Padres Daily: Quick turnaround needed

Good morning from Chicago,

The talk has turned from there being time to there being a need for urgency.

“We’ve been in this little rut now for a while,” Jake Cronenworth said. “We gotta find our way out of it, because there are eight games left.”

The Padres lost again last night. They lost to a bad team. A really inexperienced and bad team.

The White Sox are four losses from 100. They are one season removed from losing a Modern Era-record 121 games. They had five players in their starting lineup last night who made their major league debut this season. They had lost six games in a row and scored more than two runs in one of those. They ran into two outs at third base that cost them runs last night.

And they beat the Padres 4-3.

You can read in my game story (here) how the Padres got down early again and could not come back from a pair of two-run deficits.

The only people who could watch the Padres go 9-15 over the past four weeks and not assess them to be a bad team are their madres.

That doesn’t mean they are a bad team. It most certainly means they are playing like one.

Several people inside and outside the clubhouse acknowledge there has been a bit of a letdown.

It is a long season. A playoff berth has pretty much been inevitable for a few weeks.

“We are human,” Luis Arraez said. “… Maybe tired. We are trying our best. This game is hard, We just need to stay positive.”

That is not meant as an excuse. And it is hardly excusable.

Said Cronenworth: “There’s no excuses for it. At all. I could say we’re tired, but these teams have played the same amount of games we have.”

The Padres won’t have all that many more games to play if they keep perfoming like this.

Even Mike Shildt, who is loath to speak publicly about anything that would suggest his spectacles are not rose-tinted, said as much.

“I am confident it’s going to happen,” he said of a turnaround. “But it needs to happen soon.”

A week from tomorrow, the Padres will wrap up the regular season. It seems highly likely they will then board a plane back to Chicago for a wild-card series against the Cubs.

“It’s going to go quick,” Arraez said. “We need to be ready.”

The situation

The Padres are one step away from being clear of the Giants, and they are one step closer to being rid of the Diamondbacks.

But the Padres losing and Reds winning last night means the earliest the Padres can clinch a playoff spot is Sunday.

That will require them beating the White Sox twice, the Reds losing twice to the Cubs and the Diamondbacks losing at least one of their two games against the Phillies. (The only way the Giants could pass the Padres is by winning all eight of their remaining games while the Padres don’t win again.)

The Dodgers increased their lead in the National League West to four games by beating the Giants last night. Any combination of Dodgers wins and Padres losses adding up to four clinches the division for L.A.

The Mets beat the Nationals last night to maintain their two-game cushion in the race for the final NL playoff spot.

The No.6 seed will likely open the postseason with a wild-card series at Dodger Stadium.

Here is what would have to happen for the Mets to pass the Padres and take the No.5 seed:

Consistent inconsistency

Dylan Cease had another not-so-bad start that went horribly.

He gave up a two-run homer in the first inning, two more runs on two hit batters and two singles in the fourth and finished six innings.

He struck out six and walked three.

“I liked where I was at for the most part,” he said. “Obviously, that one inning where I hit a couple guys, put them on and then they capitalized. But other than that, I really don’t hate where I was at.”

That was similar to his assessment of most of his other 30 starts this season.

And it is true there are times almost every start and even for most of some starts that he looks like the pitcher he has been in the past and that the Padres expected him to be this season.

“Dylan’s stuff was so good, man,” Shildt said. “Gosh darn, it was good.”

But there is only one thing to consider now.

And running Cease out for a postseason game is going to take some careful planning and with the bullpen phone essentially in pitching coach Ruben Niebla’s hand from the start.

Does it remain possible Cease could walk onto a mound in October and spin a gem? Of course. But to expect it of Cease, who has a 4.64 ERA and 1.32 WHIP, would seem to be wishful thinking at this point.

“It absolutely can happen,” Shildt maintained. “It has happened. It happened tonight. Just the consistency of it happening, right? I mean, there were innings where he was just in complete control. It’s just the consistency of it.”

