Padres’ balancing act gets even tougher after another walk-off loss

SAN FRANCISCO — More than 45 minutes after his team absorbed its second consecutive walk-off loss, Josh Hader stood at his locker in an otherwise empty clubhouse and weighed both sides of a daily equation.

The closer had not pitched the night before, when the Padres operated with a short bullpen and gave away a lead in excruciating fashion. If he had, he would not have been available to pitch in Tuesday’s bottom of the ninth, when he inherited two runners and attempted to send the game into a 10th inning. He also would have been ruled out for Wednesday; as a general practice, pitching three days in a row in the major leagues requires an ensuing break of at least two days.

Now the Padres should have Hader available Wednesday, and in a season where not much has gone according to expectation, they can take some comfort in that. Hader has saved 18 games this season. He has a 1.26 earned-run average. He rarely is asked to inherit traffic, which he did Tuesday. It is even rarer for him to issue a walk-off walk, which he did to end a 4-3 loss to the red-hot Giants at Oracle Park.

Should the Padres, still struggling to climb back to .500 with almost half the season complete, have pitched Hader the previous night? Hindsight said maybe. The calendar, in Hader’s eyes, added even more uncertainty to the bigger picture.

“These games do matter. But once you get closer towards the end, like, August, September, that’s when the games really, really matter, right?” Hader said. “That’s when you got to put the dawg in you and be there 100 percent to get those wins to put you — I’m not gonna say any teams, but there’s teams that go really well throughout the season, and then they don’t get hot on that backend; they don’t do so well in the playoffs.

“I think when you get into that August, September time, that’s when you get that momentum to build you through that playoff, to get you going. So, like I said, these games are important, but it’s not the end of the season. We still have a lot of games left that we got to play. We’re gonna keep fighting to put ourselves in the best position to win.”

The Padres, the way things have gone, plan to attempt one of the more difficult balancing acts in recent memory. It is far too soon to concede, not when a 35-38 record has them five games back of a wild-card spot in a National League filled with less-talented clubs. And it is already too far into the season to assume their mediocrity will eventually be washed away by another late surge into the playoffs. A summer ago, Hader exemplified how that can be done, but the 2022 Padres were 17 games above .500 around this time last year. On the other hand, this current team is still seeking its first winning streak of more than three games.

Tuesday, the Padres continued to be a study of inconsistency as two units misfired. The bullpen, which still leads the National League in ERA, coughed up a late lead for the second day in a row. And the offense, as it had for much of the year, ensured that possibility by failing to add to an early lead.

The result was a second straight defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.

A boom, a bounce, and a bloop 💦 pic.twitter.com/HhtXHxJwum

— SFGiants (@SFGiants) June 21, 2023

“It blows the wind out of us, a game like this. But I know we’re gonna keep battling and keep showing up like we have been,” said Fernando Tatis Jr., who scored the Padres’ second run on a third-inning fielder’s choice and scored their final run with a solo home run in the fifth. “I mean, this bullpen has been lights-out the whole year, so you know, we just got to pick our boys up.”

The Padres’ bullpen, of course, is composed of human beings. Monday’s loss — with Hader and setup men Nick Martinez and Steven Wilson all unavailable — felt to some like watching a slow train wreck. In Tuesday’s game, Wilson, Martinez and Hader all returned to the mound, but the proceedings still brought the sensation of déjà vu as the Giants rallied with a series of conveniently placed groundballs.

Seth Lugo also returned to the mound for the first time in more than a month. The starter limited San Francisco to one run over five innings and 66 pitches. He did not go further because the Padres were understandably playing the long game with a pitcher coming back from a calf strain. Wilson followed Lugo by breezing through the bottom of the sixth on six pitches. Manager Bob Melvin, who played a bit of a long game Monday by not sticking with Tim Hill for a third inning, turned to Hill again in the seventh despite Wilson’s low pitch count. Hill ended up allowing a run on a walk and a few seeing-eye singles as the Giants cut the lead to one. Martinez came in with two outs to coax a flyout and preserve the advantage.

That advantage never grew. In a familiar story, the Padres went 2-for-10 with men in scoring position and stranded 10 runners. After the game, Melvin pointed to his offense’s recent inability to tack on while defending a couple of bullpen moves. The decision to insert Hader in a tie game, at least, felt obvious. Especially after Monday’s outcome, the Padres saw little other choice.

“Look, you can nitpick all you want. Steven did a good job,” Melvin said. “We had two other guys in matchups that we felt good about. Had to bring Josh in, and obviously it was a tough spot, but we had our best guys in the game.”

In the bottom of the eighth, Martinez surrendered a game-tying, leadoff home run to Joc Pederson before retiring the next three batters. Back on the mound in the ninth, he issued a one-out walk to rookie Luis Matos that later had him ruing the circumstances. “I felt a little rushed with the pitch clock a little bit,” Martinez said. “Battled my way back into the count and then just walked him, just lost him.”

Hader encountered similar trouble after taking over for Martinez, although the closer attributed his mistake to mere absentmindedness. On a 2-2 count against rookie Casey Schmitt, Hader had turned his head to check on Matos at second base, but for a beat too long; he was called for his first pitch-timer violation of the season, resulting in a full count. “Honestly, I forgot about the clock,” Hader said. “I think I got to do my job with runners on and I got to hold runners on, especially a guy that can steal third base. So I might’ve checked (Matos) a little bit too much before that happened.”

After Schmitt fouled off the next pitch, Hader loaded the bases with a changeup that wasn’t close to the zone. Then, after striking out the next batter to come within one out of escaping the inning, he walked Pederson on another full-count pitch. The Giants rushed the field in celebration. Hader walked into the visiting clubhouse.

There, some 45 minutes later, he pondered a question about his usage. There had not been a discussion, he said, of pitching him for a third straight day the night before. “If I could, I would pitch every single day,” Hader said. “Obviously, that’s not realistic.” Team sources said before the game that the Padres intend to pitch Hader three days in a row, if needed, at some point this season.

When that would be remains to be seen — and determined. It is rare, in 2023, for a closer to pitch on three consecutive days, although a few other hard throwers have done it this year. (The list includes San Francisco’s Camilo Doval, St. Louis’ Jordan Hicks and current Pirates closer and former Padres reliever David Bednar.)

“It’s a marathon, not a sprint, right?” said Hader, who pitched three days in a row twice in 2021 and once in 2019. “In hindsight, it’d be nice to have me in, go three in a row and potentially been able to close that out (Monday). And just like today — winning yesterday or two days off? Today and tomorrow. So, you pick and choose your battles. … At the end of the day, if you’re wearing and tearing on your body, and you get hurt, then what?

“We just got to keep on going. It’s why we play 162, honestly. … Obviously, these games mean a lot, but we still got a lot of baseball left. And I believe that we’ve got a really solid team here that can do a lot of great things. Like I said, it’s disappointing to obviously lose two games, especially the way we lost them, but we still got a lot of baseball.”

The Padres, needing more than a few wins both now and later, will test that theory like never before.

(Top photo of Josh Hader: Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)