By admin 
Good morning,
The Padres are ascending.
It has been five games. It has been a little different.
It was bound to happen.
“It’s just how baseball goes,” Craig Stammen said. “Eventually, if you stick with it, keep a good attitude, continue to work hard, show up to the ballpark every day ready to go, eventually you’re going to figure out a way to get on a good streak and the schedule is going to be favorable to you and you’re just going to go for it. Bats will get hot, defense will keep playing good, pitching will kind of come together at the same time. That’s what we’ve kind of seen over the last five days.”
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You can read in my game story (here) about yesterday’s 3-1 victory over the Rockies and how the Padres’ fifth consecutive win continued their rise through the National League standings.
There are 54 games remaining.
Once the Padres get past Monday’s trade deadline, there will be 50 games to go.
They play the Diamondbacks four times in a series that begins just a few hours after the deadline. And after that – even I can do that math – there will be 46 games remaining.
You get the point.
There is time for more twists and turns.
All their recent success suggests is that they should not be dismissed.
Multiple winning streaks in a season are generally the purview of playoff teams.
Of the 48 playoff teams in the four years since MLB expanded the postseason, 46 (96%) had at least two winning streaks of five games or more during the regular season.
Of the 72 teams that did not make the playoffs in that span, 40 (56%) had at least two streaks that long.
The Padres won eight in a row from April 8 to 16 and had not won more than four straight since. So this streak is something of a marker. It wasn’t really anything more than that.
Except maybe confirmation.
Whatever happens at the trade deadline, the current Padres roster will still make up the core of the team the final eight weeks of the season.
“We’ve had a lot of ups and downs as a group, and the best thing we’ve had is that we’ve been pushing each other,” Manny Machado said. “I think we’ve all been struggling as a group, and whenever you have a group doing that and pulling on the same rope, I think it helps. We can dig each other out of holes, and this group has been doing that all year. I think that’s where you start seeing it as the days go by. We’re striding forward and putting our best foot forward. It has been awesome to grind with these guys all year, and hopefully we’ll continue doing that, put those first two months behind us, move forward, and finish off strong.”
They were a struggling team with really good, experienced players.
They professed that they believed they would eventually come around. They have a long way to go. There will be more tests ahead.
“The last two months of the year is when good teams separate themselves from teams hanging around,” Mason Miller said. “You see it every single year. Teams that have a lot of talent, I think that’s what the experience in this locker room offers. Guys have been around for a stretch and have seen what it has taken to play a complete six months of baseball, stay healthy and make the adjustments that need to be made. Whereas guys without lots of experience might kind of see themselves coasting to the finish line – not by effort, just by output.”
No illusion, no delusion
Had the Padres not gained 2½ games in the standings and moved ahead of four teams to the precipice of playoff position over the past five games, that probably would have pushed them toward being willing to offload multiple major league players.
It appears almost everyone of import will be kept now – unless the Padres drop back a couple games in the standings over the next four days.
The Padres expect to be buyers over the next four days leading up to Monday’s 3 p.m. trade deadline, though one person familiar with their discussions explained the end result of being a buyer would likely involve some selling of major league parts.
But this winning streak is not some sort of shiny fool’s gold that will distract president of baseball operations A.J. Preller and make him think the Padres are better than he thought they were last week.
He and his lieutenants felt like they had a good handle on what the team was going to need to become a legitimate playoff contender before the series in Miami began. Heck, before the second half began.
Besides the gain in the standings, what is important is that it appears some pitchers are on the mend and that the offense is as well.
It was important that Jackson Merrill and Machado have driven in or scored 16 of the Padres’ 27 runs during their winning streak. It is even more significant (provided more confidence in the legitimacy of this surge) that they both started heating up in the second week of June and have been scorching almost all of July.
The Padres know they need starting pitching and could use a left-handed-hitting outfielder and perhaps another back-end reliever.
But they were never going to win as much as they need to going forward without Merrill and Machado being who they are supposed to be.
Big piece
Kyle Hart’s second half began with one of the better blown saves a middle reliever could have.
On July 17 at Kansas City, he took the loss when he allowed four runs in the 10th inning on four singles – the hardest of them hit at 73.2 mph.
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“We lost the game,” Hart said yesterday. “You can say all you want about how weak the contact was, but we had a three-run lead and we lost coming out of the break. That took a lot out of me because I knew how big of a start that would have been for us. But I felt like I threw the ball well that night. It didn’t go our way, but I feel like there’s been a continuation of that going forward over the last week or two.”
In four appearances since then, the left-hander has turned in 6⅔ scoreless innings. That includes his getting two outs deep in the third inning after starting yesterday’s game.
