Padres Find Nothing Funny About This Loss

All you need to know about Saturday night’s major league baseball game here is the name of one program the TBS cable television station fed the nation while the game was delayed by rain for 40 minutes.

The Three Stooges.

It was a night of raindrops and balloons and weird baserunning and bad pitches. Finally, the Braves stuck a couple of fingers in the Padres’ eyes and ran off yukking over an 8-4 victory.

A brief blow-by-blow:

The Braves jumped ahead, 3-0. Zing. The Padres bounced back to lead, 4-3. Honk. The Braves swung to a 6-4 lead. Plunk. It rained utility infielders for more than an hour, and the game was finally halted at the same time that souvenir balloons were blowing around the diamond like a certain couple of pitching staffs’ fastballs.

The game was resumed, and the Braves scored a couple more times while a guy named Charlie Puleo, we think, held the Padres hitless for the final 3 innings to win his first game since Sept. 6. Whee.

“I’ve seen nights like this before,” Tony Gwynn said, shaking his head. “But never with balloons.”

The Braves have, you understand, the worst record in the National League. This second consecutive victory over the Padres assured them of only their fourth series win all season. They are enjoying their longest winning streak of the year at three games.

And today, with their ace Zane Smith on the mound, they will be going for their first series sweep since Sept. 24.

Series sweep? The Braves?

The Padres walked out of Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium just before midnight last night in a state of being beside themselves.

“We definitely have to win tomorrow,” Gwynn said of today’s 11:10 a.m. PDT start. “I hate to put pressure on ourselves, but we really need to win our next five games. I don’t know what happened. . .”

What happened was, after winning four of their first seven games on this trip, the longest of the season, the Padres have lost three in a row and in one week have gone from 6 1/2 games out to 11 1/2 games out.

Instead of looking up at the Dodgers, they are suddenly looking behind at you-know-who. They are just 3 1/2 games out of last place. There are five games left on the trip. You figure it out.

“We almost have to win five straight to get back even,” starter and loser Jimmy Jones said. “I’m not going to say we took these guys for granted . . . but they get four quick runs Friday, and three quick runs followed by four more quick runs today (Saturday), and look at us. It does kind of put a damper on things.”

Jones led the wet blanket brigade with his third consecutive bad start, lasting only 4 innings and allowing seven runs on seven hits. For the man who would be the Padre ace, this is getting serious.

In those three starts, he and the team have lost twice as he has allowed 19 earned runs in 13 innings. His ERA, once a nifty 2.99, has ballooned to 4.42 while his record has dropped to 5-7.

Of those three starts, Saturday night’s was the worst. He not only betrayed his ability, he betrayed his team’s trust. He was handed that 4-3 lead after four innings. And he couldn’t hold it.

“That’s the thing that gets me,” a downcast Jones said. “We get that lead in the fifth and it starts raining and all I need to do is get three outs, and maybe it downpours and maybe we win. I just needed to get through that inning.”

He couldn’t get past one out of that inning, and that out was to the first batter. After Albert Hall flied to center, Ken Oberkfell grounded a single to center. Dion James then grounded a single to right, followed by a wild pitch to Dale Murphy that moved the runners to second and third.

Oh yes, Murphy. The powerful one stepped to the plate showing 1 hit for his last 17 at-bats, which might make you think he’s overdue. First base was open, thanks to the wild pitch, which might make you think you should just put him there, particularly since the guy on deck, Ken Griffey, had 1 hit in his previous 20 at-bats.

Not Jones. He battled Murphy to 3 and 2 and then lost a pitch up in the strike zone, Murphy grounding it down the third base line.

“Two inches to the right and Chris Brown has it,” Jones said. “Two inches to the left and it’s foul.”

It was neither. It hit the third base bag and bounded into left field and two runs scored.

Oh well. Turns out, wouldn’t have done any good to walk him anyway. Griffey followed with a single up the middle, making him 2 for 21.

Into the middle of the game and rainstorm came reliever Mark Grant, who promptly gave up an Andres Thomas double for another run. Then came the rain delay and the Three Stooges, and you can guess the ending from there.

“I’ll tell you, Murphy was 0 for 2 off me, and I was in his kitchen pretty good, and Griffey had done well against me,” Jones explained. “I just didn’t want to give up a home run, and I didn’t. Everything was right . . . except where it was.”

And where that leaves Jones is generally as low as he’s been in his 1 1/2 big league seasons. Such a team player that he refuses to take a shower until the game ends--”I don’t want anybody to think I’m giving up on them”--Jones was still staring into his locker 20 minutes after Saturday’s game, some two hours after his role in it ended.

“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about it,” he said. “Because I’m worried about it. I’ve got to refine things. I’ve got to go back to the drawing board.”

Pitching coach Pat Dobson feels that drawing board must include a diagram of a slider, a pitch he taught Jones last week but has yet to see him throw in a game. Without his slider, if his curveball goes bad, Jones is left with only the one pitch which made him a high school star and 1982 first-round draft pick--the fastball. Which is great, except that this is not high school, and it takes hitters one minute to figure out one pitch.

“He didn’t throw one (slider) in the game today, but he has to throw one, and he will throw one,” Dobson said. “He has to be able to put the hold on them after we come back and get leads.”

“With young guys,” Manager Jack McKeon sighed about the 24-year-old Jones, “sometimes you just have to wait and bear with him.”

There was some other bearing of Padre burdens required Saturday, chiefly in the one inning in which they resembled a .500 team. It was their three-run fifth, which began with the signs of what could be one Padre resurgence--a double by Brown, his second of three hits in his first start since he injured his shoulder seven days ago in Los Angeles.

With Brown on second, it was time for another resurgence--a Shane Mack RBI single to center, Mack’s second of two hits in one of his rare starts in place of the slumping Marvell Wynne.

After the runners were moved along with a Jones bunt, shortstop Garry Templeton singled in a run while batting from the foreign leadoff spot. So all is well.

But keep your eye on Templeton, because Randy Ready followed with a double that, with just one out, should have kept Templeton on third. Except Templeton never saw third base coach Sandy Alomar’s stop sign and ran into a critical second out that cost the Padres a run when Tony Gwynn followed with a single to score Ready.

“We talked about that. Sandy gave the ‘go’ sign for Tempy to come around the base hard, and then stopped him,” McKeon said. “Tempy saw the ‘go’ and never the ‘stop.’ Just one of those things.”

It was the second night in a row a runner has run through an Alomar sign--Keith Moreland scored while doing it Friday night. And after that, all that was needed to complete Saturday’s frustration was some big-time Tim Flannery frustration.

While pinch-hitting for Grant in the sixth, with two out and runners on first and second and the Padres still with a chance to get into the game, Flannery struck out looking. It was the third consecutive game he has struck out while pinch-hitting.