Padres routed by White Sox, suffer third straight loss
The Padres began play in May with the fifth-best record in the major leagues and a lot of questions.
Chief among those: How have they done it?
Just how did they get to 19-11 with a team batting average and OPS both ranked in the bottom 10 and their starting pitchers' cumulative ERA ranked 18th?
Somehow, enough timely hitting, a dependable bullpen and some good fortune allowed them to bank some victories.
Those might come in handy since what happened Friday night at Petco Park was more like what a team with a bottom-10 offense and a middling pitching staff could be expected to look like.
Well, maybe not as bad as the Padres lost on Friday.
Their third consecutive defeat - the first time that has happened to them in 2026 - was an 8-2 rout by the White Sox in perhaps the first game all season that seemed decided early on.
The Padres scored their two runs in the eighth inning after they were down 8-0.
The game started ugly for both teams, as seven of the first 15 batters walked.
The White Sox turned three of their four walks into runs and took a 6-0 lead in the second inning.
Padres starter Germán Márquez surrendered seven of the eight runs scored by the White Sox, six of those in the second.
The Padres loaded the bases on three walks against 6-foot-10 rookie left-hander Noah Schultz in the first inning. Two of those walks came with two outs, and they did not score when Ty France grounded a ball to second base for the third out.
Márquez began the second inning by walking Colson Montgomery, surrendering a double to Chase Meidroth and an RBI single to Sam Antonacci that put runners at the corners.
The Padres almost got the first two outs, which could have, in theory, prevented the final four runs. Manny Machado fielded Austin Hays' grounder, looked Montgomery back to third and then threw to second baseman Fernando Tatis Jr. for the force out. On the throw, Montgomery took off for home, and Tatis likely would have gotten the out at home had his throw not been about 20 feet up the third-base line.
“Right execution,” Tatis said. “Just a really bad throw.”
Márquez walked the next two batters before Andrew Benintendi hit a sacrifice fly to make it 3-0 and Munetaka Murakami hit his MLB-leading 13th home run to make it 6-0.
Padres hitters, meanwhile, went from making Schultz throw 29 pitches in the first inning to seeing a total of 27 pitches over the next three innings.
"The first inning, that was our game plan going in - to be patient with this guy, make him throw it over the plate," Padres manager Craig Stammen said. "We just didn’t get that big hit in the first inning. And then kind of after that, you get down 6-0 and it’s really hard just to stay focused on that type of a game plan. We hit a couple balls hard that were caught. And it’s one of those things, momentum was not in our favor early in the game."
Schultz faced the minimum number of batters from the second through fifth innings, until Tatis sliced a soft liner into right field that rolled to the corner as he sprinted to third base with his first extra-base hit in 16 games.
Schultz finished the sixth, becoming the 14th pitcher to make a quality start against the Padres this season.
Tatis had three of the Padres' five hits and also walked, reaching base two fewer times than the rest of the Padres combined.
Márquez at least saved the Padres' bullpen to some extent, throwing 95 pitches to get through five innings.
Before he departed, he surrendered a home run to Montgomery in the fifth.
After the White Sox added a run on three two-out singles against Ron Marinaccio in the top of the eighth, a one-out walk by Bryce Johnson and two-out singles by Tatis, Miguel Andujar and Machado brought in two runs in the bottom of the inning.
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This story was originally published May 1, 2026 at 9:40 PM.