Padres Snap Skid, Ruin Dodgers' Sweep Bid With Machado Blast

JP Sears drew the ball for San Diego looking to salvage some credibility after his last outing blew up in his face, while Emmet Sheehan took the mound for LA off a start against these same Padres that couldn't have gone much better. First pitch went off at 4:20 PM PT with the Dodgers chasing a four-game sweep and the Padres just trying to find a pulse.

The stakes were less about the standings than about whether San Diego could stop the bleeding. Tommy Edman got scratched from the Dodgers' lineup with a foot/ankle issue after taking a pitch off it a night earlier, a precaution but still one more name for an LA training room that's already stacked with arms rehabbing their way back. San Diego, meanwhile, was working with a rotation held together with tape — Joe Musgrove, Yu Darvish, Lucas Giolito and Nick Pivetta all shelved with arm trouble, which is exactly why a start like Sears just turned in mattered so much.

None of that predicted what actually happened. San Diego had dropped its previous three meetings of this series and looked overmatched doing it, but Sears settled in and gave the Padres length and zeroes, and the lineup made him a winner with the biggest swing of the day.

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	R	H	E
SD	0	0	0	1	0	0	4	0	0	5	8	0
LAD	0	0	0	0	0	0	2	0	0	2	4	0

Manny Machado, who'd been scuffling for weeks, uncorked a three-run homer in the seventh that blew the game open and finished with 3 RBI. Fernando Tatis Jr. chipped in a run-scoring knock and Jackson Merrill added an RBI single of his own, giving Sears more than enough cushion. Sheehan, sharp in his last look at San Diego, couldn't repeat it this time and took the loss, while Mason Miller slammed the door for the save.

For a Padres team that had been getting run off the field for over a week, this was a lifeline. San Diego entered the day mired in a long losing skid that had dropped them back to .500 and buried their pitching staff under some ugly cumulative numbers, so a shutdown start from Sears and a signature homer from Machado were exactly the kind of signs of life they needed heading into the deadline stretch.

The Dodgers are still the class of the division and this loss doesn't change that, but it's a reminder they're not invincible even with the NL West largely in hand. Between Edman's scratch, Will Smith still out, and a bullpen leaning on names working back from the injured list, LA's margin for error shrinks a little on nights their offense goes cold. San Diego just showed there's still enough fight in that clubhouse to make somebody pay for it.

San Diego Padres at Los Angeles Dodgers

Sources