Padres Slip Again to Braves

And so, after six exhaustive months of gliding through lands unexplored and unexplainable and just plain weird, one thing has become clear.

The Padres may be plumb out of happily-ever-afters.

They lost to the worst team in baseball for the second time in less than 24 hours Sunday, falling to the Atlanta Braves, 6-5, in 10 innings and giving rise to the final question of this season. Which will end first--their season or their slump. They are no longer the National League’s best team since May 28. They are no longer playing .500, having fallen to 73-74.

They have lost five of their past six games. Of their 14 remaining games, eight are on the road, including six against the first-place Dodgers and six against the second-place Astros.

And then they must face the memory of last season.

The Padres lost 10 of their final 11 games in 1987. All the good that had come of a midseason run came undone.

“Yeah,” said first base coach Greg Riddoch, “but last year we were all tight at the end of the season because (Manager) Larry (Bowa) was going nuts again. All the guys said, “Hey, we aren’t going to put up with this stuff anymore, we got two weeks left, see ya later.

“It’s not that way around here this year. We are still battling. Just look at today.”

Riddoch was presumably not talking about the seven hits that starter Andy Hawkins allowed. And that was just in the first inning.

He was presumably not talking about the game-winning run allowed by stopper Mark Davis in the 10th inning, on an RBI single by Ozzie Virgil, after Davis treated .182-hitting rookie Mark Lemke to a walk.

He was talking about what happened in between, as the Padres came back from a 5-1 deficit after three innings to eventually tie it up on Dickie Thon’s leadoff pinch-hit homer in the ninth, his first homer in 16 months.

“Yeah,” Riddoch said. “Look how we battled back. We could have easily chucked it in.”

But nonetheless, they lost. And by taking two out of three this weekend, the Braves won a series for only the sixth time this year.

“Of course there are guys thinking about the winter, I can’t say there aren’t,” Tony Gwynn said after collecting two hits and retaining his National League batting lead with a .309 average, a shade ahead of Atlanta’s Gerald Perry.

Added Gwynn: “I don’t think the problem is on the field, I think most of us are thinking only about baseball out there, but after the game. . . . Before, you would always think about what is coming up next. Now, we’re thinking, man, we only have 14 games left. Man, it’s hard not to look at the winter.”

So to what instinct does Manager Jack McKeon appeal to push this team into October? Well, for one thing, McKeon doesn’t appeal to anything. For McKeon to have a team meeting this late in the year--he has had only one since taking over--the Padres would have to become as bad as the Atlanta Braves.

“What the heck would I tell them?” McKeon said.

Leave it to veteran Tim Flannery to have an idea, and one in which you don’t even have to address the players. Address their wallets.

“Tell them, what you do now is what gets you the money,” he said. “We have free agents on this team, we have other players with big negotiations ahead of them. You get your numbers up, you get the money. You don’t, you lose.

“These guys have to realize, at this time of the season, they have a lot more to lose than just ballgames.”

Flannery recently hit .380 in a 20-game stretch, including five straight pinch hits, a club record. Last Wednesday the option on his contract was picked up for next season, complete with a raise to $400,000. Case closed.

Riddoch, though, had another idea. Call it an appeal to history.

“They have to realize, it would be a shame to let everything we’ve done go by the wayside,” he said. “You don’t want anybody to remember the losing, you want them to remember what we accomplished since May.”

Gwynn put it another way: “We don’t want people to look at all the hoop-de-do about our turnaround and say, ‘And now this?’ ”

Sunday afternoon, it was this:

--Hawkins, one of three Padre free agents who is truly playing for big money, had his second shortest outing of the year. In only 2 innings, he allowed 5 runs on 11 hits.

At least five of those hits were, in the words of McKeon, “Parachutes. Little bloopers. I kept thinking, ‘He’ll get this guy out,’ and there was another parachute.”

No matter, Hawkins, 14-11 with a 3.50 ERA, must be careful not to end this season in a crash landing. He has lost his last two starts, allowing seven runs in nine innings.

“If this were happening two or three months ago, the pressure of being a free agent might get to me,” Hawkins said. “But I don’t think two weeks will undo what I did all year long. All I can do is add to what I’ve done.”

--After the Padres came back with a homer by Benito Santiago, RBI singles by Gwynn and pinch-hitter Keith Moreland and then Thon’s homer, Mark Davis gave it back.

Only nine days after allowing the Braves to tie the Padres in the ninth and eventually win, 5-4, on a single by Virgil in the 11th, Davis was beaten again by Virgil, who now has a total of three game-winning RBIs.

After relieving Mark Grant in the eighth, and holding the Braves hitless for 2 innings, Davis allowed a single to Andres Thomas in the 10th with one out. He then worked the count full to Lemke before walking him on a low sinker he thought the kid might swing at.

“I didn’t think he would be taking, he really showed me something,” Davis said.

Ted Simmons fouled out, Virgil punched a curveball into center field and the Braves had the win.

“He just beat me, there is nothing strange about it,” said Davis, who falls to 5-9 despite 27 saves and a 2.03 ERA.

Six of those losses have come in extra innings, a time when one mistake means a loss, leading the normally placid Davis to say, “If people look at my win-loss record and judge me by that, fine. They just don’t know baseball.”