Padres continue to fizzle in loss to Blue Jays

Kevin Acee, The San Diego Union-Tribune on May 21, 2025

Published in Baseball

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TORONTO — That Wednesday night’s game devolved into a rout was a technicality.

What does it matter when a team can’t score?

The San Diego Padres are not hitting, and they are not scoring. So it seemed highly unlikely they were going to come back to win even before the Toronto Blue Jays scored five runs in the seventh inning and seven more in the eighth.

A second straight shutout loss — this time by a score of 14-0 — ran the Padres’ losing streak to a season-high five games.

They lost five games four different times in 2024 en route to 93 wins and a playoff appearance.

It is the underlying sickness of the offense that makes this skid so awful and so awfully concerning.

The Padres have scored three runs in the past five games, the fewest any Padres team has scored in a stretch that long since 1972.

The only time a Padres team has scored fewer over a five-game span was in the franchise’s first year of existence. That expansion team scored two runs in five games from June 20-23, 1969, and went on to finish the season 52-110.

This Padres team remains seven games above .500, at 27-20. But that feels nowhere near good.

And in the end Wednesday — well before they put utility man Tyler Wade in to pitch trailing 12-0 — the Padres looked nothing like a good team.

Three errors by Manny Machado and a bobbled ball by Jake Cronenworth that could not be ruled an error because he ended up getting an out contributed to the Jays increasing their lead from two to seven runs.

Jose Iglesias committed an error in the eighth, though that was largely inconsequential, coming as late as it did and considering the Blue Jays had already scored a run in the inning and would score five more before the second out was made.

That was ugly.

But a loss is a loss.

A two-run homer by Brandon Lukes in the fifth inning had provided the Blue Jays all twice as many runs as necessary.

A team must score to have a chance to win, and the Padres have gone 26 innings without doing that.

And a team almost always must hit to score. The Padres are batting .200 during their skid.

Two of their five hits Wednesday were by Luis Arraez. One of them came after the sixth inning.

Arraez going 8 for 19 over the past five games is propping up that team batting average. Take away Arraez, and the Padres are batting .171 over the five games.

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