Nationals beat Padres behind big night by James Wood

Kevin Acee, The San Diego Union-Tribune on Jun 24, 2025

Published in Baseball

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The paying customers showed up en masse again Monday, enough of them to make the gathering at Petco Park the 33rd sellout among the 37 home games the Padres have played this season.

And the boos that rained down after Josh Bell hit a single that drove in the Nationals’ sixth run were arguably louder than any heard at Petco Park this season.

By the time James Wood, the former Padres prospect, hit a three-run homer that clanged off the right field foul pole in the eighth inning to put the almost-final touch on the Nationals’ 10-6 victory, there was no real overt reaction. And by the time Fernando Tatis Jr. launched a three-run homer with two outs in the ninth inning, the ballpark wasn’t a quarter full.

That is where the Padres find themselves almost halfway through the season.

They are not meeting expectations. And it is becoming regular enough that outrage gives way to boredom on many nights.

Whether the Padres’ downfall was on this night mostly because their starting pitcher lost it midgame and most of the other pitchers they used never had it or because a talented but grossly inexperienced team had the kind of game it is capable of, the fact remains the Padres have not been able to put together winning baseball consistently for most of this month.

Losing to a team that doesn’t win very often only serves to make it seem worse.

The Padres (42-36) won seven of their nine games from May 25 through June 3. A loss Monday would drop them to 7-12 since then.

They went into Monday with a chance to win a third straight game for the first time since the first three days of June. Instead, they were on the verge of becoming just the third team the Nationals would beat in their past 16 games.

Washington (32-46) scored four runs in the fourth inning against Stephen Kolek and two in the fifth against Kolek and Wandy Peralta.

In between one of the worst teams in baseball racking up nine hits in those two innings, Manny Machado hit a solo home run.

The Padres added a run in the sixth, and Jake Cronenworth’s homer leading off the seventh got them to 6-3.

Woods’ blast, his 20th of the season, was followed in the ninth by one from Bell, who accompanied Soto to San Diego at the trade deadline in ‘22. Both of those came against Yuki Matsui.

Kolek entered the game with a 2.86 ERA over his previous four starts and was coming off a quality start at Dodger Stadium.

The Nationals’ only baserunner in the first three innings came on Daylen Lile’s lead-off walk in the third, and he overslid second base on a steal attempt and was tagged for the final out of that inning.

But in the fourth, Kolek’s pitches suddenly stopped going where they were supposed to and stopped moving quite as well as they usually do.

After throwing 40 pitches over the first three innings, he took 33 to get through the fourth.

And the Nationals led 4-0.

It began with a chopper in front of the mound by CJ Abrams, the former Padres shortstop and No.1 prospect who also went to Washington as part of the Soto trade.

Kolek grabbed the ball with his bare hand, threw quickly — too quickly — toward first base but well up the line. Cronenworth, playing first base, never had a chance to make the catch, and the ball bounced to the side wall as Abrams ran to second on the first error Kolek committed in the major leagues.

Wood followed with a single to left field to put the Nationals up 1-0.

Wood moved to third on a double by Luis Garcia Jr. and scored on a single by Nathaniel Lowe.

The first out of the inning, a fly ball to center field by Bell, also brought in a run. And Riley House, making his eighth career start, followed with an RBI single.

Abrams, Wood, Garcia, Lowe and Bell would single in succession with one out in the sixth to make it 6-0.

Machado’s seventh home run in June — five more than any other Padres player — leading off the bottom of the fourth got the Padres on the board.

Their second run came on a single by Jackson Merrill, walk by Xander Bogaerts and an RBI single by Gavin Sheets in the sixth inning.

Parker, a left-hander whose 5.93 ERA in his first six road starts was third-worst in the National League, would finish six innings having allowed just the two runs before he surrendered Cronenworth’s home run leading off the seventh and was replaced.

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