Padres Bats Awake From Extended Snooze, Finally Beat Giants 10-1

The game started with a familiar unsettling feeling as the Giants leadoff hitter kick started it with a triple and later scored. The Padres were down 1-0 without even an attempt to get their first base knock since Friday night. However, baseball is not as predictable as it would seem sometimes. The Padres first batter, All Star SS Everth Cabrera, ended the anticipation that began the contest by getting a hit. However, before you could really enjoy that clear feeling in your lungs from the sigh of relief, Cabby was picked off. But never fear, even though this start continued to pointed to being another typical game in the Padres' miserable slump things began to change. Chris Denorfia batted next and took Barry Zito deep to tie the game. That was just the start of what was to come.

The Padres would hit 4 HRs (Denorfia, Nick Hundley, Will Venable and Carlos Quentin) and combine for 10 runs behind another excellent outing for the team's most consistent starter this year, Eric Stults. He would go 6 innings and only give up that solitary run scored by the leadoff man. Dale Thayer and Luke Gregerson kept the Giants quiet as well in relief. The cherry on top of the game for the pitching staff was seeing 28 year-old Colt Hynes make his major league debut in the 9th inning to finish it off with a 1-2-3 inning.

The defense behind Stults and company was solid as we have seen many times this year, but the same could not be said of the Giants. The team that made some great defensive plays to help Tim Lincecum do what he did the night before was not on display in the day game tilt. A couple potential double plays were botched, including a ball Sandoval completely airmailed to second base, helped the Padres pile on more runs than just the ones by those aforementioned home runs.

I wish this blowout win was enough to be able to say the team is going into the All Star Break on a high note, but really nothing could be done today to make that so. Too many loses have been piled up and the one Saturday was particularly brutal. Since, you can't complain too much about seeing the boys put together a solid win when many were calling out the team yesterday for not playing hard enough.