Padres Daily: The playoff picture; Manny’s day off; dynamic duo; Tatis’ turnaround

Good morning from New York,

There is plenty to talk about from yesterday.

You can read in my game story (here) how the Padres scored seven unanswered runs, allowed six unanswered runs and then pulled away and ultimately closed out a 9-6 victory over the Rockies.

You can read in Jeff Sanders’ notebook (here) about Manny Machado’s first game off this season and how Luis Arraez is feeling after his freak accident Saturday night.

We will talk about all of that some more too.

First, let’s assess the situation for the Padres with two weeks remaining in the regular season.

They can clinch a playoff berth by Friday.

The Padres’ magic number to clinch a playoff spot is six against the Giants, Diamondbacks and Reds.

In other words:

• Any combination of six Padres wins and Giants losses means the Giants cannot pass the Padres.
• Any combination of six Padres wins and Diamondbacks losses means the Diamondbacks cannot pass the Padres.
• Any combination of six Padres wins and Reds losses means the Reds cannot pass the Padres.

Another way to think about it is that if the Padres sweep the Mets and White Sox this week, it doesn’t matter what those other three teams do. Or there is this: The Padres can clinch a playoff spot by going 6-6 the rest of the way.

There is not a way to succinctly break down tiebreakers yet, because the Giants and Diamondbacks play the next three days, the Padres and Diamondbacks play the final three days of the season and both the Giants and Diamondbacks have a series remaining against the Dodgers. And all of those season series are yet to be decided.

The Padres are shooting for better than a playoff berth.

The NL West title would give them a home wild-card series, as would overtaking the Cubs for the No.4 seed.

If you are a Padres fan, you are rooting for the Reds to lose in St. Louis the next three days and then to at least win their four-game series against the Cubs . You are probably rooting for the Diamondbacks to win the series against the Giants, because you will want the Giants to win a four-game series at Dodger Stadium that starts Thursday.

Here are the pertinent remaining schedules:

And on the 150th day …

The long-awaited day off for Machado came yesterday, which means he gets two days of rest with the Padres not having a game today.

“We won,” Machado said. “That’s all that matters. It will be nice going into an off day with a win. … That’s all that matters, is winning. So for me to get a day off, had confidence in the team that they were going to go out there and perform and that they’ll leave it all out there. And they did that. So yeah, to sit back and watch a game was pretty fun.”

Not to say it wasn’t always his priority that the team win, but “Wins are all that matter” essentially became his campaign slogan about midway through his five-week skid that began in early August.

That said, he knows how important his success is to the team success. So he and manager Mike Shildt had for a while looked to yesterday as the day to get him off his feet.

This was almost certainly not his last game off.  It is expected that Machado and other regulars will get time down, at the latest, after the team has secured its best possible postseason seeding.

It had become clear to many in the organization that Machado needed multiple days to try to recharge.

He hit .171 with a .502 OPS in 33 games from Aug. 6 through Thursday before going 2-for-3 with a home run and a walk both Friday and Saturday.

He was asked if he had any second thoughts about taking off yesterday considering he had homered the previous two games.

“I was not on a home run streak before that,” he said. “I wasn’t even on a freaking base hit streak before that. So no.”

Dynamic duo

Jackson Merrill laid down a bunt single his first time up and hit a home run his next time up yesterday.

Fernando Tatis Jr. went 3-for-4, walked once and set a new career high with his 30th stolen base.

Said Shildt: “Those two guys … and I am biased when I say this, but from a skillset, when you think about competition and how you beat the other team, the skillset between ‘Tati’ and Jackson is as good a duo that I believe there is in the game, because they can do it all, and it was on display today.”

Things might be looking up for the Padres, in part, because things might be looking up for Merrill and Tatis.

Merrill has homered in four of the past eight games and has eight extra-base hits in that span. Tatis has homered in four of the past 10 games.

In the 41 games before that, they had four homers between them.

Yesterday was unique in that, with Arraez sidelined, Merrill was batting second for the first time since July 7.

“It’s dope having him in front of me,” Merrill said. “It’s cool watching his at-bat from that close.”

Shildt indicated Arraez has a good chance to be back in the lineup when the Padres begin a three-game series against the Mets tomorrow.

