Good morning,
The version of Dylan Cease the Padres got last night is the one the Padres need.
“He came out there dealing,” Manny Machado said. “We really needed that from him. He needed that from himself. … That’s going to be huge for us moving forward.”
We will talk more about Cease in a little bit.
You can read in my game story (here) about how the Padres’ 11-1 victory over the Dodgers went down.
The game story focused on how this was the right game at the right time for the Padres, as it allowed them to give their bullpen a break after it had worked so many high-leverage innings in recent weeks.
David Morgan followed Cease’s seven shutout innings and worked the final two innings last night. The Padres have played 22 games in the 23 days since May 20, and last night was the first time since May 20 they used just one relief pitcher. It was just the fourth time in that span that the bullpen didn’t have to cover three or more innings.
“It was important,” Padres manager Mike Shildt said of being able to provide rest for the bullpen.
The Dodgers, whose relievers have worked more innings than any other team’s relievers this season, took a different route to giving the bulk of their relievers an off day.
They used an opener for the first inning and then went to Matt Sauer to cover almost five innings.
He threw 111 pitches, more than he had ever thrown as a professional.
“I felt it just wasn’t smart to chase and red line guys in the pen,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “I’ve got to give credit to Matt, who … essentially took it for the team to try to stay away from other guys and give us a good chance to win a series.”
As soon as he was allowed to by virtue of being down eight runs, Roberts removed Sauer and brought in position player Enrique Hernandez to pitch the final 2⅓ innings.
Both teams are off Thursday.
So while both managers will have some arms they would like to stay away from today, there probably won’t be anyone besides Morgan off limits for Shildt.
Cease rebounds
I wrote (here) after his last start about how important Cease is to the rotation — and to the Padres’ success.
The tone of that assessment was actually more along the lines of how absolutely screwed the Padres probably were if Cease did not begin pitching like he was supposed to and was expected to and was being paid to do.
A year after finishing fourth in National League Cy Young voting, he had the fifth-highest ERA (4.72) among qualifying NL starters going into yesterday.
“It’s been frustrating,” Cease said after last night’s game. “It’s not fun not contributing. But I’m just continuing to work. And there’s still a lot of season left, so hopefully I can really make a big impact.”
That is a lot like what Cease said after his previous start. But this time he was saying it in the aftermath of his first truly dominant outing.
“That’s the Dylan I know,” Jackson Merrill said. “He has been hard on himself. … Everybody has a bad game now and then. But that was Dylan. That was Dylan.”
Throughout the first two months of the season, some in the organization spoke about how Cease was taking his struggles hard. His battle was not only with his mechanics and rhythm but with his emotions.
“It’s a difficult game,” Cease said last night. “It’s very easy to maybe overthink or go down the wrong path or do whatever. But, really, the only way to get out of it is just commit to a process and keep evaluating where you’re at and not give up.”
Both Cease and pitching coach Ruben Niebla had said recently they felt this kind of game was coming.
The underlying numbers on Cease’s pitches — shape, movement, sustained velocity of his fastball — were trending in the right direction.
One bad inning (three runs, 32 pitches) in his start last week in San Francisco was probably the difference between his going five innings and rolling through six or more.
And that had sort of been a theme, as Cease had too often been inefficient en route to getting past the fifth inning just five times in his first 13 starts.
“I think he feels good about where he’s at,” Niebla said over the weekend. “I feel good where he’s at. It’s just right now, like he’s so close to the edge that sometimes the edge pushes him into like, ‘Damn, we were so close.’ But I feel like we’re on the verge of going the other way.”
Last night, Cease veered off course once, walking three batters in the third inning. But there were two four-pitch walks and a five-pitch walk, and he got through that inning in a remarkably tidy 21 pitches.
He took just 56 pitches to finish the next four innings.
His 11 strikeouts were a season high, and he allowed just three hits.
Allowing three or fewer hits over seven or more shutout innings is something Cease did five times last season. Last night was the first time he did it in 2025.
“It means a lot,” he said. “But I really don’t want to lose focus. The job is nowhere near done. There’s a lot of starts left, and I really just want to build off of it and keep it going.”
Top of mind
The Padres’ left fielder went 0-for-4 last night, reaching base once when he was hit by a pitch.
Did you notice?
No. You did not. Because the top of the order had seven hits and the middle of the order had six hits.
“That’s what we’re capable of doing,” Fernando Tatis Jr. said. “We need to find a way to stay consistent on that.”
That would be good.
I will not let the fact that catcher Martín Maldonado went 2-for-4 with a home run keep me from making my point. How poorly the Padres catchers hit most nights is largely an ancillary issue. Elias Díaz and Maldonado are here to handle the pitching staff.
And the truth is, too big a deal has been made of how the left fielder hits.
It is a big deal. The Padres continue to look for a permanent solution in left field who can provide more slug and get on base better than the current rotation the team is using, including Tyler Wade last night.
But the Padres left fielders (and catchers) ranking near the bottom of the league in average and OPS has not been the main problem with the Padres’ offense.
The biggest reason the Padres’ offense has been so underachieving and overrated has been that most of the guys who absolutely have to hit have not been doing so.
