The San Diego Padres hadn’t won a baseball game since June 26. On Sunday they finally did, and they did it at Dodger Stadium, beating Los Angeles 5-2 to end an eight-game losing streak — the franchise’s longest since 2013, per ESPN’s game recap — and avoid a four-game sweep.
JP Sears made it possible. In just his third start of the season, the left-hander held the Dodgers to one hit over five scoreless innings, striking out five; Miguel Rojas‘s two-out single in the fifth was the only ball that found grass. For a rotation that had been bleeding runs through the skid — San Diego gave up 23 in a single game on July 1 — five clean innings read like a rescue.
Then the stars did what stars are paid for. Fernando Tatis Jr. went 3-for-5 with a stolen base and scored on Manny Machado‘s three-run homer to center in the seventh, the blow that stretched a 2-0 lead to 5-0. The homer was Machado’s 18th of the season and, per ESPN, his 26th against the Dodgers in a San Diego uniform — passing Dave Winfield for the most by a Padre against Los Angeles. Machado reached base four times in all, drawing three walks. Jackson Merrill supplied the game’s first run with a fourth-inning RBI single, and Mason Miller retired the side in the ninth to close it out.
One win doesn’t repair a stretch in which San Diego went 2-8 over its last 10 and slid to 44-45, four games back of the final NL wild card and even with Arizona. But the shape of this one matters. The skid was defined by blowouts and late collapses; Sunday was the inverse — dominant starting pitching, the two franchise cornerstones combining for four hits, three runs and the decisive swing, and a clean handoff to the bullpen. That formula travels. The Padres have played their way to the season’s margin, and with the deadline four weeks out, the front office is watching for exactly this kind of evidence that the core still carries.
