Padres right-hander Jordan Lyles was scratched from his scheduled start in Saturday afternoon's game against the Giants in San Francisco. But he didn't feel right warming up and then we heard the two most dreaded words a pitcher can hear:
Forearm tightness.
Padres fans know all too well that is often a symptom of an elbow ligament problem. Lyles said after the game that initial tests offered encouragement but with elbows it’s always prudent to wait and see for sure.
So this turned into a bullpen game and this time it didn’t work out. The Padres used five pitchers and the Giants scored on four of them in a 5-3 San Francisco win.
Matt Strahm, as he has in all the bullpen games, started and threw pretty well. He struck out five and only allowed one run in 3.1 innings. For a short while he was pitching with a lead.
In the top of the 4th inning Hunter Renfroe hit his 4th home run of the year, a solo shot off Andrew Suarez that put San Diego up 1-0. The Friars had 10 other hits in the game but didn’t score again until the 9th inning because instead of stacking singles they hit into four double plays.
The Giants tied it in the bottom of the 4th on a Brandon Crawford RBI triple. In the 6th Crawford put San Francisco on top with a 2-RBI double, part of a 3-hit, 3-RBI day for the Giants shortstop.
San Francisco added runs in the 7th and 8th innings to take a 5-1 lead but the Padres gave themselves a chance in the 9th. A.J. Ellis reached on an error by Crawford that allowed two runs to score and brought the tying run to the plate in the form of Cory Spangenberg, who grounded out weakly to 1st baseman Brandon Belt to end it.
The Padres can try to salvage a split of the series on Sunday afternoon when Eric Lauer takes the mound against Dereck Rodriguez.
