WEST SACRAMENTO — The strong scent of cow pasture rode in on the afternoon breeze.
The wind had vanished by game time, and the usual ballpark smells wafted throughout Sutter Health Park, hard on the shore of the Sacramento River with the Tower Bridge, the 16-story Holiday Inn and the very few taller buildings that make up the skyline of California’s capital city.
“It’s a baseball stadium,” Padres manager Mike Shildt said Monday afternoon. “We’re gonna go play baseball.”
That it is, and that they did.
The Padres did not play all that well at times, though there was the big-league defensive play Manny Machado made and Fernando Tatis Jr.s’ home run that sailed out of the minor-league ballpark and catcher Elías Díaz did throw out a runner at second base in the eighth inning.
But they did enough to beat the Athletics 5-4 in a Major League Baseball game in a small ballpark with hardly a second deck, a grassy knoll dotted with fans on folding chairs and blankets wrapped around half the outfield and the visiting clubhouse beyond the outfield wall. A crowd of 9,502 filled the place to a little less than three-quarters of its capacity. It seemed half of them were Padres fans, and they seemed delighted by some plays that would hardly create a murmur in a major league ballpark with four times as many people.
“It’s a Triple-A ballpark,” Tatis said with a smile. “That’s what it is.”
Indeed. He sat inside a cramped clubhouse on a chair emblazoned with the name of the resident Sacramento River Cats with which the Athletics are sharing the ballpark for at least the next two seasons.
“They’ve done a great job with the clubhouse and everything and getting the field ready,” Jake Cronenworth said. “Obviously, a unique experience. It’s just very different.”
For the record, manager Mike Shildt, who spent a decade in the minor leagues, was effusive in his praise for the Sutter Health Park and the hospitality.
And really, since the Padres are just visiting for three days, a major league game in a minor-league park is arguably nothing more than a little odd.
Wins and losses count the same in the standings, as it did when the A’s played in Oakland all those years and as it will when they make their planned move to Las Vegas in 2027 or ‘28 or whenever.
To that end, the Padres improved to 9-2, putting them atop the National League West, giving them the best record in the major leagues and matching the best 11-game start in franchise history achieved twice before — in 1984 and 1998, the Padres’ only two seasons to end with a trip to the World Series.
“It was all what we were talking about in spring training,” Tatis said of getting off to a fast start. “… I feel like we can do anything that we want. Now we saw we can do it, so now it’s our job to maintain it.”
It was the work of the back end of the Padres’ bullpen that finished off a game that was in doubt throughout despite the Padres taking a 3-0 lead in the top half of the first inning for a second straight day.
Adrián Morejón, Jeremiah Estrada, Jason Adam and Robert Suarez have only pitched in wins this season.
Successive doubles by Luis Arraez and Machado and a two-run homer by Cronenworth is what gave the Padres their three runs at the start.
This time, even though their starting pitcher took a circuitous route to his three outs, the Padres held that lead after the entire inning had been played.
Michael King threw just five strikes among his 13 pitches and walked two batters in the first inning. But he got his three outs on a total of three pitches, on a double play following the first walk and a fly ball to center field following the second walk.
After King created some extra work for himself in the first, a Cronenworth error created some extra work for him in the second inning. He left a runner at second that inning, and was given a 4-0 lead to protect in the third when Arraez singled and scored from first on another Machado double.
He did, barely.
The A’s got their first run on Tyler Soderstrom’s homer lined over the right field wall in the third inning.
In the fourth, two infield singles, a line drive single and a double got them two more runs.
King was at 81 pitches after four innings, a precarious situation for the Padres, who got eight total innings from their starters in three games in Chicago before coming here.
But he got through the fifth on five pitches, thanks in part to Machado backhanding a 105 mph grounder on the grass at third, rising from one knee, spinning 180 degrees and throwing to first for the third out.
An inning later, only a two-out single that caromed off Machado’s glove kept King from getting through a full six.
Shildt went to Morejón to face Lawrence Butler, the Athletics’ left-handed-hitting lead-off man, and Morejón struck out Butler on three pitches.
Athletics ace Luis Severino pretty much cruised after Machado’s double with one out in the third. He retired 13 of the next 15 batters before Tatis walked to the plate with two outs in the seventh.
That is when Severino hung a slider that Tatis smacked 406 feet and off the top of a tall building that helps form the outer edge of the park.
That gave the Padres a 5-3 lead.
In the bottom of the seventh, with Estrada in for the Padres, Soderstrom’s second home run of the game and sixth of the season got the A’s back to within a run.
Adam yielded a one-out single to Jacob Wilson before Díaz nabbed pinch-runner Max Schuemann trying to steal second and Adam struck out Seth Brown.
Suarez worked a 1-2-3 for his National League-leading fifth save of the season.
This story was updated with postgame quotes and further reporting.
Originally Published: April 7, 2025 at 9:25 PM PDT
