Joe Musgrove’s playoff tuneup went about as well as the Padres could script.
The Padres’ postseason auditions looked better, too, by the end of Monday night.
Musgrove punched out seven over six scoreless innings and Trent Grisham and Brandon Dixon strung together back-to-back doubles in the eighth as the Padres batted around in their only rally in a 7-4 win over the San Francisco Giants to start the final series of the regular season.
Grisham’s double was his first since Sept. 9 and snapped an 0-for-24 skid. Dixon’s was his first hit as a Padre since he was recalled from Triple-A El Paso last week and his first in the majors since September 2020 with the Detroit Tigers.
The former is fighting for his spot in the starting lineup. The latter hopes to force his way onto the postseason roster. It also wouldn’t hurt to get Wil Myers going — he hit a three-run homer to cap the seven-run eighth — before the regular season ends Wednesday.
Yet where the Padres go from there is no clearer than it was a day ago.
The NL East, after all, is a half-game tighter as the Braves lost in Miami, while the Mets, the current No. 4 seed, were rained out in New York. The Padres would travel to New York for Friday’s postseason opener as the No. 5 seed but the Phillies — who clinched the NL’s final wild-card spot on Monday — are just a game behind the Padres and own the head-to-head tiebreaker should the two teams finish with identical records.
Not that Padres manager Bob Melvin is all that invested in what’s going on elsewhere, not after finally clinching Sunday.
“I think it’ll all get wrapped up here … in the next day or so,” Melvin said Monday afternoon. “It’s all about just getting our guys ready for whoever and wherever we’re going.”
Musgrove certainly looked ready for his next assignment, retiring the first 10 batters he faced Monday and not surrendering his first hit until David Villar’s one-out single in the fifth.
LaMonte Wade Jr. followed with a single, but Musgrove retired the next two hitters and then the side in order in the sixth before giving way to Adrián Morejón in the seventh for the start of two shutout frames.
The quality start was Musgrove’s 20th of the season.
He finishes with a 10-7 record, one out shy of his career high with 180 innings and a career-best 2.93 ERA over 30 starts.
The last Padre to pair 30 starts with 10 wins and a sub-3.00 ERA: Tyson Ross in 2014.
Musgrove’s 184 strikeouts are the second best of his career. He struck out four straight at the start of the second inning and had fanned six of seven when Wilmer Flores’ one-out walk in the fourth gave the Giants their first runner. Musgrove walked his second batter with two outs but got out of that jam with a comebacker from Thairo Estrada.
But help, at least other than Grisham’s diving catch in center to end the sixth, was nowhere to be seen until the bottom of the eighth, when Grisham’s and Dixon’s back-to-back doubles interrupted what had been a sterling effort in the Giants’ bullpen game.
But by the end of the inning, the Padres had padded their lead via a bases-loaded walk from Josh Bell, a two-run double from Jake Cronenworth and a three-run homer from Myers, just his sixth this year.
Left-hander Tim Hill walked two and hit two batters in a four-run ninth before Josh Hader was called on to fetch the final two outs to record his seventh save with the Padres, but not before loading the bases with one more hit batter.
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