'He's human': Miller's dominant streak without allowing a HR abruptly ends

SAN DIEGO -- Mason Miller hadn’t surrendered a home run in over a calendar year. He’d gone 76 2/3 innings without doing so -- the longest active streak in the Majors. He’s in the midst of one of the most dominant relief seasons in baseball history.

All of which made Tuesday night so utterly jarring. Miller, the Padres’ lights-out closer, surrendered the only run in San Diego’s 1-0 loss -- a go-ahead blast from Pittsburgh’s Oneil Cruz in the top of the ninth inning at Petco Park.

Then again, there’s a simple enough explanation.

“He’s human,” said Padres manager Craig Stammen.

Tuesday offered a reminder of that. Informed of his manager’s comment after the game, an introspective Miller expanded on precisely what that means.

“Humans can be idiots sometimes,” Miller said. “Tip your hat. Good swing. Crushed it obviously. But I just can't be throwing that pitch in that spot.”

“That pitch” was a changeup. Miller doesn’t throw many of those. He doesn’t need to. His fastball is one of the best in baseball, routinely exceeding 100 mph. His slider might legitimately be the single best pitch in baseball. At the very least, it misses bats more than any other.

And then there’s Miller’s changeup, which he uses at a clip below 5%. When he broke it out in an 0-1 count to Cruz, Miller intended to bury it low and away. Instead, he hung it on the inner half, and Cruz pulverized it to the Petco Porch in right.

“Looking back, I can be a good enough self-evaluator to say that that was a stupid pitch,” Miller said. “But, yeah, I was convicted in it and had a plan. Didn’t execute it.”

For much of the game Tuesday, it was unclear whether Miller would be available to pitch at all. He’s taken on a heavy workload lately. Miller threw 30 pitches on Monday and had pitched in three of the previous four games.

But the Padres used nearly every arm in their bullpen in that 12-inning loss on Monday. Miller wasn’t the only weary arm. He played catch pregame and informed the coaching staff that he had an inning in him.

With Miller, that isn’t bluster. Yes, he always wants to pitch. But he understands the big picture and does his best to be as honest with the coaching staff as possible.

“Was he pitching too much, has he pitched too much?” Stammen mused. “I think when a pitcher like Mason says, ‘Hey give me the ball,’ you’re willing and able to give him the ball, especially with where we are at in the season.”

Indeed, it’s crunch time. The Padres spent much of the early part of the year limiting Miller’s workload specifically so they could unleash him down the stretch. They’re in the thick of the playoff race, now only one game ahead of the Diamondbacks for the National League’s final Wild Card spot.

“I felt good enough to go today,” Miller said. “We had a lot of guys throw yesterday. That’s part of my value and part of my responsibility to this team and to my teammates -- to be available any time that I can.

“My workload’s been high. But it wasn’t: ‘Yeah, I wasn’t feeling good, didn’t have my best stuff.’ I think it was just one dumb pitch, and that’s kind of the story.”​

About that pitch: The changeup has always been Miller’s white whale. He works on it every spring. Every year, he plans to start using it just a bit more. Then, the season begins, and his fastball/slider are just so untouchable, he sets his changeup to the side.

Miller had thrown only 21 prior changeups this season, all of them to left-handed hitters. And while it’s his third-best pitch (by far), only one player had even put a changeup in play against him.

No, the pitch selection wasn’t indefensible. But if Miller was going to throw it, he needed to do what he usually does with the pitch -- miss the strike zone entirely, hoping to fool a hitter who’s sitting on fastball or slider. This one caught far too much plate, and Miller knew it right away.

The moment Cruz connected, he slumped to a crouch on the mound. Petco Park, roaring just moments earlier, went silent. The last time Miller gave up a homer here, he was pitching for the A’s, facing then-Padres rookie Jackson Merrill in June of 2024. It was stunning.

Human, after all.