If this series is a playoff preview, the Cardinals are seeing a Padres team that might actually be ready.
The Padres scored twice in the first inning, added a run in the fourth, another in the fifth and again in the seventh to beat the National League Central leaders 5-0 on Tuesday night at Petco Park.
"We may see them again … in games that matter more in the next month," Padres reliever Nick Martinez said. "We're showing everyone who we really are when we bring the energy."
Mike Clevinger allowed three hits and no runs in 5 2/3 innings. It was his best outing in at least a month and extended the scoreless streak by Padres starting pitchers to 20 2/3 innings. Three relievers closed out the Padres' 14th shutout of the season.
"Something that we've been doing better in this stretch here is scoring early in the game," manager Bob Melvin said. "That gives you the momentum right away. It seems like the at-bats are kind of a little more fierce in the first inning than maybe they have been for some time, and then every time you add on a run after that it just feels like with our pitching you're gonna have a tough time coming back on us."
Fans stood for every at-bat by Cardinals designated hitter Albert Pujols, the future Hall of Famer who is playing his 22nd season and says he will retire when it is finished. He was 2-for-3 with a walk and remained two home runs shy of becoming the fourth player in history with 700 for his career.
The victory was the Padres' fourth in a row and 82nd of the season, which assured them a winning record for the first time since 2010 in a full 162-game season.
"The way we've come together over the last four games, coming back home after a good end of the road trip, starting out the quick homestand with tonight's win is huge," said Jake Cronenworth, who drove in the game's first two runs.
It had seemed for some time that if the Padres qualified for the playoffs they were destined to play in St Louis in their opening series, as the Cardinals are on track to host the sixth seed in the wild card round.
The Padres are now in possession of the fifth playoff spot, which would send them to Atlanta for the best-of-three wild card series.
No matter what happened at Petco Park on Tuesday, the Padres were not going to lose ground in the NL wild card race, as the Phillies and Brewers both lost. With their victory, the Padres increased their leads to 1½ games over the Phillies and four games over the Brewers as the three teams compete for the NL's final two wild card spots.
The Padres were again ready to go at the start, taking a 2-0 lead in the first inning for the third time in four games.
Jurickson Profar began the bottom of the first with a seven-pitch walk and moved to second on Juan Soto's single. Profar was forced out on a grounder by Manny Machado before Soto and Machado advanced on Brandon Drury's fly ball down the right field line. Cronenworth made Machado moving up 90 feet significant when he flared a single the other way into left field to bring in both runners.
Cardinals starter Adam Wainwright took 27 pitches to get through the six batters the Padres sent to the plate, the third consecutive game the opposing pitcher threw that many pitches in the first inning.
This is a change for the Padres, one that began after their 4-0 loss Thursday in Arizona. Among the things that came out of Friday's team meeting and subsequent conversations following that loss was that they needed more urgency from the start of games. It was decided they would all make every effort to finish their pregame preparations and be on the field for the national anthem, as it is one of the few times every player and coach can be together.
"We've had a tough time early in the game for a while now," Melvin said Sunday. "And you see these guys out here early now. … I think there's just a little bit more sense of urgency from the first pitch of the game on, and I think that's what we're trying to accomplish."
The Padres had scored in the first inning of just 32 of their first 144 games, a rate of once every 4.5 games. They had an even run differential in the first inning of those first 132 games, meaning they had scored and allowed the same number of runs. They were the only team with a winning record that did not have a positive run differential in the first inning.
In the middle game of a three-game sweep in St. Louis, Wainwright threw seven scoreless innings against the Padres on May 31, with the since-traded Luke Voit getting the only two hits against him that day.
They had six hits in his six innings Tuesday.
Wainwright retired nine of the 10 batters had faced following Cronenworth's RBI single, with Machado's single in the third inning being all the interrupted the 41-year-old right-hander's run.
With two outs in the fourth, Ha-Seong Kim launched a full-count curveball of the facing off the Canel's sign fronting the lower balcony on the Western Metal building to put the Padres up 3-0.
The lead increased in the fifth when José Azocar singled, went to second on a walk by Soto and scored when he got a good jump and made a smart read on a Machado flare that dropped in front of center fielder Lars Nootbaar.
Clevinger's only trouble came in his final inning when he could not retire the two Cardinals hitters who will almost assuredly finish in the top five in NL MVP voting. Presumptive favorite Paul Goldschmidt lined a two-out double to left field, and Nolan Arenado was hit by a full-count pitch before Melvin walked to the mound to remove Clevinger.
Martinez retired Corey Dickerson on a fly ball to right field to end the inning and pitched a perfect seventh. Tim Hill and Luis Garcia closed out 14th shutout of the season.
The Padres have won four straight games just three times since the middle of June. At 82-66, they are 16 games above .500 for the first time since June 29.
"It looks like everybody in this clubhouse is like trying to win, is hungry, even more than the middle of season, including me," Kim said through interpreter Leo Bae. "We're just on the same page every night."
The Padres' loss Thursday was their fourth in five games and cut their lead over the Brewers to 1½ games. Their run differential for the season was at plus-17, lowest among any team in playoff position. Melvin sternly asserted in a postgame meeting that they were better than how they were playing. before the next day's game, players held a meeting. They have since outscored their opponents 25-4.
"It definitely feels like ourselves," Martinez said. "We've come back to who we are. We've shown this type of energy and our true colors earlier in the season when we (brought) this type of energy. We lost it for a while or, you know, just the natural kind of ebbs and flows of the season, you kind of lose it. I feel like lately we've gotten back to who we really are."
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