Padres Take One, Can’t Add Another Against the Pirates

PITTSBURGH — You are playing a doubleheader on the muggy back porch of baseball’s hottest team, and something extraordinary is occurring.

Your staff’s most worrisome pitcher throws a six-hitter to win the first game. Twenty minutes later, your best hitter starts the second game with a three-run homer. Taking the mound in the bottom of that first inning is your top pitcher.

You figure, what’s the worst that can happen?

When they awake this morning--make that this afternoon--the Padres can tell you.

Tuesday night against the Pittsburgh Pirates at Three Rivers Stadium, the worst happened.

The Padres ended the Pirates’ nine-game winning streak with a 6-2 victory in Game 1, and they scored three runs on Tony Gwynn’s homer in their first at-bat in Game 2. But then they tripped over their smirks and landed square on their giggles.

More precisely, staff ace Andy Hawkins allowed the Pirates five hits on his first five pitches of the third inning of the second game, dragging the Padres to a 9-5 defeat and a doubleheader split.

For a fifth-place team playing a second-place pennant contender, a split might be considered nice. In fact, for one team playing another team a full 12 games better than it, a split might even be considered a victory.

Well, OK, said the Padres. If you insist.

“You know, you win one game and come out and get a jump on them in the second game for three runs . . . and you think you’re in good shape,” Gwynn said. “Next thing you know, the roof caves in.

“No, a lot of us aren’t happy with a split. But we’ll take it.”

“We’ve got to take it,” said pitcher Greg Booker, who worked in Game 2 in his first appearance in 17 days. “These guys (the Pirates) are playing great, and we split on the road. There is no need moping around.”

Some of their frustration was because of the hope brought about by Jimmy Jones’ six-hitter in Game 1. This same Jones had not pitched in 14 days after being moved to fifth in the pitching rotation. He had not won a game since June 9 and had not thrown a complete game since May 13.

“This was a big win for all of us,” Jones confirmed afterward.

Or maybe the frustration was because nobody wanted to Gwynn’s 13th and 14th consecutive splendid games go to waste. In Game 1, he went 3 for 5 with an RBI. He started Game 2 with that three-run home run to right, his fifth homer of the season.

There are hitting streaks and then there are other-world streaks, and Gwynn’s belongs to the latter. He has hit in 14 consecutive games, which is not a terribly huge deal except when you go 29 for 59 during that time (.492), with 2 homers and 13 RBIs. Gwynn, who was hitting .246 before he began the streak with a sixth-inning single June 30 in Cincinnati, is now hitting .297.

And it has become a very big deal.

“I can’t explain it,” said Gwynn after Game 1. “I only hope I can keep it going for a couple of months and not be worried if I can’t.”

Gwynn, who is on the verge of climbing back into the batting race--a chase he won last season with a .370 average--says he is ignoring it. He says the only things he wants to get back into are the season and the good graces of his team.

“Yeah, I read the papers, but I haven’t read them lately. I’m not paying attention to where I’m at,” he said. “Whether I get back in the race or not, that still won’t make up for the bad first half of the season I’ve had.

“That’s all I’m concerned with, getting myself right.”

As for the Pirates, they are concerned with getting their pennant race right, something they eventually did Tuesday. Their victory in Game 2 moved them within 1 1/2 games of the New York Mets in the National League East, the closest they have been in two months.

“The first game was a deadbeat game, and then we get down, 3-0, in the second game, and a lot of teams would quit,” said Pirate Manager Jim Leyland, whose home crowd of 17,092 made October-type noise. “But we didn’t. And that’s what makes this a quality ball team.”

Not to mention causing pitcher Hawkins to become a little confused. He watched Pirate starter Brian Fisher allow the first five Padres to reach base to open Game 2. He watched Gwynn follow Marvell Wynne’s single and Roberto Alomar’s walk with a homer.

Hawkins then went out in the bottom of the first and allowed a couple of runs to put the Pirates back in it, but he finished the inning with three consecutive outs and was still strong. He was the same Andy Hawkins who had two complete games in his last three starts and had not allowed more than two earned runs in any of his last five starts.

But then something happened.

“Something kind of weird,” Hawkins said. “Something strange.”

Something that few in the Padre clubhouse had ever seen before.

“Not me,” Gwynn said.

“I’ve never seen it,” Hawkins said.

Third inning, Padres still ahead, 3-2. We’ll start with Hawkins’ first pitch and go in order, only one pitch per batter, please.

Barry Bonds hits a rocket into the right-field seats for his 18th homer. Jose Lind singles to left. Andy Van Slyke singles to right. Bobby Bonilla singles to left. R.J. Reynolds hits an infield single.

Five pitches, two runs in and the bases loaded.

“They were getting on base like that turnstile at Dodger Stadium--click, click, click, click,” Gwynn said.

“You know one thing,” pitching coach Pat Dobson said. “He was throwing strikes.”

Said Hawkins: “No sense explaining it, because I don’t understand it myself.”

After those five pitches, you think Hawkins was a little shaken? He walked the next batter, Sid Bream, on four pitches to force in another run and force him from the game. By the time Booker had allowed a two-run single to Junior Ortiz to finish the inning, Hawkins’ ERA had jumped from 2.97 to 3.41, and his record dropped to 9-8.

“Maybe I could have thrown a couple of those pitches outside and worked into the count a little more,” Hawkins said. “But I’ve been successful this year by going right at them, and I wasn’t going to change now.

“I’ve won games with a lot worse stuff. I guess I was just overdue for a bad outing, and my number finally came up. That’s all I can figure.”

Suddenly trailing, 7-2, the Padres could do nothing against a rejuvenated Fisher. They touched him for just three hits from the second to the seventh innings. Reliever Dave Rucker finished up by allowing Carmelo Martinez’s fourth homer, a two-run shot in the ninth.

The only bright spot in Hawkins’ performance was the chance it gave the previously hibernating Padre middle relievers.

First there was Booker, whose four innings represented his longest outing of the year in only his ninth appearance in 48 games for Manager Jack McKeon.

“Shoot, I’m tired. You forget how long four innings is,” Booker said after allowing one earned run on three hits during that time.

Next up was Dave Leiper, who had not pitched in 12 days. He threw one shutout inning and was followed by Mark Grant, who had not pitched in 14 days. Grant finished with a shutout inning.

The reason those guys never get work could be illustrated by Monday’s Game 1, during which Jones pitched the Padres’ third complete game in a five-game stretch.

Jones allowed a run in the third ining on Bonds’ two-out single, and then a run when he tired in the ninth. To end the game, with runners on first and second, he needed Alomar to dive upon a Mike LaValliere grounder. But then considering that he had reached the ninth inning just twice in his previous 10 starts, and had allowed fewer than three runs just twice in those 10 starts, the late problem was understandable.

“I just wanted to get that last inning over quick and get out of there,” Jones said. “So I rushed.”

In all, Jones threw up the fastballs, and then left it to Gwynn to throw down the hits. Though Gwynn had three hits in that first game--a double and two singles--and scored a run, he said his best at-bat was a ball that was caught.

With the score tied, 1-1, in the fifth and runners on first and third with one out, Gwynn hit into a certain inning-ending double play. But Randy Ready dove into shortstop Rafael Belliard at second base, and Belliard’s throw was too late to get a hustling Gwynn at first. Dickie Thon scored from third to make it 2-1, a lead the Padres never lost.

“I knew I had to go hard because it looked like an easy double play,” Gwynn said of his grounder to second baseman Lind. “It should have been a double play. I don’t know what happened, I just went as hard as I could.”

“The key to the game,” McKeon said of the play. “That there, that’s what makes Tony Gwynn such a good player.”