The San Diego Padres are making a late run while Ha-Sung Kim, 28, rests with unexplained abdominal pain. It’s too bad, because they could have been playing fall baseball sooner.
San Diego came from behind to win a 3-2 home game against the Colorado Rockies on April 21. With the bases loaded and one out in the seventh inning,토토사이트 Ji-Man Choi hit a huge sacrifice fly over the center field fence for the game-winning run.
After sweeping a three-game homestand against Colorado, San Diego has won seven straight, beginning with a series against the Los Angeles Dodgers on April 14. Their previous longest winning streak was seven games, but they didn’t hit their stride until the season finale in mid-September.
At 75-78 on the season (.490 winning percentage), San Diego is in fourth place in the National League (NL) West and the seventh wild card spot, trailing the third-place Chicago Cubs by 4.5 games. But there are only nine games left in the season. It’s not arithmetically impossible, but it is realistically difficult.
Since Ha-Sung Kim missed his fourth straight game on April 17 against the Oakland Athletics with an unexplained abdominal pain, backup infielder Matthew Batten has filled in nicely. Batten has started each of the last four games at second base, batting 3-for-5 with six RBIs in 14 at-bats.
MLB.com writes, “San Diego certainly looks different than the team that spent the last five and a half months of the season underachieving. They look like the team they’ve always been expected to be. A team that never won more than four games in a row is on a seven-game winning streak and is winning close games.
Center fielder Fernando Tatis Jr, who signed a 14-year, $340 million super-contract with San Diego in February 2021, said, “We’ve been underperforming, we haven’t been coming together as a team. “I feel like all the pieces are finally coming together. We’ve found the answers we’ve been looking for all year. It’s unfortunate it took us this long.”
With a 0.2 percent chance of making the postseason, according to Fangraphs, he’s not giving up. “We’re still hoping for a miracle,” said shortstop Xander Bogaerts, a belated free agent (11 years, $280 million) who is batting 4-for-17 (32 for 68) with four homers, eight RBIs and a 1.323 OPS in 17 games in September. “The situation we’re in is very tough, but we brought it on ourselves,” he admitted.
“It would be worse to end the season with no answers. It’s taken us so long, but everyone expected us to be able to play this level of baseball. It’s really hard to be late, but we found something in it,” he said, trying to find meaning in the late surge.
About that something, Tatis said. “We had a lot of good players, we had a lot of hype. People were excited, and we put too much pressure on ourselves. There was a lot of pressure to perform.” “It was a big lesson for us as a team. Baseball is the hardest game in the world. When you add pressure to it, it becomes extremely difficult. You have to play like a kid,” he said, emphasizing the need to take the pressure off and enjoy the game. But for a team with a payroll of more than $250 million and the third-highest overall, that’s a pretty poor excuse for postseason failure. /waw@osen.co.kr