Gavin Sheets launched a game-ending three-run homer Friday night and the San Diego Padres walked off the visiting Colorado Rockies for the second straight game, prevailing 5-2.
Jackson Merrill started the winning rally with a leadoff single off Juan Mejia (0-2). Manny Machado drew a walk and Xander Bogaerts, who cracked a walk-off grand slam on Thursday in the 12th inning, advanced Merrill to third with a fly ball to deep right.
Sheets then crushed a 434-foot bomb to right-center, his second homer of the game and season, to clinch San Diego’s sixth win in seven games.
Mason Miller (1-0) struck out the side in the ninth for the second straight night. He has fanned 19 hitters in 7 1/3 innings. Dating back to last year, Miller has authored 28 2/3 consecutive scoreless innings. In that span, he has permitted four hits and nine walks while fanning 45.
The Rockies evened the score with a pair of two-out runs in the eighth inning. Pinch hitter Hunter Goodman slashed a single to left-center that scored Brenton Doyle, who had singled and moved to third on two groundouts. Goodman reached second on Tyler Freeman’s single and scored on Jordan Beck’s single to right.
Colorado’s tying rally in the eighth left both starters with no-decisions. Rockies right-hander Tomoyuki Sugano tossed six innings, allowing four hits and two runs with no walks and three strikeouts.
San Diego’s Walker Buehler needed only 68 pitches to fire six scoreless innings, permitting three hits and walking none while fanning four. He was in line for his first win with the Padres after San Diego broke a scoreless tie with two runs in the fifth.
Sugano gave up an American League-leading 33 homers in his first big-league season with the Baltimore Orioles last year, and the long ball got him in this one. He left a cutter over the middle and Sheets walloped it an estimated 416 feet to right-center for a leadoff homer in the fifth.
Two batters later, Luis Campusano jumped on a hanging splitter and launched it an estimated 396 feet over the wall in left-center for his first homer of the season.
