Clubhouse chatter: Padres pitchers recall the last time they hit a home run

It was almost as if Walker Buehler was expecting the question, but he wasn't. Pitchers stopped hitting in the National League in 2022, but not before the Vanderbilt product downloaded a moment he'll always remember with ease:

A big-league home run.

"Michael Wacha. St. Louis. 2019. Hit 104 (mph in exit velocity). A 2-2 heater, up and away," Buehler rattled off quickly. "There were two outs. Joc (Pederson) swung at the first pitch the next at-bat, so I didn't even get to sit down. I gave up four runs the next inning, so it kind of ruins the feeling, but I got one in the pros.”

He added: "It's the only one. If you only pitched one game in the big leagues, you're going to remember a lot about it too."

Buehler was almost exactly right, but Pederson didn't bounce into an inning-ending groundout until the fourth pitch of the ensuing at-bat.

It probably just felt like it all happened so quickly, from a rare jog around the bases to the predictable cold-shoulder entrance in the dugout to having to get ready to pitch again.

"I hadn't run like that in a long time," Buehler said with a laugh.

He indeed did give up four runs the next inning and did not factor in the decision after giving up a four-spot in the third and exiting after just four innings.

The blast is one of just 19 hits that Buehler collected across 195 plate appearances before the NL did away with pitchers grabbing a bat.

But Buehler has bragging rights in the Padres clubhouse. For other pitchers, their homers came long before they reached the bigs.

"My sophomore year of high school," reliever Ron Marinaccio recalled. "It was the last year before they switched to the BBCOR bats … kind of nerfing the bats a little bit. So there was no more homers for me."

Jason Adam was a "BP legend" who couldn't go yard in real games, he said. Joe Musgrove hit too many at Grossmont High School - 18 over his junior and senior seasons, according to MaxPreps.com - to recall just one, at least in the way reliever Kyle Hart can.

"I only hit five, so I remember them all," Hart said before reliving the left-on-left change-up that he pulled down the line and out of the yard while a friend was catching for the opposing team.

"He knew I couldn't hit," Hart said. "When it went over the fence, he was laughing."

Michael King hit a handful in high school. His last home run was as a freshman at Boston College in a fall ball exhibition.

Jeremiah Estrada remembers the last two home runs he hit as a senior for Palm Desert High School. Both were game-winners as he was the pitcher of record when he hit a three-run bomb to secure a spot in the semis. The next round, Estrada added another blast and then came in to close the game.

"Oh yeah, I bat-flipped them," he said.

Germán Márquez didn't dare bat-flip his last homer.

Like Buehler, he's a rare Padres pitcher with a professional home run.

Two, actually.

The first came off infielder Daniel Descalso, who was pitching in mop-up duty in a classic 19-2 Coors Field laugher in 2018. He ambushed a 71 mph slider 447 feet to center field.

Then, in 2021, Márquez hit a Yu Darvish sweeper 418 to straight-away center field at Petco Park.

"I have bad mechanics swinging, but I had good hands," Márquez said. " … Darvish is one of the best players in the last 15 years. To hit a homer against Darvish is pretty amazing."

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This story was originally published April 18, 2026 at 7:27 AM.