WASHINGTON — It is going to take a little bit of fight for the Padres to dig out of the hole their inertia has created.
Sustained fight is not something the Padres have demonstrated this season.
For one thing, they have not won more than two games in a row in three weeks.
With a chance to win a third straight game and clinch a series victory on Wednesday night, they fell behind and ultimately fell, 5-3, to the Nationals.
A victory Thursday is needed to avoid a sixth consecutive series loss.
The Padres are five games below .500, at 22-27.
Wednesday’s loss was all but determined in the second inning when the Nationals jumped on Ryan Weathers for four runs and a 4-0 lead.
The Padres made a game of it with a pair of home runs, a two-run shot by Rougned Odor and a solo blast by Ha-Seong Kim. But they simply have not been good at coming back from that kind of deficit.
Perhaps there should not be too much read into that in terms of what it means about them and their ability to turn around their season. The reality is they aren’t adept at scoring runs at any point in games.
And a four-run deficit is all but a death sentence for a team that has scored more than three runs in just 23 of its 48 games games this season.
Only once have they come back from four runs down, April 30 in Mexico City against the Giants. They have come back from just one other deficit greater than two runs this season. That was April 29 in Mexico City against the Giants.
They actually are not good at coming back from any kind of deficit. They have nine victories in games they trailed by any margin at any point, tied for seventh fewest in the majors.
And when trialing late, they are particularly helpless.
They are now 2-22 when trailing after six innings, the fourth-worst such record in the major leagues. They are 1-23 when trailing after seven innings, sixth worst. They are 0-22 when trailing after eight innings, tied with 10 others for the worst record in MLB.
It is a challenge to win a game in which a starting pitcher allows five runs, including one unearned one.
But the Padres came into the 2023 season thinking they had the type of lineup that would be able to do that, and not infrequently.
Their inability to score consistently has made nights such as Wednesday seem hopeless quickly.
After Ryan Weathers effectively breezed through the first inning, the Nationals hardly let him collect his thoughts in the second. In a span of five pitches, they had four hits that scored three runs. They ended up sending eight batters to the plate, with Weathers walking one and the final run scoring on a sacrifice fly.
Odor’s two-run homer got the Padres halfway there in the fourth inning.
He helped give back one of those runs with an error in the bottom of the fourth. Then Ha-Seong Kim got them back within two, at 5-3, with his solo home run leading off the fifth.
That was as close as the Padres would come.
