Padres starting pitchers turned a corner by running through the Rockies as if they weren’t there.
It was Michael King’s turn to shut out Major League Baseball’s worst team on Sunday. King didn’t even need any other pitchers to help complete the job.
The 29-year-old right-hander retired all but three of the 29 batters he faced in the first complete game of his career, and a 6-0 victory over the Rockies was the Padres’ third consecutive shutout and sixth in their first 10 home games of the season.
“You can’t be much better than that,” Padres manager Mike Shildt said of King. “I mean, that’s just top-of-the-line, Grade A, ace stuff.”
Their second laugher in three games against the Rockies extended the Padres’ best start at home to 10-0 and improved their MLB-best record to 13-3. The only other time a Padres team began a season 13-3 was the 1998 club, which kept playing all the way to that year’s World Series.
The Padres led big from the start (scoring in the first inning for the eighth time) and kept piling up hits (11, their 10th time with at least 10) and big innings (their fifth with at least four runs).
But the story was the Padres pitching staff following up 8-0 and 2-0 victories by blanking the Rockies again, the first time since 1988 a Padres staff has recorded three shutouts in a row and the first time they have ever shut out a team over an entire three-game series.
It was just the 34th time since 1901 that any MLB team has done it.
The 1966 Cleveland Indians are the only other team to have six shutouts in their first 16 games in a season, and the 1981 Texas Rangers are the only team to have six shutouts in their first 10 home games. The 2010 Padres are the only other team in franchise history to have six shutouts in any 16-game span during a season.
And on the heels of a rough spate, King and fellow starters Nick Pivetta and Kyle Hart were practically unhittable. Going back to Randy Vásquez’s start Wednesday against the Athletics, the past four Padres starters have allowed one run and seven hits in 27 innings.
This four-game stretch follows a turn through the rotation in which the team’s five starters had an 11.21 ERA and 2.55 WHIP while working 17⅔ innings.
“I think every time out, you know that we could show out what we could do,” King said. “We’ve got a really good culture in terms of, like, when you do have a bad one, everybody is around you to support you and allow you to have a good one in your next one. And I think that the pressure from the team is a good one in terms of like, ‘Hey, we’re not gonna have two bad (starts) in a row. Ruben (Niebla, the Padres pitching coach) is also great in terms of keeping the confidence, and then we’re great in terms of just talking it through.”
The Rockies were 6-for-71 against Padres starters in the three games. And Kyle Farmer had four of those hits. That was 3-for-25 in seven innings against Pivetta, 1-for-19 in six innings against Hart and 2-for-28 against King. Pivetta and King walked one batter apiece.
In all, the Rockies were 9-for-88 in the series, a .102 batting average that was the lowest the Padres have ever yielded in a three-game series.
The Rockies arrived in San Diego with a 3-9 record and a .243 batting average and departed with 12 losses and a .218 average. They also arrived with the third-highest chase rate (31%) in the majors and the third-highest swing percentage (50%) in the majors.
“They’re a very aggressive team,” King said. “You’ve got to feed off that. You’ve got to make sure that you’re still around the zone but executing strike to ball. It wasn’t as much of an emphasis in terms of getting soft contact early but making sure that I wasn’t leaving anything middle, knowing that if I did fall behind in the count, they are going to chase, so still continue to execute.”
That is not to say King’s achievement was entirely due to the opponent. Sunday was the sixth time in his 35 starts for the Padres that he has gone at least seven innings while allowing no more than four hits and one run. He is one of 11 pitchers to have done so since the start of last season.
“I think he can beat any team in the big leagues,” catcher Elias Díaz said.
King began Sunday’s game by retiring 13 straight batters before Michael Toglia grounded a single through the right side with one out in the fifth.
King did not throw three balls to a batter until the eighth inning, when he walked Hunter Goodman with two outs. His eighth strikeout ended the inning.
“Don’t think about it,” King, who was at 93 pitches, recalled telling Shildt after that inning.
Thing was, Shildt never even had to consider making a move until the ninth. King threw more than 14 pitches in an inning just once — 19 in the eighth — never pitched with a runner at second base and worked with a big lead in his final eight innings.
“It was tight,” Shildt said of the wiggle room heading into the final inning. “The rope was there. He’d earned it. … Also, he had some time in between innings. We didn’t have a lot of quick innings on offense. He’s also coming off the (five) days rest. He’s going to get (five) days on the other side. But he was definitely getting in that area that was getting a little bit uncomfortable. But he was efficient, and he had earned it.”
Ezequiel Tovar’s one-out single in the ninth was the Rockies’ second hit, and a double play grounder by Nick Martini four pitches later (King’s 110th of the afternoon) ended a game that the Padres had in hand virtually from the start.
Eight Padres batted in the bottom of the first.
Their four-run barrage in the inning began with Fernando Tatis Jr. striking out before Luis Arraez singled and Manny Machado walked.
After Xander Bogaerts hit a fly ball out to right field is when the scoring got started. And it was three consecutive RBI hits by players who were in spring training on minor-league deals that did it — singles by Oscar Gonzalez and Yuli Gurriel and a two-run double by Jose Iglesias.
Another double by Iglesias led to the Padres’ fifth run, in the fourth inning, when Tatis’ double-play grounder with the bases loaded drove in Iglesias from third. Manny Machado’s led-off double and Jason Heyward’s one-out single made it 6-0 in the seventh.
“It’s definitely really cool,” King said of the complete game. “But a win is a win. It’s a lot easier when you get out to a four-run lead in the first inning, and then you can really kind of attack the zone and go from there. So I think that complete games happen when offense gets out early.”
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