Hart’s versatility – he has reverse splits, allowing a .197 batting average and .568 OPS to right-handed batters and .239 average and .782 OPS to lefties – is part of what makes him a lynchpin in the Padres’ current pitching plan.
His previous appearance saw him take over for Germán Márquez with one out in the third inning and get the next six outs on Friday. The day before that, he threw one inning as the opener for Griffin Canning. And on July 20, he worked the eighth inning in a game the Padres trailed by a run.
“Obviously, Craig has had some different thoughts in mind for my role,” Hart said. “I definitely feel comfortable early. I feel comfortable in that mid-leverage role and even in that high-leverage situation in Kansas City, I felt good. I’m just coming in and executing to the best of my ability whenever Craig wants me to.”
Use him, not lose him
Miller acknowledged last week that he was rusty from lack of use and said he badly wanted to pitch more.
The Padres have not had to manufacture ways to get him in games since.
And he is clearly he has knocked the rust off.
Another 1-2-3 inning yesterday kept him perfect over his four outings in the past five games. He has retired those 12 batters in a total of 52 pitches. And that is with seven of those outs being strikeouts.
“Stuff is sharper, body feels better,” Miller said after earning his NL-leading 28th save.
Miller averaged 102.8 mph on his 10 four-seam fastballs yesterday. It was the second-highest average of his career and highest when throwing more than five four-seamers.
He has thrown a season-high five pitches at least 103 mph each of the past two days. On Tuesday, he reached 104 mph for the first time.
“The ball is coming out well, crisp,” he said. “My body feels good, so everything is syncing up. I like where we’re at.”
Tom Krasovic’s column (here) from yesterday’s game recounts how the Padres covered nine innings, focusing on Canning’s role and how dominant Miller was.
Kras said it would be “insane” to trade Miller.
The Padres plan to go with two more all-staff games before Walker Buehler starts Friday and Michael King goes Sunday.
‘Jack’ Cronenworth
Jake Cronenworth is batting .305 with a .374 on-base percentage in July, which has provided a significant boon to the Padres offense.
But yesterday was the kind of day that truly illustrated what the Padres value in him.
He was 1-for-3 with a sacrifice bunt, scored a run and made one of the better plays a second baseman can make.
“He’s capable of doing a lot of things,” Stammen said. “Is he the best at anything? You could argue he’s pretty good at defense. He’s pretty good at laying a bunt down. He’s pretty good at hitting. He’s pretty good at base stealing. He’s pretty good at running. He’s good at everything. He’s a jack of all trades. That is a good player to have on a baseball team, because we’ve got a lot of other players that are very exceptional at specific things, and he kind of rounds it all out together with being able to do all the little things.”
On the spectacular play he made, which got the second out of the first inning, Cronenworth was playing shaded toward the bag on a ball Cole Carrigg hit over Hart that bounced to the shortstop side of second and onto the grass. After a run of about 10 feet and a dive, Cronenworth stopped the ball, picked it up off the grass and while still on a knee and leaning toward third base slung a throw across his body to Ty France at first base.
“Off the bat, when I was kind of sizing it up, I figured he might get to the ball,” Hart said. “But with how fast Carrigg is and the position he found himself in on the ground, I didn’t expect him to be able to get a throw off. That was the fascinating part to me, was the throw.”
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Tidbits
- Reliever Jeremiah Estrada was activated off the injured list, where had been for nearly two months due to knee inflammation. The right-hander walked the first batter he faced in the eighth inning before striking out the side. To make room for Estrada on the active roster, Matt Waldron was designated for assignment. You can read about that (here) in Jeff Sanders’ game preview.
- Yesterday, Xander Bogaerts made an error for a second consecutive game, a third time in four games and fourth time in 10 games. Before this rough patch, Bogaerts had the highest fielding percentage of any qualifying shortstop in the major leagues this season.
- Annie Heilbrunn wrote (here) about what Miller and Adrian Morejón are thinking as their names have been among those most mentioned in trade rumors.
- Machado was 1-for-4 yesterday and is batting .338 with a .412 OBP during a 19-game on-base streak.
- Ty France was 1-for-3 and was hit by a pitch yesterday. He has at least one hit in 15 of the past 16 games, a span in which he is batting .387 with five doubles and six home runs.
- Fernando Tatis Jr. extended his hit streak to six at-bats with a double in yesterday’s first inning. It was the fourth time in his career he had a streak at least that long. He hit in seven consecutive at-bats in 2019 and in eight straight in 2024.
- Yesterday was just the second time in the past 19 games the Padres never trailed.
All right, that’s it for me.
Talk to you tomorrow.
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This story was originally published July 30, 2026 at 7:03 AM.