Santiago’s Homer Pushes the Padres Past Cardinals in 10

With one out in the 10th inning Thursday, San Diego’s Benito Santiago hit a home run off St. Louis’ Todd Worrell to give the Padres a 9-8 victory over the Cardinals at Jack Murphy Stadium.

Stranger things have happened, but not only did baseball’s worst team (58 losses) defeat baseball’s best team (56 victories), but also beat a team that had won six straight extra-inning games, with an overall 10-1 record in overtime. The Padres had played all of three extra-inning contests, fewest in the National League, and had won just one.

To get the victory, among other things, the Padres had to first work out of a frustrating 10th-inning jam, caused when, with two out, reliever Lance McCullers walked Lance Johnson, a rookie pinch-hitter making his third plate appearance.

After five pitches to Jack Clark, Johnson stole second base. On the next pitch, Clark walked. It was up to Willie McGee, who struckout one inning earlier. He did it again, giving the Padres another try, one they finally used.

The Padres had fought through two lead changes and two tie games to take an 8-7 lead in the bottom of the seventh on Benito Santiago’s RBI double. But the groan of the 17,218 fans when Chris Brown was thrown out by cutoff man Ozzie Smith while trying to score from first base on that play foretold that one was not going to be enough.

And what happened but, in the top of the eighth, reliever Goose Gossage pitched so that those cried of “goose” could be interpreted as “boooo.” He simply gave the run back, walking the first batter he faced, Jose Oquendo, on five pitches. He walked the second batter, Vince Coleman, on four pitches. A sacrifice bunt (Smith) and RBI groundout (Tommy Herr) later, and the game was tied.

It was an appropriate second-half opener for the Padres, a team that has spent much of the last three months in confusion. For those of you scoring at home:

Cardinals led 2-0. Tied 2-all. Cardinals led 3-2. Padres led 4-3. Cardinals led 7-4. Tied 7-all. Padres led 8-7. Tied 8-all.

Fittingly, the only steady thing for the Padres was the thing that has troubled them all season--middle relief.

Keith Comstock came into the game with a runner on second and two-outs in the Cardinals’ four-run fourth. He promptly struck out Jack Clark, who also struckout two innings later. Comstock went 2 innings, allowing no runs on two hits.

Mark Davis then took over, and allowed no runs and one hit in his inning, including picking major-league leading base stealer Vince Coleman off first, and striking out Tony Pena with two out and a runner on first.

Davis and Comstock held the Cardinals such that, trailing 7-4 after 3 1/2 innings, the Padres offense could come back with the kind of flame that Manager Larry Bowa has spent a season stoking.

The Padres capped it by taking an 8-7 lead in the seventh, after Tony Gwynn led off with a single to left. Pat Perry was replaced by Lee Tunnell, who was greeted by the sight of the Padres’ leading RBI man, Carmelo Martinez (42) bunting Gwynn to second.

John Kruk followed with the predictable intentional walk, setting up Brown vs. Tunnell, which resulted in a fielder’s choice grounder to third that forced Kruk at second, moving Gwynn to third and Brown to first.

Up stepped Santiago, who fell behind 0-and-2 and then resisted temptation after temptation, watching two borderline balls instead of unleashing wild swings. When he finally did swing, the ball shot down the left field, barely rolling into the glove of a runing Vince Coleman.

Gwynn scored, and because there were two outs, Brown was waved home by third base coach Harry Dunlop, only to be easily caught. The comeback had actually started three innings earlier, with one out in the bottom of the fourth, when Garry Templeton laced a ball underneath a leaning Willie McGee in center field for a triple. Having the team’s most disappointing season at the plate, Templeton went 3-for-4 Thursday and suddenly has a seven-game hitting streak in which he’s hitting .542 (13-for-24). He was followed by Tim Flannery’s flyout to center field, which scored him, although not as easily as you might think, as McGee’s throw traveled about a football field and was just late.

Two innings later it was Templeton again. He followed Chris Brown’s lead-off single with a broken-bat single to left. It eventually turned into runners on first and second with two out and rookie pinch-hitter Shane Mack at the plate against hard-throwing reliever Pat Perry.

And this turned into one of the Padres best at-bats in recent months.

Perry quickly busted Mack for one inside strike, then two. Completely off-balance, Mack hung in while Perry threw three straight balls. Then Mack fouled off a pitch.

Then he picked one off the outside of the plate and sent it into right-center field, scoring both runners, tying the game at 7-7.

Padre Notes Thursday night’s featured visitor was National League President A. Bartlett Giamatti, who last week issued a memo denouncing fights such as the one of July 7 between the Padres and the Cubs. Except while Giamatti met with Chicago’s Andre Dawson at Tuesday’s All-Star Game, he did not come here to meet with Padres pitcher Eric Show, who hit Dawson to start the fight. “I was in the Bay Area for the All-Star Game, and thought I’d stay a while,” Giamatti said. “The Padres have got a superb new president (Chub Feeney), one of the most experienced men in all of baseball, and I shouldn’t interfere.” Giamatti’s actions and words, however, seem to indicate he favors the pitchers’ right to the inside of the plate. Of the Show-Dawson incident, he said, “I can think of only one incidence of ‘beanballing’ this year, and it was not in the game we were talking about. I see no increase this year in beanballing or headhunting. The hitters have to understand, the pitcher has a right to the inside of the plate. Twenty or thirty years ago when this happened, batters never charged the mound. That’s changed, and for the life of me, I don’t know why. Today there’s some kind of machismo out of control, some kind of punctured pride.” Earlier this season, Giamatti backed up this feeling by issuing his umpires a new directive to eject any player who charges the mound. The biggest problem in the recent incidents, said Giamatti, is assessing whether the pitcher is intending to hit the batter or just push him off the plate. “Intent has been in the rules a long, long time but can only be judged by common sense and umpires experience.” One piece of forthcoming action, he said, might be to alter the rule that calls for only a warning to the pitcher when he hits a batter, then ejections thereafter. Because of this rule, while Show was not ejected from the Cubs’ game, the two Chicago pitchers who retaliated were ejected. Teams claim this rules gives a pitcher a free hit from which they cannot get fair revenge. “I think there will be a fair amount of conversation on that rule at the end of the season,” Giamatti said. “People call it a free shot.” Giamatti said there would be no suspensions in the Padres-Cubs fight, but would not comment on further disciplinary action for the Cubs, which could be fines for their seven ejected players, manager and coaches . . . Padres president Feeney met with the club for five minutes before Thursday’s game. It amounted to little more than a second-half pep talk. “He just told us to keep hustling, keep working, and try and win some games,” said Carmelo Martinez . . . Disabled pitcher Storm Davis will throw a simulated game Monday, seriously testing the torn rib cage muscle for the first time. “We’ll make our plans from there,” said Davis, who said he would not object to a minor-league rehabilitation assignment. “I just want to get out there and pitch again.” . . . In case you missed Tony Gwynn’s finish in the All-Star Game’s Hitting-for-Accuracy contest, you didn’t miss anything. He missed it. His Monday morning flight from San Diego was late, and he arrived at 2 p.m. “The National League guys said they would have won with me,” said Gwynn, no great compliment considering National League won anyway . . . Marvell Wynne talked for the first time Thursday about the play which Manager Larry Bowa criticized as a key to Sunday’s 4-2 loss in Pittsburgh, a failed attempt to steal third with two out in a first inning rally. “What could he have been thinking of?” asked Bowa at the time. Said Wynne Thursday: “I thought I had it. I thought I had a chance. I wanted to get to third so I could score better on a passed ball or a high chopper or something. All of this was because I didn’t make it. I make it, it’s a different story.”