well, matched up as Buehler was against a pitcher in the midst of a run in which he is more difficult to score on than anyone wearing a Phillies uniform in more than a century.
“Their starting pitcher is on a little bit of a roll right now, to say the least,” Padres manager Craig Stammen said. “Pretty darn good. We battled him, but just not quite good enough.”
It is not that it was impossible the Padres were going to score against Cristopher Sánchez, but no one has since April.
By shutting out the Padres for seven innings, the left-hander ran his scoreless streak to 44⅔ innings, the longest by a Phillies pitcher since 1911 and the longest by any left-hander in at least 65 seasons.
And the major leagues’ most feeble offense just isn’t in a place where it can seem to mount comebacks anymore.
The Padres went down in order against Jonathan Bowlan in the eighth before getting one hit against José Alvarado in the ninth.
The meaningful scoring chances Wednesday came against Sánchez, but the Padres went 0-for-7 with runners in scoring position against him. After also failing once against Alvarado, they have now gone 35 at-bats without a hit with runners in scoring position.
“It’s definitely a tough guy, one of the best pitchers in the league right now, has been for the past couple years,” Manny Machado said of Sánchez. “I think we competed with him well. We had an opportunity early on in the first two or three innings, and after that he kind of got into cruise control and kind of took over his game. If you don’t take advantage of those situations early on off of a guy like that, you’re gonna put yourself in a bad spot. We battled early on, we just couldn’t get that big hit like we haven’t.”
The Padres, whose .218 batting average is lowest in the major leagues and whose .652 OPS is second lowest, were shut out twice by the Phillies and once by the Dodgers in a nine-game homestand in which they went 3-6.
The Padres returned home from one of their best offensive series of the season, a three-game sweep against the Mariners in which they scored 17 runs and hit .255, and batted .182 at Petco Park over the past week-and-a-half against the Dodgers, Athletics and Phillies. They scored five runs against the Dodgers, their fewest in a three-game series this season. Then they went lower against the Phillies, scoring just three times.
So Buehler was going to have to match the hottest starting pitcher in the game for the Padres to have a chance of avoiding a fourth consecutive loss and being swept in a series for the first time this season.
He was more efficient than Sánchez, throwing just 58 pitches in his 5⅓ innings.
But the last two batters he faced reached base, on a single lined up the middle by Justin Crawford and a pitch that hit Edmundo Sosa. So with the Phillies about to turn the order over and have left-handed-hitting Kyle Schwarber, the MLB home run leader, face Buehler a third time, Stammen went to the left-handed Morejón.
“We flip the lineup and have two guys on, I understand it,” Buehler said. “When I haven’t been especially dominant for a couple years, it is what it is. … It’s not 2021 where I can go and say, “No, I’m still in the game and manager go back to the dugout.’ That’s not the situation. And we trust our bullpen about as, as much as anyone in baseball.”
Morejón, as good as any reliever in the major leagues at stranding runners over the past two seasons, got two ground balls. But the first made its way through the right side for an RBI single by Schwarber, and the second was an RBI fielder’s choice by Trea Turner that he hit too softly for it to produce a double play.
Morejón ended the inning by snagging a line drive by Bryce Harper and walked angrily off the mound.
Stammen continued to chase the victory, able to do so since the Padres are off Thursday before beginning a series in Washington on Friday, by deploying Jeremiah Estrada and Jason Adam for an inning apiece before Ron Marinaccio worked the ninth and allowed a home run to Turner.
The Padres finished with seven hits, one more than the Phillies.
But, as has been the recent norm, the Padres’ hits stopped when it mattered most.
Three straight outs stranded Fernando Tatis Jr. at second base after he led off the first inning with a single and immediately stole second.
A pair of two-out singles led to nothing in the second inning. Likewise for Ramón Laureano’s two-out double in the fourth.
And after Jackson Merrill doubled with one out in the seventh, Sánchez got Nick Castellanos on a groundout and struck out pinch-hitter Ty France.
With that, Sánchez became the first pitcher since Brandon Webb in 2007 and just the fifth pitcher ever to go at least seven scoreless innings in five consecutive starts.
During his run of scoreless innings, during which he passed Hall of Famer Grover Cleveland Alexander for the longest streak in Phillies history and future Hall of Famer Clayton Kershaw for the longest streak by a left-hander in the Expansion Era, Sánchez also has a complete game and has twice completed eight innings.
Other than the doubles by Laureano and Merrill, the Padres’ best-hit balls were two that Machado sent to the wall, including one that Crawford ran 118 feet to catch just before running face first into the wall in right-center field for the second out in the sixth inning. Sánchez did not walk anyone, struck out nine and got seven groundball outs.
“He just executes really well,” Xander Bogaerts said. “Even if it’s coming down the middle, it’s still moving. He’s a sinkerball and changeup guy. He’s pitching to grounders — punchouts and grounders. That’s what he does. Ask all the other guys that he threw all the zeros against, they’ll probably say the same thing.”
