San Diego Padres Win Five Straight and Flip the Trade Deadline Script

The San Diego Padres began the week as a team half the league expected to sell and ended it as one of the more interesting what-ifs of deadline season. Six wins in seven days will do that. The latest San Diego Padres news is mostly good: a road sweep in Miami, two more wins over Colorado including a walk-off that featured a career night from Fernando Tatis Jr., and a five-game winning streak that carried the club back over .500 and to within shouting distance of a wild-card spot before the Giants finally cooled them off on Thursday. With the trade deadline landing Monday, August 3, the front office now has a genuinely hard call to make, and the roster spent the past week making the case that it should get help rather than get broken up.

Three Wins in Miami to Open the Week

The week started at loanDepot park against a Marlins team in free fall, and the Padres did exactly what you're supposed to do to a club riding a double-digit losing streak. Friday's opener went 4-2, with Adrian Morejon picking up the win out of the bullpen to move to 8-2. Saturday was a 7-2 cruise built on a patchwork pitching day: Randy Vasquez lasted just 2.2 innings, but JP Sears came out of the pen for 3.1 scoreless frames and the win, and the offense piled on late with five runs across the final three innings. Jackson Merrill went 3-for-4 with two doubles, Ty France drove in three to push his season total to 49 RBIs, and Luis Rengifo — a recent addition who has been absurd since arriving — extended his hitting streak to seven games while batting well north of .400 in a San Diego uniform. That one handed Miami its 11th straight loss and, notably, gave the Padres their first road series win in roughly six weeks. Sunday's 5-3 win finished the sweep, with Wandy Peralta getting the decision in relief.

A Walk-Off, a Career Night, and a Rockies Sweep

Back home after a Monday off day, the Padres opened a two-game set with Colorado on Tuesday and played the game of their week: an 8-7 walk-off that required repeated comebacks. Colorado hung four runs on the board in the third, and San Diego spent the rest of the night clawing back, tying the game in three consecutive innings. Tatis was the engine, collecting a career-high five hits with two RBIs, including a go-ahead single in the sixth. Michael King gave the Padres six innings with six strikeouts and no decision, and Mason Miller struck out the side in a perfect ninth to set up the finish. Merrill led off the bottom of the ninth with a single, stole second, and Xander Bogaerts lifted the sacrifice fly that won it — San Diego's seventh walk-off of the season. Wednesday was quieter and just as effective: a 3-1 win behind the bullpen, with Griffin Canning credited with the victory and Miller closing it out for his 28th save. That made five in a row.

Robbie Ray and the Giants End the Streak

Thursday night brought the Giants to Petco Park for the opener of a four-game series — San Diego's last set before the deadline — and San Francisco won it 4-1 behind Robbie Ray. Rookie Daniel Susac did the damage with a two-run homer in the second and a sacrifice fly in the fifth, while the Padres managed only a Bogaerts RBI single off Sears, who took the loss. The defensive highlights were the consolation prize: Merrill ran down a ball in the gap, and Manny Machado threw Rafael Devers out at the plate in the seventh. Streak over, but the week still finished 5-1 through Thursday, and the loss came with an asterisk of sorts — Ray is one of the best rental starters on the market, pitching for his trade value, and he looked like it. Three more games against San Francisco this weekend offer a quick chance to make that one a footnote.

Where the Padres Sit in the NL West and Wild-Card Race

The win streak moved the needle. San Diego entered Thursday at 55-53, reportedly just a game and a half back of the final National League wild-card spot, and sits at 55-54 after the loss — third in the NL West behind the runaway Dodgers (69-40, a 14-game gap nobody in San Diego is thinking about) and a Diamondbacks club hovering around 57-52. The division is out of reach barring a Dodgers collapse of historic proportions, but the wild-card math is very much alive, which is what makes this next stretch so loaded. Two weeks ago this team was 48-48 and drifting; the Padres this week looked like a club that remembered it has Tatis, Merrill, Machado, Bogaerts, and the nastiest late-inning arm in the sport. It helps that the teams around them in the race keep losing — Miami arrived in the wild-card mix and left the weekend riding a losing streak that had reached a dozen games — but the Padres can only beat what's on the schedule, and they went 5-1 against it.

Deadline Watch: From Seller Talk to a Real Decision

Here's where the San Diego Padres week in review gets complicated. In mid-July, with the club sitting at .500, reports out of San Diego indicated the front office was open to moving Mason Miller, Michael King, and Adrian Morejon — Miller as the single most valuable trade chip in baseball given his sub-1.00 ERA and salary control, King and Morejon as pending free agents who could walk for nothing. King's name has continued to surface in trade chatter even as he fronts the rotation with a 3.38 ERA over 22 starts. But the calendar and the standings have shifted under those reports. A team a couple of games out of a playoff spot with this kind of star power doesn't usually sell, and A.J. Preller has never been accused of thinking small in either direction.

The complication is the pitching. Injuries have forced San Diego into what's been described as a pitching-chaos approach — bullpen games, piggybacks, and a Friday starter that was still listed as TBA (likely German Marquez or Randy Vasquez) heading into the weekend. Walker Buehler gets Saturday and King gets Sunday, which means King could make his final start in a Padres uniform roughly 24 hours before the deadline — or his most important one of the stretch run. Either way, the next four days will tell us which team Preller thinks he has.

What's Next for the Padres

The schedule cooperates in one sense: everything through the deadline is against teams the Padres are either chasing or burying.

• Friday, July 31 - Sunday, August 2: vs. San Francisco Giants at Petco Park — Marquez or Vasquez on Friday, Buehler vs. Tyler Mahle on Saturday, King vs. Landen Roupp on Sunday.
• Monday, August 3 - Wednesday, August 5: at Arizona Diamondbacks — a direct shot at the team just ahead of them in the NL West, with the trade deadline expiring Monday while the club is in Phoenix.

So that's the setup for one of the more consequential weekends of the Padres' season: three more against a Giants team that is selling but keeps winning anyway, then a deadline-day series in Arizona with real standings weight. If San Diego banks two or three wins against San Francisco, it's hard to see anything but additions on Monday. If the week's momentum stalls, the Miller and King conversations get loud again in a hurry. Check back on the next San Diego Padres week in review, because by then we'll know exactly which direction Preller jumped — and this week's five-game streak is the reason the question is even interesting.