Padres Daily: Another good one decided by ‘the little things'; refocused Morejón; book vs. gut

Good morning,

Mason Miller was on the wrong side of a twisting turning gut-churning ninth inning this time.

And he succinctly summed up what made the difference.

"It’s the little things," he said. "Little things win games, and they also lose games too, as we saw tonight."

Despite it getting ugly for a few moments in the ninth, last night's game was another beauty between the Padres and Dodgers.

"Great baseball," Manny Machado said of the first two games of the first series between the teams atop the National League West. "It has been beautiful. Been awesome."

You can read in my game story (here) about how the Padres, who had won eight games this year in their final time to bat, lost such a game for the first time last night.

Like the Padres' 1-0 victory on Monday, last night's game had a number of moments that led to the slim margin.

The first six runs were the product of two-run homers, as the Padres assumed a 4-2 lead before the third inning was up.

The final three runs were scored by the Dodgers, one in the fifth inning on a groundball that was going to be an out but turned into a double, one in the seventh inning on a solo homer and one in the ninth after Miller threw away what would have been the second out of the inning on a pick-off throw.

In between, both teams got some excellent pitching.

And in the end, the Dodgers got an awesome at-bat.

While the first error of Miller's career made it possible, Andy Pages deserved a heap of praise for his battle with the Padres closer.

Pages was down 0-2 and then saw seven more pitches by fouling off a 102 mph fastball, a 101 mph fastball and two sliders from the pitcher who has used those two pitches to strike out 52% of the batters he has faced this season.

His sacrifice fly came on the ninth pitch of the at-bat, a 102 mph fastball above the zone.

"I don't know if there's words for that at-bat," Freddie Freeman, the 17-year veteran who homered twice last night, said on the Dodgers telecast after the game. "That's one of the greatest at-bats I've ever seen."

This is what Pages said about the at-bat that handed Miller his first loss with the Padres:

"Doing that against a pitcher of that caliber is obviously very good, and I felt very confident facing him. … For me, he's just a pitcher that throws really hard, and if your timing is right and you're exact with him, you can have success against him."

Miller, who was pulled after Pages' sacrifice fly, employs video game pitches and still possesses numbers that have him on pace for one of the best seasons a relief pitcher has ever had.

But his 2026 can fairly neatly be split in half.

Not Miller time

Not winning a close game in which you used your high-leverage relievers often is a double loss.

So it is to some extent for the Padres today, as Miller will almost certainly not be available.

He has thrown 22 pitches each of the past two days and has pitched three times in five days. Among his five appearances in the past 11 days are a pair of four-out saves.

Miller's 22 appearances this season are six more than he had made at this point last season. His 15⅓ innings in March/April were a career high before May.

The Padres should have the rest of their back-end relievers available.

Jason Adam did not pitch last night, and Jeremiah Estrada, Adrian Morejón and Bradgley Rodriguez will all presumably be available to pitch a second straight day.

Back in the game

Some bad luck earlier in the season contributed to Morejón having a 5.66 ERA (13 runs in 20⅔ innings) after 17 appearances. He allowed at least one run in eight of those games and allowed an inherited runner to score in another.

Even with the metrics saying he was more unfortunate than all but a handful of other relievers, it was a troubling start for the left-hander, who was an All-Star last summer and finished the 2025 season with a 2.08 ERA and having stranded all but five of the 45 runners he inherited.

After the kind of inning last night that again showed the 27-year-old left-hander can be among the best relievers in the major leagues, he acknowledged a change in his level of focus.

"Sometimes I forget things that are out of my control," he said. "The way they get hits, I can't control any of that. So I changed that mentality coming into these last few outings and just said. ‘I just have to go out there and execute my pitches.'"

He certainly had to do that after entering last night's game at the start of the eighth inning and immediately surrendering a double to Shohei Ohtani.

"Good hitter, but it's a bad location," said of the slider he left over the middle and a little high.

What he did to strand Ohtani, getting through the gauntlet of Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman and Kyle Tucker, indicates Morejón may have regained his 2025 execution level.

After a fly ball to center field by Betts got Ohtani to third base with one out, Morejón had to face his third consecutive future Hall of Famer in Freeman.

He struck out the left-handed hitter on a 100 mph fastball and then got Tucker to ground out to first base.

Morejón has over his last four appearances yielded one hit in 3⅓ scoreless innings while allowing one of the four runners he inherited to score.

"Those first outings, maybe it wasn't my full concentration that I had," he said. "I think that was the key the last couple times. I've been able to have full concentration and execute my pitches the way I wanted to."

Canning back on track

Five days after walking five batters while allowing six runs in 1⅔ innings and vowing to work on attacking the zone, Griffin Canning did so last night.

