By admin 
It was one of those.
Fernando Tatis Jr. launched a ball to left field, stood in the batter’s box with his bat in his left hand held straight out in front of him and pointed toward the sky and watched his majestic home run travel almost until it had bounced down in the second balcony of the Western Metal building.
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Then he flipped his bat toward the Padres dugout and took off jogging.
“Amazing, beautiful,” Tatis said. “That’s what you dream of when you’re a kid.”
He had turned a one-run deficit into a two-run lead in the fourth inning, and the Padres would only build from there in what became a 7-2 victory over the Astros on Sunday night.
The Padres also got a home run from Jackson Merrill before Tatis’ blast and one apiece from Gavin Sheets and the newly signed Austin Hays afterward.
The Astros got their own home run, which gave them a 2-0 lead in the second inning. And then they were finished. They did not reach base after that, as Padres pitchers retired the final 22 batters they faced.
Randy Vásquez set down the first 10 of those to get through the fifth, and three relievers kept up the perfect run to the end.
“It was a pretty good game for us,” Padres manager Craig Stammen said. “We’ve played a lot of games here lately that resembled that. That was probably the best version of that. … Hopefully, it carries on as we keep going.”
The victory kept the Padres a game behind the Diamondbacks and Phillies in the race for one of the final two National League wild-card spots.
So this is a good time for Tatis to be hitting like he is.
What he provided in the fourth inning was the kind of moment he used to provide so routinely that bathroom breaks and food runs were planned around his at-bats.
It was the kind of moment that had been lacking in 2026 and, really, for much of the past four seasons.
But after going 55 games without a home run at the start of this season and hitting just four more over his next 40 games, Tatis has homered in six of his past 21 games.
Sunday’s homer was his third in five games.
He also doubled in the sixth inning and has six doubles and a triple to go along with the six homers in the 21 games.
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“Obviously, I feel really good,” Tatis said. “… Right on time for what we’re aiming for.”
The home run was the 163rd of Tatis’ career, which tied him with Nate Colbert for the second most ever hit by a Padres player. Manny Machado passed Colbert in 2024 and now sits at 217.
“It takes our team to another level when he can kind of put us on his back and be like, ‘Hey, I got you guys,’” Stammen said of Tatis being on a tear. “And we’ve just seen it in his eye here lately that he’s got that feeling that he can do it and that he wants to do it.”
Every run Sunday came via a home run.
Vásquez did not have the superlative command he did five days earlier, when he shut out the Diamondbacks over six innings in his first real start in more than a month.
But he hardly paid for it, and he was at times as sharp as ever.
But he allowed his first home run since that July 2 start at Dodger Stadium. The two-out drive to right field by Varsho, on a full-count sweeper left up and over the middle, followed a one-out single by Taylor Trammell in the second.
Merrill got one of those runs back when he led off the bottom of the second by sending a fastball at the tiptop of the strike zone over the wall in left-center. Sheets greeted Astros reliever AJ Blubaugh by ending a home run drought at 31 games.
By then, the Astros were finished hitting.
Kyle Hart worked the sixth, Bradgley Rodriguez the seventh and eighth and Jeremiah Estrada the ninth.
Hays’ two-run homer pinch-hitting for Sheets made for the final margin and allowed closer Mason Miller to stop warming up.
Hart threw seven pitches. Rodriguez needed 17 to get through two innings. Estrada added 12 at the end. The 98 pitches the Padres threw were their fewest in a game since they needed 94 to get through a 7-5 victory over the Reds on June 30, 2021.
“Kyle Hart has just had a great ascension of his season this year,” Stammen said. “He’s definitely someone we can rely on right now. … And Bradgley, he has turned into one of the best relievers in all of baseball, to be able to get righties and lefties out, and keep his pitch count down, and make it look really easy. And then Estrada, getting him back from the IL, he’s a huge addition to our team. To be able to put somebody like that in the ninth inning without Mason Miller and feel pretty comfortable that we’re going to get the job done.”
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This story was originally published August 9, 2026 at 7:53 PM.