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ATLANTA — The pitching was good. The hitting was good. The Padres are …
The season’s first 101 games have shown it is best to wait on that assessment.
But for a night, the Padres put together the kind of game they knew they needed and beat the Braves 8-3 on Tuesday at Truist Park.
They did it with the kind of all-around performance that has been elusive.
“It’s a really important time of the year,” Fernando Tatis Jr. said. “And especially now playing really good baseball as a team … it’s going to be huge if we want to build momentum to where we want to go.”
Walker Buehler allowed two hits over 5⅔ innings, surrendering two runs in the second inning and one base runner thereafter before four relievers closed out the Padres’ second victory on a 10-game trip that is halfway completed.
Manny Machado homered twice, Jackson Merrill homered for the third time in three games and Tatis hit the longest home run (474 feet) in the major leagues this season.
“There has never been a question of how talented this team is,” Buehler said. “And as cold as we’ve been on kind of both sides of the ball and lack of success, I think talent means that you can get equally as hot. … When you have talent, you have a chance. We’re 2½ back, 1½ back or whatever it is after tonight. So we’ll see what happens.”
How far out the Padres are in the race for the final National League playoff spot depended on results later Tuesday.
They began this trip — identified by virtually everyone involved as having the potential to determine the course of their season, as these games are being viewed by the front office as a litmus test heading into the Aug. 3 trade deadline — 3½ back.
Their three-city trek started with two losses, 7-6 in 10 innings on Friday and 6-1 on Saturday, before they beat the Royals 19-2 in the finale of that series. They lost 3-2 here Monday and were left to lament again how they so often do not match quality pitching with enough offense.
“You know it’s in there,” Ty France said late Monday night. “We just need to find a way to be more consistent with it and we’ve kind of got to figure it out fast.”
France’s two-out single in Tuesday’s first inning made sure the Padres did not squander singles by Tatis and Jake Cronenworth to start the game. After Machado grounded into a double play, France went to the plate and extended his hitting streak to nine games by lining a single into center field to score Tatis.
The Padres were down 2-1 after two innings, and it looked like it might be another ugly outing for Buehler, who had allowed 20 runs in 11 innings over his previous three starts.
A pair of walks and a triple by Clairemont High School alumnus Jim Jarvis, the Braves’ No.9 hitter, made it 2-1.
Buehler walked three batters and threw 35 pitches in the second inning. Of his 50 pitches to that point, just 26 were strikes.
But he threw seven strikes in an eight-pitch third inning, seven strikes in an 11-pitch fourth and six strikes in a 10-pitch fifth.
He walked Matt Olson to start the sixth before getting Austin Riley on a fly ball to center field, surrendering a double to Michael Harris II and retiring Mauricio Dubón on a pop fly.
Padres manager Craig Stammen then went to Yuki Matsui, and after walking the bases full the left-hander struck out Brewer Hicklen to end the inning and preserve a 6-2 lead.
Matsui was charged with a run in the seventh inning when Bradgley Rodriguez allowed a single and balked in the runner Matsui left him. Adrian Morejón retired the Braves in order in the eighth. Mason Miller survived a one-out single and a walk by striking out the other three batters he faced to navigate a scoreless ninth.
Miller, who aside from the four pitches he threw in the All-Star game had pitched in a game once in the previous nine days, was pitching merely to get some work because the Padres had scored and scored and scored.
Merrill’s home run leading off the fourth inning tied the game 2-2, and the Padres added two runs in that inning on a walk by Sheets and doubles by Xander Bogaerts and Tatis.
The next two runs came on balls Machado sent to the seats in successive innings — the first off Braves starter Reynaldo Lopez in the fifth inning and the second off JR Ritchie in the sixth.
Ritchie retired the next five batters before walking Luis Rengifo with one out in the eighth and then hanging a full-count curveball over the center of the plate that Tatis hit some 20 rows beyond the wall in left-center field for the longest home run by a Padres player since Tommy Pham hit a ball 486 feet at Coors Field on Aug. 17, 2021. It was the second-longest homer of Tatis’ career, three feet shy of a blast he hit on June 16, 2021, also at Coors Field.
“It was beautiful to feel that,” Tatis said. “Especially to see it off the bat.”
It felt even better for the Padres that they did not stall offensively.
“I think that’s the thing that we’ve struggled with most of the year — to tack on those extra runs to give us a little breathing room for our bullpen and for our starters,” Stammen said. “We’ve done that two of the last three games where we’ve continued to tack on, we continue to take good at-bats. … We’ve seen that a little bit more often than not here of late.”
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