Rain derails Yu as Padres drop 3rd straight

PHILADELPHIA -- Across 18 seasons in their sunny Southern California home, the Padres have endured a total of six rain delays at Petco Park. On their jaunt through Cincinnati and Philadelphia this week, they’ve been forced to sit through exactly that many -- six hours and 39 minutes spent simply waiting to play baseball.

That’s just fine when you’re winning, and the Padres did just that in the first two games of their road trip. Lately, however, the results haven’t been worth the wait.

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San Diego dropped its third straight on Saturday night, a 4-2 loss to the Phillies at Citizens Bank Park -- a stop-and-start contest featuring two more rain delays. Yu Darvish pitched through one of them and wasn’t particularly sharp on either end of it. The Padres, after scoring twice in the first inning, mustered just two more hits the rest of the way.

“We’ve got to deal with the adversity,” Padres manager Jayce Tingler said. “We’ve still got to play winning baseball, and tonight, we didn’t. We didn’t deserve to win that game.”

Darvish allowed four runs over six innings -- a rough outing that put a serious dent in his All-Star candidacy. The four-time All-Star entered the game squarely on the bubble, with rosters slated to be revealed on Sunday. He saw his ERA jump to 2.65 -- 12th among qualifying starters in the National League.

Darvish said he felt mostly OK on Saturday night, aside from a poor second inning in which he surrendered a pair of loud solo homers on poorly executed first-pitch fastballs.

“That wasn’t the best inning for me, but after the second inning, I felt the ball was coming out of my hand pretty good,” Darvish said in Japanese through an interpreter. “So I felt pretty good. But the thing that gets me is that you obviously have a plan going into the game. I feel like that plan didn’t necessarily work out.”

Manny Machado staked Darvish to a first-inning lead with a two-run homer that accounted for all of the Padres’ offense (perhaps giving Machado’s All-Star candidacy a last-minute jolt). He got an 0-1 sinker over the middle from Phillies right-hander Zach Eflin and sent a missile to straightaway center with a launch angle of only 18 degrees. Somehow, it carried over the 401-foot sign and into the trees that make up the center-field batter’s eye.

After a delay of more than two hours to start the game, the Padres were off and running. Then, suddenly, they weren’t. In the second inning they put two men aboard, but gave away outs on bunt attempts by Wil Myers and Darvish. Myers was clearly bunting for a hit, but he popped it up -- emblematic of the Padres’ poor execution lately with runners on base.

The Phillies tied the game shortly thereafter on homers from Bryce Harper and Rhys Hoskins. Two innings later, the rain returned. Darvish recorded two outs in the fourth inning, then waited through a 45-minute delay before recording the third.

“We were fortunate with it being just 45 minutes or so,” Tingler said. “There comes a time where he can’t go back out there. The good thing is, with Darvish, he’s experienced this before and knows how to stay ready.”

Darvish retreated to the tunnel and threw to catcher Victor Caratini in the batting cage to stay warm.

“The most important thing is not to overthink it,” Darvish said. “Basically, you’re given the ball and told to go.”

For a beleaguered Padres bullpen that has thrown more innings than any other ‘pen in the NL, Darvish’s return was crucial, even if it only lasted a couple of innings. He surrendered two more runs, but pitched better after the delay.

One of those runs scored on Harper’s sacrifice fly in the sixth. Darvish was hardly at fault for the other. He got Rhys Hoskins to hit a routine popup in foul ground next to first base, where Eric Hosmer lost the baseball in the hazy sky. It fell mere steps in front of the Padres’ first baseman, who had turned his back toward the outfield, asking for help.

San Diego -- which rallied from a three-run deficit against the Phillies' bullpen on Friday night -- wouldn’t threaten after that. Still, Tingler refused to use the toll of six rain delays in five days as any semblance of an excuse.

“Both teams had to go through it,” Tingler said. “Of course it’s not ideal. It’s certainly not ideal, coming off a trip where we’re having those. I don’t know if we take it for granted being in San Diego, but it’s obviously something you never have to worry about being home. … Quite frankly, we’ve got to deal with it.”