Padres Lose to Braves, Wonder Where Hits Are

Sometimes, to get a man to look in a mirror, it takes more than just a mirror. Sometimes it also takes a good slap in the face.

Saturday night, the Padres got that slap. His name was John Smoltz.

After spending most of a warm evening with a 21-year-old Atlanta Braves pitcher who had not beaten them in three previous starts (while allowing nearly five runs per start), the Padres gathered around their clubhouse to face the awful truth.

This team of good hitters is not hitting. Not even close.

Smoltz pitched eight innings worth of a three-hitter, Jose Alvarez shut down the Padres in the ninth and the Braves won, 5-1, in front of a paid crowd of 19,216 at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.

Although there were a lot of reasons for the Padres to fret over this game, which stopped their three-game winning streak and left them at 9-9, there was no reason so plain as the bats on their hands.

It wasn’t just the three hits, their low of the season. It wasn’t just the one run, which isn’t the worst that has happened to a team that is tied for the National League lead in shutouts-against with three.

It’s just that this kind of night has been happening almost every night.

“Tonight, our bats were just a little more silent,” Manager Jack McKeon said. “Generally we get, what, six or seven hits? It’s tough to do anything when you don’t hit, and we haven’t been hitting.”

Tony Gwynn put it more plainly: “We aren’t even hitting the ball hard, we’re just going to the plate and taking our turns at bat. If you aren’t hitting the ball a ton, then you have to move the runners around. But we aren’t even doing that.”

Saturday’s specifics:

Jack Clark walks to start the second inning. Marvell Wynne, Benito Santiago and Tim Flannery go grounder, strikeout, strikeout.

Starter and loser Ed Whitson doubles with one out in the third. John Kruk and Roberto Alomar fly out.

Flannery walks with one out in the seventh. Garry Templeton and pinch-hitter Carmelo Martinez fly out and ground out, with Martinez swinging at the first pitch Smoltz gives him.

Kruk walks to start the eighth, and Smoltz throws a wild pitch that moves him to second. The Padres only trail, 2-1, at this point thanks to Clark’s homer in the fourth, his third. But then Alomar lays down a bad bunt, and Kruk is thrown out at third and that is that. Alomar never gets past second.

“There ain’t much I can say--we just didn’t execute,” said Whitson, who allowed one earned run in six innings but is now 2-2. “If we execute right, we win that ball game.”

He wasn’t talking just about the hitting. With the Padres up, 1-0, thanks to Clark, they had an awful fifth inning that gave the Braves all they needed. Kruk misplayed a fly ball to right field into a triple and an eventual run. Santiago skipped a ball underneath shortstop Templeton’s glove to turn a simple sacrifice bunt into another run.

Kruk’s play, on a one-out fly ball by Jeff Treadway, was particularly irksome because, as the ball soared toward the gap between right and center fields, Kruk slowed in his pursuit as if he had it. Then, as if realizing he didn’t have it, he sped up again and dove and missed, and the ball rolled to the wall. Treadway scored on Jeff Blauser’s ensuing single.

“I guess he lost it in the lights--something happening,” McKeon said. “You’d rather him pull up and hold the guy to a double. But those things happen.”

So much for the specifics. Now for the big, unpleasant picture.

As a team, the Padres are batting just .231, which puts them in the bottom half of the league and is a full 16 points worse than last season’s average of .247. They have scored just 54 runs, three per game, which is also rattling around somewhere down there in the league’s basement.

Of their nine victories, only one has come by more than two-run margin, and that one, April 10 against Atlanta, the Padres won by just three runs.

“We haven’t a game where we’ve won easy, we haven’t played for many big innings,” said Clark, who spent the day at the local drag races and didn’t see nearly as much excitement at night. “I think we need to take more chances, play for more big innings. Just go up there and keep swinging sometimes.”

That’s a problem for two reasons.

No. 1: The Padres have no apparent leadoff hitter.

In the past 10 games, there have been three different hitters batting first in the order--Alomar, Wynne and Kruk. They have combined to go five for 39 (.128), with all five hits singles. The leadoff man has not scored a run.

McKeon would like for Alomar for the job; the Padres were 12-0 with Alomar batting leadoff late last season. But this year he is hitting .208 with just six walks in 18 games. He has just one walk in the past 11 games, in which he is in a horrid, six-for-45 (.133) slump.

“Everything goes bad for me right now, nothing is going right,” Alomar said. “I think I do better in the leadoff spot, I don’t swing at as many bad pitches. But everything is bad.”

No. 2: The Padres have no hitter to bat behind cleanup hitting Jack Clark.

McKeon’s first choice was Martinez. He is hitting .134 with one homer and four RBIs. His next choice would be Kruk, but Kruk is hitting .135 with no homers and got his first RBI Friday night.

In the five games of this trip, McKeon has tried four different batters behind Clark, including Wynne and Santiago as well as Kruk and Martinez. Together, they have combined to go three for 18 (.167), all singles, while Clark has been on base ahead of them 10 times.

“We’ve got to have somebody to pick up Clark,” said McKeon, who watched as his slugger was stranded three times after three walks.

With the season still just 18 games old, there appear to be no trades in the making. McKeon said he might try Santiago behind Clark in today’s afternoon game. And maybe Luis Salazar will get a shot at hitting leadoff.

“Yeah, it’s still early,” Gwynn said. “But we’re still frustrated. When is the last time somebody has been on something other than first base when I’ve batted? I don’t know. It’s been a while.”

Padre Notes

Pitcher Greg Harris, who grew up five hours from here in Siler City, N.C., strangely enough is playing host to only 20 friends and family members for this weekend’s games. “That’s because the rest of them think I’m on the disabled list,” he said. That’s also what some Padre fans probably think, but look for Harris to work his way into a game this weekend after facing just one batter since April 5 because of a torn cartilage in his left rib cage. Harris has thrown hard for a couple of days and felt great. . . . The scheduled Braves starter for today’s game here, Tom Glavine, has started the season as one of the top lefties in the league. He didn’t allow an earned run in his first 18 innings and since last May 22, when Russ Nixon replaced Chuck Tanner as manager here, Glavine has a 3.40 ERA in 180 2/3 innings. But Glavine, 23, has learned quickly about fame. On the day earlier this week that an Atlanta newspaper featured him with a story headlined “The Great Glavine,” he allowed his first earned runs--four of them--in an eventual 5-4 Braves victory over Houston. Glavine is still 2-0 with a 1.37 ERA, including a six-hit shutout of the Padres in San Diego April 12. . . . Tommy Gregg, the talented young Braves right fielder (.389 average) who suffered a stress fracture in his foot Tuesday and could miss a month, was a punt returner at Wake Forest for three years and never had an injury. Gregg has been replaced by on the roster by Terry Blocker, who was hitting all of .217 at triple-A Richmond.