Before last night, the Padres’ core six players had combined for more than six hits in just three of the previous 21 games they had all started.
Machado has been hitting for most of the season. But the rest of the core has been underperforming for going on a month.
We should not lose sight of the reality this team is built around Machado, Merrill, Luis Arraez, Xander Bogaerts, Jake Cronenworth and Fernando Tatis Jr.
As they go, so go the Padres. Not every night. But usually.
The core six have played together 40 times. The Padres are 12-2 when those players combine for seven or more hits. They are 11-15 when the core six combines for six or fewer hits.
“It’s good to see the offense jumping,” Merrill said. “Slow couple weeks, but you gotta know it’s going to jump.”
June bloom?
It might not seem like it at first glance, but Tatis’ June is going significantly better than his May.
Check it out:
He is batting just .219 with a .250 slugging percentage in nine games this month. Together, those numbers are arguably not as productive as his .184 and .368 in 26 games last month.
But Tatis has a .375 on-base percentage in June (118 points higher than May), has stolen four bases (one more than May) and scored seven runs (half as many as May).
Just in the past two nights, he is 2-for-5 with three walks, has been hit by a pitch, stolen two bases and scored three runs.
“Taking what they give me,” Tatis said. “And, you know, it’s a matter of time for me to get hot.”
Arguably the most impressive thing Tatis did last night was run from first to home in 10.22 seconds to score the game’s first run on Luis Arraez’s double in the third inning.
Now, that was just the 50th-fastest first-to-home dash in MLB this season. But it was remarkable in that Tatis had come to a dead stop after feigning taking off on the pitch, and then he broke into a sprint.
It was a fairly bold send by third base coach Tim Leiper, in that right fielder Teoscar Hernandez had just let go of the ball on his throw to Freddie Freeman, the cut-off man, when Tatis was crossing third base.
But Tatis was flying.
“I was thinking home all the way,” said Tatis, who reached a top sprint speed of 29.4 feet per second.
Manny tidbits
He gets his own today.
- Machado’s five RBIs last night were his most since June 29, 2024. It was his 13th career game with five RBIs.
- Machado ed Phil Nevin on the Padres’ all-time RBI list and now ranks third with 575. He is 51 behind second-place Dave Winfield.
- Machado was 3-for-5 to extend his hitting streak to eight games. He is batting .471 (16-for-34) and getting on base at a .514 clip during the streak.
- Machado has moved up to second in the National League with a .325 batting average.
- Machado now has 1,981 career hits. If he were to continue getting hits at the pace he is doing so this season, he will reach 2,000 some time during the Padres’ trip to Cincinnati and Philadelphia at the end of this month. Should he take a little longer, the Padres begin a 10-game homestand on July 4.
Tidbits
- Left fielder Jason Heyward ( him?) will start a rehab assignment Friday with Triple-A El Paso. Heyward has been out since May 24 with a left oblique strain. It has been written many times here that the Padres value what Heyward brings off the field but that they are prepared to move on if what he does on the field does not pick up soon. Heyward, who is batting .172/.223/.271, might have already been let go had he not gone on the injured list.
- Bogaerts drove in his first run in 12 games. He actually drove in two with a single in the sixth inning.
- Bogaerts was 3-for-4 and put four balls in play at 99.7 mph or harder for just the sixth time since 2015 (when Statcast began measuring exit velocity.) Last night was the first time Bogaerts has put three balls in play at 105 mph or harder.
- Cronenworth was 1-for-4 with a walk last night and has reached base in nine straight games. This is the 18th streak at least that long in his career, most on the Padres since the start of the 2020 season. (Machado has 17 on-base streaks at least that long.)
- Cronenworth struck out at the end of a 13-pitch at-bat in the second inning. It was the Padres’ longest at-bat since Merrill singled on the 13th pitch he saw in an at-bat on June 22, 2024.
- Arraez was 3-for-5 last night. It was his 10th game with at least three hits, tied for second-most in MLB. Arraez’s .281 batting average is his lowest through the first 60 games of a season in large part because he has gone hitless in 21 games. That is more hitless games than he has had at this point in any of the past three seasons, all of which ended with him winning a batting title.
- Arraez’s four runs last night are the most any Padres player has scored in a game since Cronenworth scored four against the Brewers on June 21, 2024. Arraez’s only other four-run game came in 2022 when he was with the Twins.
- The Padres have scored at least three runs in three different innings over the past two games. That is as many as they had in their previous 10 games.
- Merrill hit his eighth career triple last night, tied for eighth most in the major leagues since the start of 2024.
- Maldonado’s three home runs this season have come on the first pitch of the at-bat.
- I wrote yesterday (here) about Luis Campusano having not appeared in a game this month and what that meant. Campusano did bat last night. And it was hardly a real at-bat, coming as it did against Hernandez. Campusano grounded out and is 0-for-14 this season.
- The Padres are a game behind the Dodgers. But a win today does not guarantee the Padres will have a share of first place. But if they win and the Giants lose in Colorado, the Padres would be atop the division this late in a season for the first time since June 17, 2022.
All right, that’s it for me. Early game today (1:10 p.m. PT).
Talk to you tomorrow.
