Padres Lose as Gwynn Can’t Get Hit He Needs

PITTSBURGH — Riding the 15-game whirl with Tony Gwynn:

It is Wednesday night in Three Rivers Stadium against the Pittsburgh Pirates and veteran pitcher Bob Walk. Gwynn’s hands are hurting. He didn’t take batting practice because of the rain. He hasn’t played much of anything all day except cards.

First inning: RBI double.

Third inning: infield single.

Sixth inning: triple and run scored.

Had enough? Unfortunately for Gwynn and his ability to sleep Wednesday night, there was more.

There remained an eighth inning, with Gwynn batting and the Padres trailing, 3-2. This time, after all that Gwynn has done over the past three weeks, all that was needed was for him to move a runner from second to third.

With Roberto Alomar on second and none out, all the Padres needed was a sacrifice bunt or a fly ball to right to put Alomar in position for an easy score.

Gwynn couldn’t do it. He flied out to left. And the Padres couldn’t win, losing by that 3-2 margin to drop their second consecutive game to the pennant-contending Pirates.

Thus, although Wednesday night continued to show Gwynn’s bluster, it also showed his burden.

When you play for a young and impatient team, often the biggest hit is the one you don’t get.

“It was a really good night,” Gwynn said glumly. “And then that .”

He looked upset. Other Padres blew six other chances with runners in scoring position, all on grounders and strikeouts, and Gwynn looked upset. His face was down, his smile twisted.

This was a night on which he increased his hitting streak to 15 games and climbed above the .300 mark for the first time this season, to .303. During the streak, he has hit .508 (32 for 63) with multiple hits in 12 of those games.

Fifteen games ago, he was hitting .246. Today he is among the league’s top 10.

Yet he said this: “I knew what I had to do, and I didn’t do it. I’m not going to beat my head against the wall, but really . . . “

Alomar led off the eighth against a tiring Walk with a a lead-off double. In came reliever Bob Kipper, and up stepped Gwynn, who wasn’t really even thinking about becoming the first Padre in history to hit for the cycle (single, double, triple, homer) because he felt his sixth-inning triple may have been ruled a double when it was bobbled by right fielder Darnell Coles.

“I wasn’t even sure I had a chance at the cycle,” Gwynn said.

He was thinking about a discussion he had just had with Manager Jack McKeon. The obvious play would be to order Gwynn to bunt, but McKeon has been around long enough to know that you had better not need your job very badly if you order a .500 hitter to bunt.

The next best thing would be to order a fly ball to right field, but left-handed-hitting Gwynn has had trouble pulling the ball off Kipper.

That left one option. Gwynn said he would try to get a base hit. McKeon said fine.

“He’s hitting the ball much too good to have him bunt, and he was uncomfortable trying to pull it,” McKeon said. “Geez, he’s been hitting the ball so good, I said, great, I’ll take a single to left field.”

“I wanted one crack at it,” Gwynn said. “If I didn’t hit his first pitch, I was going to bunt, but I wanted one shot at hitting it to left field.”

He got his pitch, he hit it . . . but he got under it. He lofted it to R.J. Reynolds in left field, and Alomar stuck to second base like a tobacco stain.

In came reliever Jim Gott, who, after striking out Keith Moreland, allowed an infield single off his glove to John Kruk. If Alomar had been on third, the single would have scored him.

As it was, it just moved him to third, where he was stranded by Benito Santiago’s strikeout.

“I like our chances if I get that guy to third,” Gwynn said. “You hate to squander opportunities.

“I could have bunted and gotten him over, but you hate to give up an out. And I have been hitting the ball so good. I just thought . . . “

McKeon hopes Gwynn keeps on thinking and doesn’t fret over this. On a night when they dropped to 4-3 on this 11-game trip--facing the final four games in Chicago, where they haven’t won in two years--it’s the team’s other hitters he says should worry.

“We had more chances tonight . . . it’s the same thing every night,” McKeon said in some of his toughest comments this season. “One hit wins a game. I think we get more hits this year and we win 10 more games.

“We have to start using a little intelligence at the plate. We aren’t being selective. I guess some of these guys have to fail X amount of times before they finally wake up and realize why they are .230 or .240 hitters.”

McKeon, who team is second in the league in one-run games (30) and has lost 16 of them mostly because of lack of clutch hitting, is perturbed enough to call a meeting.

Not a big meeting, of course. Just a lot of little one-on-ones. And though not with Gwynn, just about everybody who bats behind him.

“When you get to the bottom half of our lineup, you’re in trouble,” McKeon said. “I think it’s time to have a little review, some little meetings.

“We’re getting guys up there, ahead in the count 3 and 1, and expect they will automatically see a strike. The guys throw a sinker at the knees, and they are swinging and they ground out. Maybe we’re going to have to put the take sign on more of our guys.”

Not counting the pitcher, the bottom half Wednesday was Kruk, Santiago, Chris Brown and Garry Templeton. The real culprit was Santiago, who, besides his eighth-inning strikeout, also grounded out on Walk’s first pitch with two runners on base in the first.

Playing a larger role in Wednesday’s struggle was Moreland, who grounded out with a runner on third in the first, grounded into a double play in the third and then struck out in the eighth.

After the Padres scored just one run on Gwynn’s double in the first, starter Dennis Rasmussen allowed the Pirates to take a 3-1 lead in the fourth on a two-run double by Junior Ortiz. The Padres came back on Moreland’s RBI grounder in the sixth, but then Brown left Santiago on second base with a groundout to end that inning, and all that was left was the eighth.

The game ended with pinch-hitter Tim Flannery striking out looking at three pitches and the Pirates pulling to within a game of the New York Mets in the National League East.