That said, the Padres’ trust in Yu Darvish likely means he would be the choice if a Game 3 was necessary in the wild-card round. And a solid start tomorrow by Michael King would almost certainly cement him as a starter in one of the first two wild-card games with Nick Pivetta starting the other.

If we’re going to entertain the possibility of the Padres getting to the Division Series, it should be noted the new schedule allows teams to use just three starters in that series as well.

On the bases

The Padres’ baserunning has been emblematic of their overall play.

They are a good baserunning team not showing it lately.

Jackson Merrill being thrown out between second and third trying to advance on Ramón Laureano’s comebacker to the pitcher last night was their fifth blunder in three days. (Merrill did stay in a rundown long enough that Laureano was able to replace him at second base, which meant Merrill’s gaffe did not cost the Padres anything in the end.)

In the previous three games, mistakes cost them at least two runs.

On Wednesday in New York, Manny Machado and Arraez made mistakes on the same play. With Arraez on first base following a one-out single in the first inning, Machado hit a hard line drive that was clearly over the head of left fielder Brandon Nimmo. But Arraez slowed while rounding second base and had to stop at third base. Meanwhile, Machado attempted to turn his hit into a double and was thrown out at second. Arraez ended up stranded.

With two outs in Tuesday’s sixth inning, Elias Díaz should have easily scored on a single by Arraez. But Díaz slowed down as he approached the plate and did not cross it before Arraez was tagged out at second.

Later Tuesday, Fernando Tatis Jr. was caught in a rundown after taking off on an attempted steal of second.

Tidbits

• The Padres expect shortstop Xander Bogaerts back on Monday. That gives him six games to gear up for the postseason after missing nearly a month with a fracture in his left foot.
• The Padres are 1-10 in games in which they have trailed after the first inning since Aug. 16. That does not mean they haven’t shown the ability to come back. They have won three games in that span in which they have trailed by two or more runs. In all, their 22 victories this season in games in which they trailed by at least two runs are third most in the major leagues.
• The Padres have yielded an MLB-high 17 first-inning home runs in their past 41 games. They surrendered an MLB-low nine first-inning homers through their first 113 games.
• Laureano got his career-high 11th assist when he fielded a single in left field and, while still on the run, flung a ball to third base, where Machado tagged out Chase Meidroth.
• Tatis was later denied his fifth assist when his perfect throw home was dropped by catcher Freddy Fermin, allowing Edgar Quero to score what stood as the deciding run in the fourth inning.
• Fermin did prevent a run in the fourth inning when he knocked down a curveball Cease bounced, picked up the ball and threw out Miguel Vargas trying to advance to third base.
• Arraez went 1-for-4 and is batting .375 (12-for-32) during an eight-game hitting streak.
• Cronenworth, who was 1-for-3, has hit safely in six consecutive games and reached base in nine straight games. His on-base percentage is .448 in those nine games.
• Merrill was 1-for-4 with a double and has 11 extra-base hits (five homers, two triples, four doubles) in his past 12 games.
• Ryan O’Hearn halted a hitless skid at 16 at-bats with an RBI single in the fourth inning. It was his career-high 118th hit of the season. He is batting .108 (4-for-37) over his past 11 games.
• Tatis was 1-for-4 last night and is 10-for-22 with four walks over the past six games.
• Gavin Sheets was 0-for-3 with a walk in his return to Chicago.
• Get to know Mason Miller by reading the Q&A Annie Heilbrunn did with the Padres’ new reliever (here). Really good stuff about how he essenitally became a prospect by accident.

All right, that’s it for me.

No newsletter tomorrow. That is because someone I rarely see (my wife) decided to not fly home from the East Coast this week and instead flew to Chicago last night. And since the Padres can’t clinch tonight, what the heck, I will hang out with her after the game.

I will still, of course, cover tonight’s game. You can find that coverage on our Padres page. (And the last time I said I was not going to do a newsletter, I did. So you never know.)

But do not expect the next Padres Daily in your inbox until Monday morning.

Talk to you then.