Padres don't sweat finale, instead focus on 6-3 trip: 'That's good baseball'

DENVER -- Baseball is a funny sport. Sometimes the team with the worst record in the league beats the team with the best record in the league. Sometimes a team scores 21 runs and shatters all sorts of franchise records, then struggles to hit less than 24 hours later.

So it was for the Padres on Sunday afternoon at Coors Field in a game that made little sense -- apart from the fact that, well, sometimes baseball doesn’t make sense.

The Rockies won the series finale, 9-3, jumping on Padres right-hander Nick Pivetta from the outset. Pivetta had allowed six earned runs in five starts across the past month. He allowed six over four innings on Sunday.

Nonetheless, the Padres completed their 11-day, nine-game road trip with six wins. They would have loved 7-2, but they’ll take it.

“Six and three on the road?” said manager Mike Shildt. “Absolutely. That’s good baseball.”

Additionally, the Padres welcomed Jackson Merrill, Jake Cronenworth, Brandon Lockridge and Sean Reynolds back from the injured list on the trip (though Merrill was absent from Sunday’s series finale, scratched from the lineup two hours before first pitch due to an illness).

With a healthy offense for the first time in more than a month, the Padres emphatically showed what they’re capable of this weekend. They won Friday’s opener, 13-9, and then followed it with a 21-0 beatdown on Saturday -- the largest margin of victory in franchise history and one run shy of the MLB record for largest shutout win (since 1900).

“We’re deep,” Fernando Tatis Jr. said Saturday night “Especially when everybody’s healthy, this lineup together, it’s really good.”

Still, sometimes a really good lineup has a day like this one. Rockies right-hander Germán Márquez entered play with an ERA approaching 10. But he kept the Padres’ lineup -- largely the same lineup that scored 21 runs the night before -- off-balance.

“We hit the ball hard, just right at guys, couldn’t find holes,” said Manny Machado. “But he threw the ball well. … You’ve got to give him credit.”

There would be no dramatic Coors Field comeback in store. Instead, the Padres return to Petco Park after 11 days away, tied with the Dodgers in the loss column for the best mark in the Majors.

“I’m ready to get back home,” Machado said. “But it was a good trip; we played some good baseball.”

Clearly, the Padres were ready to write off Sunday as a mere blip, and they probably have earned the right to do so. They weren’t sloppy. Their at-bats weren’t noncompetitive. They just ... lost. A day after the biggest victory in franchise history.

“Every day’s a new day,” Shildt said. “Márquez threw the ball well. … They’re trying, too, man. They put some good swings. They were more aggressive a little bit earlier with Nick. They put some swings on him. They were able to get the lead, and we weren’t able to scratch back.”

Pivetta allowed three runs in the first inning and three more in the third, as his struggles at Coors Field continued. He’s not the first pitcher to have issues in the altitude of the Rocky Mountains. But his struggles have been particularly pronounced.

With Sunday’s outing, Pivetta’s Coors Field ERA rose to 17.36 across four starts. He entered play with the second-best ERA (2.01) in the National League and wasn’t about to let one outing at his personal house of horrors put a damper on his fast start.

“This is just a one-off and forget about it,” Pivetta said. “It doesn’t matter.”

Asked to expand, Pivetta cited his metrics at Coors Field versus the ballparks across the rest of the league. Indeed, the numbers back his theory. His fastball didn’t have as much lift, his sweeper didn’t have as much bite, and his curveball didn’t have as much drop.

“If you look at my metrics, they’ll kind of tell the story,” Pivetta said. “For me, I think it affects me a little bit more than other guys. Not to say I’m going to make an excuse for that. But it is an interesting situation when you’re dealing with overall different metrics than you’re used to.”

When his interview was over, Pivetta again reiterated that he wasn’t trying to use those numbers as an excuse. He simply won’t be drawing any conclusions from one rough day in Denver.

“It wasn’t my day,” Pivetta said. “Just flush it and move onto the next one.”

The Padres, as a whole, will take the same tack.