"Maybe a little too much," Canning said. "Just wish I could take that pitch back to Freddie. Probably not a good hitter to throw a fastball down the middle to."

He referred to a 96 pitch in the heart of the strike zone that Freeman hit just over the left field wall to give the Dodgers a 2-0 lead in the first inning.

After that, Canning reestablished himself in an adventurous five innings against one of MLB's best offenses.

He worked past the leadoff hitter reaching base in the second and third innings before allowing a third run in the fifth on three ground balls.

Teoscar Hernandez led off the fifth inning with a double that was headed toward Machado before bouncing off the third base bag and over Machado's head. Hernandez came around to score on grounders by Hyeseong Kim and Ohtani.

Canning departed after the fifth with the Padres ahead 4-3.

Gut 1, Book 0

Padres manager Craig Stammen went with his gut when he kept the right-handed Adam in to face the left-handed-hitting Ohtani on Monday.

While Ohtani singled, Adam ended the eighth inning by getting Betts to ground out.

Last night, Stammen went by the book, having right-handed-hitting Ramón Laureano pinch-hit for the left-handed Gavin Sheets in the seventh inning against lefty Tanner Scott.

Laureano hit a fly ball 350 feet that was caught on the warning track for the third out, stranding Fernando Tatis Jr. on second base.

"I felt really good when it came off the bat," Stammen said. "… Good swing, good at-bat, kind of what we expected in that matchup. Laureano is historically a pretty good hitter against left-handed pitching. Felt good about that. Sheets (was) National League Player of the Week (last) week, one of our hottest hitters. Very tough decision on my end to do that."

Sheets had walked twice and flied out (against right-handers) last night after going 0-for-3 the night before (all against righty Yoshinobu Yamamoto).

Sheets was 1-for-3 with a walk against lefties on the last road trip, during which he went 10-for-16 with four home runs, a double and seven walks over six games.

Tidbits

• Miguel Andujar's home run in the third inning ran his hitting streak to eight games, tied for his longest of the season and the longest by any Padres player this season. (Luis Campusano also did it.) Andujar is batting .344 (11-for-32) with four doubles and three home runs during the streak.
• Machado's two-run homer last night made him 5-for-56 (.089) over his past 15 games. He went 1-for-4 to raise his season batting average to .182, which ranks 167th among MLB's 174 qualifying batters. His .615 OPS ranks 151st.
• The homer was also Machado's 25th against the Dodgers, three more than he has against any other team. (He has homered 22 times against the Diamondbacks, Rockies and Yankees.)
• Jackson Merrill was 1-for-3 with a walk. That raised his batting average three points to .205, which ranks 154th among qualifying hitters.
• Tatis saw one more pitch in his five trips to the plate than Pages saw in the ninth inning. And that was with Tatis' strikeout in the first inning taking four pitches. His two singles last night came on the first pitch of at-bats.
• Since the start of 2024, Estrada has a 17.18 ERA in nine games (7⅓ innings) against the Dodgers and a 2.24 ERA against every other team. Freeman's solo homer in last night's sixth inning was the sixth homer Estrada has allowed the Dodgers in those two seasons.
• Since the Dodgers’ final run was unearned, the Padres’ ninth-inning ERA remained at 0.45. The next-closest team is the Braves (2.36). The Padres have outscored their opponents 32-4 in the ninth.
• Freddy Fermin's ABS challenge woes were interrupted last night. He not only stopped a six-challenge losing streak behind the plate but got a strike call overturned while batting. He grounded out in that at-bat and is now batting .153 (13-for-85) with a .437 OPS. His average ranks 311th and his OPS 314th out of 318 batters with at least 80 plate appearances this season.
• Monday's announced crowd (40,882) barely got the Padres to their 19th sellout of the season, and Tuesday's attendance (39,788) was just shy of being their 20th. No game against the Dodgers had failed to reach the 40,000 sellout threshold at Petco Park since 2022 when all three games in a midweek series in September fell well short.
• You can read about what made Rodolfo Durán stick with the Padres this past offseason and get updates on Campusano, Jake Cronenworth and Germán Márquez in Jeff Sanders' notebook from yesterday (here).
• Kirk Kenney wrote his "Scene & Heard" column after spending the past couple days around Petco Park. Read (here) how one young Padres fan coerced a ball from a Dodgers player, a new take on "Holy Sheets" and also see Kirk's complaint about a free hamburger.
• I wrote in yesterday's newsletter about Tatis' learning curve at second base, and in that item I quoted Stammen said, "He makes up (for that) with athleticism. That's kind of the point of being able to move him around." This play Tatis made in last night's first inning illustrated what Stammen was talking about:

All right, that's it for me.

Talk to you tomorrow.

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This story was originally published May 20, 2026 at 7:09 AM.