A Couple of Victories Could Rain on Padres’ Awful Season

What has happened with yooooouuurrr San Diego Padres?

These guys are in a mix-up that threatens to destroy a very special season. Unless this trend is stopped, this team has a chance to become appallingly mediocre. It hasn’t come to that yet, but it is distressing to think that it could.

You see, these guys were off to the most magnificent start. They had 12 wins and 42 losses, a pace so remarkable that this team surely would have earned its niche in baseball lore.

Indeed, the Padres could well have erased the memories of the 1962 New York Mets, heretofore modern baseball’s benchmark for ineptitude. That team was 40-120.

However, it takes a very special team to win games at a pace of only one in four. It takes very little to disrupt such anti-heroics. A very special won-lost record, the worst of the worst, can be a very delicate thing.

And the Padres were doing so well.

In fact, the Padres, albeit reluctantly, were ensconced in a most unusual “pennant” race. It was becoming a question of who would be the first to get to 20 victories--the Padres or Kansas City’s Bret Saberhagen. I could see that race getting down to daily charts and eventually magic numbers.

Ah, there is magic in the most paltry of numbers.

As folks hereabouts are well aware, the Clippers have always been bad. To name one bad Clipper team is to name them all. None stand out.

You want a bad . . . the worst . . . in professional basketball?

Anyone who follows the National Basketball Assn. in even the most casual manner can identify the 1972-73 Philadelphia 76ers as the baddest, as in awful, team since the center jump after every basket was abolished. That team won a mere 9 of 82 games.

It takes something extreme for something to be special. One or two baseball teams are miserable every year. They win 60 games and lose 100, and no one remembers them beyond the day after tomorrow.

It is my fear that the 1987 Padres will slip into this morass. It doesn’t take too many two-game winning streaks to destroy the woeful wonder of a 12-42 start.

To my mind, it started to slip away for the Padres when they went to Atlanta over the weekend. Bad teams inevitably will run into other bad teams, and it takes an especially bad team to find a way to lose. A team that stumbles and bumbles and wins against the likes of Atlanta risks improving its record to an equally mediocre level.

And so the Padres went out Friday night and scored 10 runs. This might not have been a catastrophe, except that Eric Show allowed the Braves to score only three times.

It would be easy to cast Show in the role of the goat, but others contributed to the sorrowful ease of this victory. John Kruk had four hits, Tony Gwynn had three hits and Bruce Bochy had a home run for the game-winning RBI. Here the Padres are, in need of game-losing errors or game-losing hanging curves, and Bochy goes and hits a home run.

Sad.

Still, there was Saturday night and a chance to avoid a two-game winning streak. I’ll be darned if Lance McCullers doesn’t throw four shutout innings in relief to preserve a 5-4 victory for Ed Whitson, the game-winning RBI coming from outfielder Shane Mack. I found it difficult to blame the rookie Mack, but Whitson and McCullers have been around long enough to have a sense of history.

My faith in the Padres was to be tested on Sunday. I turned on the television and the Padres were ahead, 11-2. I immediately understood what this could mean. A team for the ages would find a way to lose this game, thereby dodging the stigma of being stuck with a three-game winning streak. No lead should be safe for a team capable of losing 120 games in a 162-game season.

Alas, heroes would be in abundance on this occasion. Jimmy Jones could not last six innings with a nine-run lead. Errors were liberally committed, enabling Craig Lefferts, for example, to give up six runs in only 1 innings. The Braves, almost through no fault of their own, tied this game and went ahead.

And still it came down to the type of performance so important to sustaining the special nature of this season.

Enter relief pitcher Greg Booker. Let’s give him what might be called the Marv Throneberry Award.

With the score 12-12 in the bottom of the ninth, Booker took the bats out of the Braves’ hands . . . lest they inadvertently hit into something like a double play. He mistakenly--surely it was a mistake--threw one pitch for a strike and it was hit for a single. He walked three other batters, two of them on four pitches, and the Padres had rallied to a 13-12 loss.

Whew.

My relief was short-lived. The Padres went to Houston Monday night and suffered the ignominy of a 5-4 victory, getting a save--if that’s the right expression--from a guy who used to be Goose Gossage.

Suddenly, the record was 15-43. This was still a very bad record, but that was not my concern. I could see discouraging signs that this special season was slipping away. Three wins in four games can be a difficult burden to overcome.

Looking out the window Tuesday afternoon, I gazed at the gloomy sky and pondered the mediocrity of the weather. I sensed that the Padres, given the events of the last few days, could well become baseball’s version of just another overcast day.

I would have felt better if it had been raining.

Even though I didn’t get any rain, I felt so muchmuch better after watching the Padres get great pitching and still lose, 1-0, Tuesday night.

Proving they can do it with bad hitting as well as bad pitching, they renewed my hope.