4 Straight Wins for the Padres

Tuesday May 19, 2009

The Padres winning streak is at 4 games.

Look what happens. I go away from posting on this blog and other sites for a couple of days and suddenly the Padres are on their longest winning streak of the season. The San Diego Padres have now won four straight games after sweeping the Cincinnati Reds and winning one tonight 2-1 over Barry Zito and the San Francisco Giants.

I must admit that I only got to see 7 innings of Jake Peavy's complete game win against the Reds on Sunday. I was running a fever in the morning and I was not quite sure my wife was going to let me out of the house, but once again treachery and old age won out over sweetness and common sense. For those other 21,000 that were there that day and that are now feeling a cold coming on, my wife assures me it is entirely my fault.

Peavy must have felt like Picasso, because he painted a masterpiece. 9 innings, 4 hits, ZERO walk and just 1 earned run on what may have been his only bad pitch of the game. How good was he? Of the 121 pitches he threw, 92 were strikes. Only 1 player had an extra base hit. Only 1 player got to 2nd base. In fact through 7 innings, only one Reds player was on base at all.

You have got to feel privileged any time you get to see a pitching performance like that.

Tonight we got to see another pitchers duel in which both Chris Young and Barry Zito pitched a great game. Unfortunately for Zito, who pitched 8 full innings and gave up just 5 hits, the 2 home runs he gave up to Scott Hairston in the 1st and Hundley in the 2nd were enough to hang him with the loss. It was Hairston's 5th home run of the season and Hundley's 2nd home run in as many at bats after his walk off blast against the Reds in the 16th inning on Saturday.

Despite a 3.62 era, Zito is just 1-4 for the punchless Giants.

CY went 6 strong only giving up only 5 hits while striking out 6. Young gave up only a single run in the 6th when Kouzmanoff and Eckstein were unable to turn a double play on a ground out by Emmanuel Burris with men on 1st and third.

A trio from the Padres bullpen shut the Giants down for 3 innings and Heath Bell stayed perfect on the season while picking up his 10th save.

Adrian Gonzalez continued his struggles on this home stand (and at Petco overall) by going 0-4 tonight. For the home stand he is just 2 for 18 with just 1 run batted in. A .111 batting average.

Just a few moments ago I saw one of the most promising statistic of the year come across the TV Screen during the replay. What was it?

It was a graphic showing the NL teams with the lowest number of extra base hits this season and the Giants headed the list with just 94 extra base hits and it rose to 108 extra base hits for the 5th worst team, the Reds.

Why was that promising? The Padres were not on the list for the first time since 2007. The Padres are tied with the Cubs at 112 extra base hits going into tonight's game.

A side note - Bruce Bochy, former Padres manager, got his 1176th loss tonight tying him with Frank Robinson for 28th all time. While Bochy has no shot at passing Connie Mack and his 3948 losses over 53 seasons, at his current pace Bochy has a good shot at passing Bucky Harris for the 2nd most losses in just 11 more seasons. Go for it Bochy!

(A trivia question for you all. What manager has the best win-loss percentage since Jackie Robinson became the 1st African American player in modern baseball in 1947?)


Now back to the Padres -

Is it time to bring out the kool aid again?

Far from it, but it is so nice to see four wins in a row after 11 losses in a row on the road.

So, for now it is nice to report that the Padres winning streak is at 4 games.