Un-Magic Moments Defeat Padres, 10-7

As often happens in this sport of moments, an evening at Riverfront Stadium Friday could be boiled down to one.

Seventh inning, Padre pitcher Mark Grant is removed from the game. He begins walking from the field to the dugout. Suddenly he stops, spins back toward the pitching mound and begins shouting.

Grant said he was yelling at himself. Catcher Benito Santiago, standing on the mound at the time, thought Grant “might have” been yelling at him.

Whatever, this was not a baseball game for the Padres, it was a cry in the night. Grant and bullpen mate Dave Leiper combined to blow a great start and a great comeback in an eventual 10-7 loss to the Cincinnati Reds.

“Our pitchers did a good job elevating the ball tonight,” pitching coach Pat Dobson said wryly. “In the fifth inning, I look down and Denny (Sommers, bullpen coach) has grabbed a bat.”

After games like these--when the Reds pounded out 15 hits with two homers, two doubles and a triple--a little humor is not all bad.

Handed a 3-all tie in the sixth inning, Leiper allowed a bases-loaded walk and a bases-clearing triple to turn it into a 7-3 deficit.

Then handed a 7-all tie after Carmelo Martinez’s booming, three-run homer in the seventh, Grant turned it to 10-7 loss. Exploded it, actually. Took all of two batters.

First up in the Reds’ seventh, Barry Larkin. Single to left. Next up, Eric Davis. Homer to left.

Three batters, two hits and one run later, Grant departed, although not before a little exercise in public speaking.

“It was between me and my ghost,” Grant said of his shouts.

“He may have been talking to me,” Santiago said, noting that on Davis’ home run, he called for a slider, and Grant threw a fastball.

Santiago then implied that he might have incensed Grant by saying something about that pitch while Santiago and Dobson met Grant on the mound.

“I’ve got to learn to say nothing, to not let anything bother me,” Santiago said. “If a pitcher does something wrong, I don’t want to say anything bad about him because we are a team. It’s my job to call the best pitches and make them look good.”

If that is the case, then lately, in Grant’s case, he had been succeeding. Grant’s three allowed runs in a third of an inning Friday were more than he has allowed in his previous nine relief appearances combined, covering 14 innings. And just when he’s getting used to this middle-inning role . . .

“I’ve learned in this job, you’ve got to hold them quick,” Grant said. “You can’t be throwing 20- to 25-pitch innings. There’s no time.

“Tonight, I was terrible.”

And all in front of 29,340 who waited through a rain delay of an hour and 14 minutes at the start of the game and who, if you didn’t know any better, were cheering as if they were a witnessing a pennant race. After the Dodgers’ 6-4 loss to Houston Friday, maybe they are. The Reds are just 7 1/2 games out of first place and 4 1/2 ahead of the fifth-place Padres.

“We’ve picked up two games on the Dodgers this week. I just want the players to understand that it can turn around fast,” Red Manager Pete Rose said. “There have been a lot of strange things that happen in baseball in August and September. All they have to do is look back to 1987, when we had a nice lead for 81 games and--boom--it was gone just like that. It can happen to anybody.”

Besides Grant, a couple of other Padres felt that boom part Friday, chiefly Leiper and starter Jimmy Jones.

Pitching in a tie game in the sixth, Jones reacted to the pressure by allowing the first three runners to reach base, on a check-swing single in front of the plate (Davis), a single to right (Paul O’Neill) and a walk (Nick Esasky).

Enter Leiper, who had allowed just two earned runs in his previous 15 innings. First thing he does is get pinch-hitter Bo Diaz to ground the ball right back to him, starting a run-saving double play. Next, he intentionally walks Ron Oester to load the bases and effectively remove Red starter Danny Jackson from the game, because Jackson was due up next.

In Jackson’s place came pinch-hitter Dave Concepcion. On a low, full-count pitch, Leiper walked him for one run. Next up, Herm Winningham, who hit a ball into the gap in left-center field for a three-run triple to make it 7-3.

All of this didn’t give Leiper the loss or anything; it only set up Keith Moreland’s RBI single and Martinez’s homer, his seventh, both hits coming off new reliever Rob Murphy. But for what?

“I know, it’s so tough to come back like that and then lose it,” Manager Jack McKeon. “But those two guys have pitched well. What are you going to do, shoot them?”

Padre Notes

In honor of Farmer’s Night tonight, several Padres have been enlisted to compete against the Reds in farm-type contests. They include: Cow milking, Lance McCullers and Andy Hawkins. Egg toss, Mark Grant and Greg Booker. Corn shucking, Tony Gwynn and Ed Whitson. Calf feeding, Mark Davis and Chris Brown. And there was even controversy here. Keith Moreland had agreed to milk the cows, then backed out at the last minute and assigned the chore to Randy Ready, who said he was not in the mood to milk a cow just now, or words to that effect. McCullers finally agreed, perhaps because when he was asked by public relations assistant Mike Swanson, he was in the middle of a card game and didn’t want any further interruptions. There is also the likelihood of controversy in the egg toss, as Grant has promised to sneak in a hard-boiled egg. Of course, such frivolity would not be complete without a Jack McKeon story, this one about a cow-milking contest in the minor leagues at Winston-Salem. “I was out there milking like hell and spitting tobacco juice at the same time and turns out, everything is going into the same bucket,” McKeon recalled. “I said ‘Hey, look at this, chocolate milk.’ ” For the record, McKeon has also won a greased pig contest in his career, in Boise, Ida., simply by using good managerial sense. “If you look, you’ll see they never grease the pig’s legs,” McKeon said. “So I made one grab for his leg and got him.”

Stanley Jefferson’s seven-game hitting streak may have been ruined by the plane ride here Thursday. He said he nearly “froze to death” on the airplane and came to Riverfront Stadium Friday with a head cold. He then went 0 for 4 . . . The headline in Friday’s USA Today screamed: “San Diego-San Francisco rematch to feature fight.” The story underneath the headline contained a quote from former Padre Kevin Mitchell, now with San Francisco, saying he would “mess with” Chris Brown the next time he sees him, to avenge Brown’s sucker punch of Mitchell’s good friend, Marvell Wynne on June 27. The story quotes Mitchell as saying: “I hope he takes a swing at me. Why Marvell? He doesn’t hurt anybody.”