Missing Thursday's game a new experience for Black

SAN DIEGO -- When Padres manager Bud Black missed Thursday's game to attend the college graduation of his daughter Jessie, it wasn't the first time he's had to track his team remotely.

However, most of those previous instances during his seven-plus years with the team have involved an ejection -- there have been 18 of them since his first season in 2007 -- where he's had to watch the rest of the game from his clubhouse office by television.

But when Black and his wife Nan flew to see their youngest daughter graduate from the University of Maryland on Thursday, it meant a much greater distance between Black and his team.

"That was a little odd," Black said Friday. "When you get ejected, you go upstairs, and watch it in your office or the clubhouse, and then maybe sneak back down towards the dugout [if] you might want to help out a little bit," Black said.

"But it's different when you're 3,000 miles away."

The Padres, with bench coach Dave Roberts running the team for the evening, lost to the Cubs, 5-1, on Thursday at Petco Park.

Black did watch some of the game on MLB.TV and kept tabs on what was going on but left the game in the hands of Roberts and his coaching staff.

"Those guys were fine," Black said. "Doc, Phil [Plantier], Zo [Alonzo Powell], they were fine."