The Padres have bounced back from losses all season.
They don’t believe the left patellar tendinitis that forced Jurickson Profar from the eighth inning on Tuesday is serious.
Then again, Kyle Higashioka had done quite a bit to lift the mood.
The backup catcher’s fourth home run this month delivered a 4-3 walk-off win over the Oakland Athletics in front of a sellout crowd of 41,945.
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The celebration and Gatorade shower that ensued flipped the script significantly considering an inning earlier the Padres had lost both a lead on a homer off Enyel De Los Santos and an All-Star-caliber left fielder in Profar, who walked off with a trainer after he swung and missed at a pitch in the bottom of the inning.
“Every win is huge, man,” Fernando Tatis Jr. said after he extended his hitting streak to 17 games with a single and a double. “But losing Profar at the end and still be able to come back shows the identity we have. We feel like we’re in every single game. We have showed that since the beginning of the season.
“We’re just going to have each other’s back until the very last out.”
After the game, Padres manager Mike Shildt said Profar was day-to-day. He’d been dealing with the knee well before it gave out on that eighth-inning swing, forcing David Peralta to finish the at-bat.
Profar was being seen by team doctors after the game.
Padres’ Jurickson Profar left the game while batting in the eighth inning against the Oakland Athletics at Petco Park on Tuesday, June 11, 2024.
(K.C. Alfred/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
“He’s been playing with a little bit,” Shildt said. “A lot of guys are banged up. He’s been a real pro’s Pro as far as how he’s doing it, pun intended. But yeah, just a little bit more sore today and it caught on (him) a little bit. We’ll see about tomorrow, but I just talked to him. He’s not overly concerned about what that looks like moving forward.”
Again, a reason to breathe a sigh of relief.
The Padres, after all, have effectively replaced Juan Soto with the best year of Profar’s career.
The 31-year-old entered Tuesday with a .324 batting average, second in the majors behind teammate Luis Arraez. He drove in two runs to open a 3-1 lead in the fifth inning with a two-out single and was thrown out at the plate trying to score on Manny Machado’s 112-mph double to left-center.
Without Profar’s production — his .924 OPS leads the team — it’s very difficult to see how the up-and-down-and-up-again Padres would be even just a game above .500, as was the case after Higashioka’s walk-off homer to lead off the bottom of the ninth.
“It is concerning; it’s huge,” Tatis said of the prospect of losing Profar for any amount of time. “It’s like losing our very backbone right now. Hopefully our boy can be back hopefully tomorrow, but it’s baseball and injuries are always going to be part of it.”
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The clock still said 6:40 p.m. when Randy Vásquez’s first pitch landed on the Toyota beach, beyond the wall in right-center.
The answer — five innings later — wasn’t nearly as loud.
Nor did it quite do the job.
The Padres rallied for three runs via two-out hits in the fifth inning only for De Los Santos to allow a game-tying home run in the eighth inning with Robert Suarez warming in the bullpen.
Yuki Matsui and Adrián Morejón each threw a scoreless inning after five innings of one-run ball from Vásquez, but De Los Santos allowed a one-out single to Miguel Andujar and a monster 421-foot homer to Tyler Soderstrom.
Jurickson Profar is tagged out by Athletics catcher Kyle McCann in the fifth inning.
(K.C. Alfred/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
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Suarez entered to record the last out of the top of the eighth inning of a 3-3 game.
Vásquez allowed base runners in each of his five innings and allowed more than one in four of the innings.
The only one that hurt was Abraham Toro’s 105 mph, 415-foot homer to right-center to begin the game.
The rest of the traffic simply drove up the rookie’s pitch count to 86 pitches through five innings.
In addition to the first-pitch homer, Vásquez allowed a single to J.J. Bleday before getting out of the first inning.
Two strikeouts allowed Vásquez to strand a leadoff single and one-out walk in the second. He allowed two more singles without giving up a run in the third inning and a double and a single in the fourth before Arraez started a 3-6-3 double play to get Vásquez out of that jam.
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The fifth was the easiest on Vásquez: A one-out walk to Bleday was stranded on his fifth strikeout of the game.
All told, Vásquez scattered seven hits and two walks over five innings of one-run ball.
It was the first time he’d allowed fewer than three runs in a game since allowing one run in 4⅓ innings at Wrigley Field on May 7.
The ensuing four-start stretch included two quality starts despite Vásquez allowing 14 runs on 28 hits and two walks over 21⅓ innings (5.91 ERA).
“It shows his mentality as a starter that he’s going to keep going,” Tatis said. “He’s going to keep pushing. And the game started like that, but it looked like he settled. Right away he got a couple knocks, but still made big pitches to close the innings. That’s a very huge start for him.”
Randy Vasquez throws against the Athletics at Petco Park.
(K.C. Alfred/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
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The Padres’ ensuing rally gave Vásquez a lead to hand to the bullpen.
Before pulling ahead in the bottom of the fifth, the Padres’ offense spun its wheels against A’s left-hander J.P. Sears.
Machado bounced into a double play with two runners on in the first inning. Jake Cronenworth’s second-inning double play erased Donovan Solano’s leadoff walk.
The Padres had two runners on in the third when Profar popped out to end the inning.
After a 1-2-3 fourth, the breakthrough arrived in the fifth via four two-out hits.
The first was a gift from Sears, who was slow to cover first base on the bouncer that backed up Soderstrom to the dirt behind first base.
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Arraez beat Sears to the bag and Ha-Seong Kim scored from second base on the play.
Tatis followed with a double off the center-field wall to put runners on second and third and Profar cashed in both with a single off the glove of a diving Zack Gelof at second base.
The fourth hit was the hardest of them all, a 112 mph double to left center from Machado, but Profar was thrown out at the plate trying to add to the Padres’ 3-1 lead.
Tatis’ two-hit game extended his hitting streak to 17 games, the longest by a Padre since Adrián Gonzalez in 2006.
It is also the longest current active streak, the last six games of which include at least one extra-base hit.
