Bad Feelings Are Justified for Padres

ST. LOUIS —  There are days when baseball managers have a sense of knowing whether their team will win or lose.

It’s difficult to explain, really. There’s just a feeling a manager has on occasion, where he can actually forecast the outcome before the opening pitch.

There obviously are times a manager’s intuition proves wrong, as depositions in the Pete Rose case suggest, but you’d be surprised just how often they’re right.

“There are just games where the vibes are not there,” Padre Manager Jack McKeon said. “The biorhythms are not right. Everything’s messed up.

“There’s nothing you can do, and nothing to stop it, but there are games when you just know this isn’t going to be your night.

“And baby, this was one of them.”

What it was Saturday was a 9-3 loss to the St. Louis Cardinals before 42,270 at Busch Stadium.

You’ve got to understand that McKeon’s premonition was strongly assisted at about 4 p.m. when pitcher Eric Show stepped into his office.

Show, scheduled to start in an hour and a half, told McKeon that he awoke with a bad back. He underwent massages and therapy and even sat in a whirlpool bath. It was of no use. He couldn’t even bend over to touch his toes.

For the first time this season, McKeon was going to have come up with another starter from outside his rotation, and he had 90 minutes to do it. He huddled quickly with pitching coach Pat Dobson, decided that it would be between Pat Clements and Fred Toliver, and opted for Clements because the Cardinals have been susceptible to left-handed pitching.

“I really didn’t have a whole lot of choice,” McKeon said.

No one will ever know just what Show might have accomplished had he pitched Saturday, but the box score forever will show that Clements was not the answer. The Cardinals knocked him out by the fourth inning and put the Padres away two innings later.

It was the Padres’ fifth consecutive defeat at Busch Stadium, and unless they find a way to win today, they’ll have accomplished a feat that no other Padre club has accomplished in their 20-year history:

Being swept for an entire season in St. Louis.

“We’re just not doing anything right,” said Tony Gwynn, the Padre right fielder. “We’re not getting the big hits. We’re not getting the clutch pitching. We’re not even getting the breaks.

“When all those things happen, you can’t be surprised by the results.”

The Padres, led again by Bip Roberts, had nine hits, just one fewer than the Cardinals. They even had one more extra-base hit. But they don’t have pitchers who can hit like the Cardinals’, nor do they an infield the pitchers can depend upon.

You’d have thought the Padres would have learned their lesson Friday night when they were beaten by a 408-foot home run by pitcher Scott Terry. Nope. This time, they intentionally walked Tony Pena to get to starting pitcher Ken Hill, and two pitches later, Hill sent a fastball into left field for a run-scoring single that ignited a five-run second inning.

It was Roberts who helped the Padres to peck away at the Cardinal lead, reducing it to 5-3 in the fourth inning with a run-scoring double. The hit tied Tony Gwynn’s two-week-old club record of reaching base nine consecutive times, but by the time he grounded out in the sixth, the game’s suspense already was over.

The trouble might have been that Roberts wasn’t playing third base this night. He was in left, enabling Tim Flannery to make just his second start since June 11.

The difference was apparent in the fifth. The Cardinals opened the inning with Vince Coleman drawing a walk from Toliver, and Jose Oquendo advancing him to third with his third of four hits.

Ozzie Smith hit a routine grounder to Flannery. As soon as the ball was hit, Flannery said, he was thinking, “Should I go to home to get Coleman, or should I go to second for the double play? Really, I wasn’t sure what I should do.”

It was a decision he never had to make. The ball skipped off the heel of his glove, bouncing away from him and down the left-field line. Coleman scored, Oquendo went to third, and Smith was at second by the time Roberts retrieved the ball. Before Flannery had a chance to fume, Pedro Guerrero hit a line drive to him. Oops. The ball caromed off his glove and rolled into foul territory. Two more runs scored, and Guerrero was at second. Two balls. Two errors.

“I know I’ve made three errors in a game in the minors once, and I think I’ve even made two errors in the same inning,” Flannery said, “but errors on back-to-back plays, uh-uh. I can’t ever remember being that bad.

“You know, during a course of a season, you have parts in winning games, and you have parts in losing games. Well, I’m the one responsible for losing this one. Give me the credit for this loss.”

Actually, someone else already was accepting blame for the Padres’ 42nd defeat at the halfway point of their season. Though he was not a participant in this slapstick affair, Show said he felt responsible simply because he was not on the mound when he should have.

“Right now, it’s very hard to take,” said Show, who had not missed a start since 1986, when he was placed on the 15-day disabled list with elbow tendinitis. “I’m just not used to this. You hate to have someone trying to pick up for you anyway, but when they have to tell a guy he’s starting an hour and a half before game time, that’s really not fair.

“I’m sure it’s perplexing to everyone on the team, anyway. Here I was taking batting practice yesterday and throwing on the side, and now I’m about disabled. How can anyone understand that? I even can’t.”

Show says he expects to be ready in time for his next scheduled start Friday against the Pittsburgh Pirates, but with the nature of back injuries, who knows for sure?

McKeon has his own perplexity with Clements. Is this the Pat Clements who allowed just two hits in 4 1/3 innings Tuesday, when he was the winning pitcher in the Padres’ 5-3, 17-inning victory over the Dodgers? Or is this the Pat Clements who already has bounced around in four different organizations in a three-year career?

“You’ve got me,” McKeon said. “We don’t know who the real one is, but I know we better find out real quick.”

Unfortunately, though, McKeon is beginning to believe that the team he has been seeing the first half of the season might be the same one he’ll be stuck with the second half.

Once again, the Padres failed to obtain a hit in almost every critical situation, leaving 10 men on base Saturday, 21 in the first two games of this series. The Cardinals scored six of their runs with two outs, and their three others on Flannery’s errors.