Fixed it

It wasn’t just that Tatis went 5-for-7 with a home run and walked twice in the past two games.

It was that he did it after looking so bad on Friday.

Tatis can be mercurial at the plate. This time stood out, though.

Friday was just the third four-strikeout game of his career and it took two Rockies pitchers a total of 16 pitches to get those four strikeouts. And then his final three at-bats Saturday were each such battles.

Tatis went to sleep after Friday’s game, woke up Saturday and got on the phone with his dad.

“I picked his brain,” Tatis said. “There was some good back and forth.”

Tatis popped out on the first pitch he saw that night, and then he became almost impossible to get out for the next two days.

He hit a full-count fastball up and off the plate to the party deck beyond right-center field in Saturday’s second inning. And after drawing a full-count walk his next time up, he sent a broken-bat single into right field on the eighth pitch of his final at-bat.

Yesterday, he singled through the left side on the first pitch he saw in the first inning and singled through the right side in the second inning before walking in the third, hitting a fly ball out in the sixth and lining a single to center field in the eighth.

“You go from here to here,” Tatis said, putting his palm on the floor in front of his chair and then raising it well above his head. “You’ve got to find a way to go up. That’s why you don’t panic in this game. That’s why you learn. That’s why you talk the game. You see what’s happening, how pitchers have been attacking. And then it’s about creating the right plan. … I feel like I’ve lived a lot in this game. I’ve learned. You trust yourself to come back the next day and just do it.”

Homer sweet homer

The Padres’ eight home runs since Wednesday are tied for their most in a five-game span this season.

And with those runs accounting for 12 of their 25 runs in the five games, the Padres are no longer last in the major leagues in runs derived via home runs. They have driven in 31.5% of their runs this season with homers. That is 0.2% better than the Pirates.

Merrill’s home run yesterday was the Padres’ 10th three-run homer, still fewest in the major leagues. But the Padres also moved one ahead of the Pirates with their 27th multi-homer game on Saturday.

Winning marks

The Padres yesterday clinched their fourth consecutive winning season, something they had accomplished just one other time.

That was 2004 to ‘07.

Their 175 victories over the past two seasons are second-most in franchise history behind the 177 the Padres won from 2006 to ‘07.

The Padres’ next victory will give Shildt more victories in back-to-back seasons than any Padres manager before him. He moved into a tie with Dick Williams (1984-85) yesterday.

Tidbits

• Tatis scored three times yesterday after scoring twice on Saturday. He has scored 102 runs this season, a new career high. It is the most runs by a Padres player since Adrián González scored 103 times in 2008.
• Mason Miller worked 1⅓ innings yesterday to run his scoreless streak to 15⅔ innings (15 appearances). He has struck out 31 of the 53 batters (58.5%) he has faced in that span, including three of four yesterday.
• Jeremiah Estrada got his 100th and 101st strikeouts yesterday, tying him with the Astros’ Bryan Abreu for most among all MLB relief pitchers. Estrada has at least two strikeouts in seven consecutive games, which is one off Trevor Hoffman’s Padres record.
• The run Estrada allowed in the sixth inning yesterday was the fifth the Rockies scored against him in 3⅔ innings this season. Of the 26 earned runs he has allowed in 2025, 18 have come against the Dodgers and Rockies. Of the 10 home runs he has allowed, seven have been hit by the Dodgers (five) and Rockies. His ERA in 10 innings against those two teams is 16.20, while he has a 1.25 ERA in 57⅔ innings against the other 25 teams he has faced.
• The Padres improved to 21-7 when leading after the first inning. They are 10-1 when leading by multiple runs at that point.
• The Padres are 12-0 when they score nine or more runs. They are one of nine teams to be undefeated when scoring that much in a game, but their 12 such games are tied for third fewest in the majors.
• Kruz Schoolcraft, the Padres’ first-round draft pick, visited Petco Park on Sunday. Sanders also wrote about that in his notebook.
• Sanders posted one of his “Clubhouse Chatter” stories a couple days ago. This one (here) had players talking about their first major purchase as professional ballplayers.

All right, that’s it for me.

No game today, so no newsletter. Sanders will have a story on the starting rotation that will be on our Padres page.

The next newsletter will be in your inbox Wednesday morning.

Talk to you then.