Padres spark another comeback to rally past Phillies and tie NLCS

It was always about the payoff in the playoffs.

And on a hot October Wednesday afternoon when it appeared it had been blooped and bumbled away, the guys who became Padres in August came through.

“It’s pretty special for us,” outfielder Juan Soto said. “We are really new in this city, so we are just letting the city get to know us and see what we’ve got and what we bring to the table.”

The trade deadline pickups picked themselves up and propelled the Padres to an 8-5 victory over the Philadelphia Phillies at Petco Park that evened the National League Championship Series at one game apiece.

Game 3 is scheduled for 4:37 p.m. PT Friday in Philadelphia.

With their comeback victory Wednesday, the Padres won’t have to try to become the first team to win a seven-game LCS after losing the first two games at home.

“You have to win four games to win the series,” Padres manager Bob Melvin said. “But you go into their place, which is probably going to be as spirited as our place is, and you go down 2-0, that would be quite an uphill battle. So 1-1 feels a lot better.”

It also felt better to finally get some real production from the middle of the order and from players who had not been producing nearly enough.

Josh Bell, Brandon Drury and Soto, the latter two having contributed to a messy second inning that had the Padres down 4-0, drove in six of the Padres’ seven runs that flipped a four-run deficit into a three-run lead between the second and fifth innings.

“It’s huge,” Drury said. “Whatever we can do to help the team win, that’s all that matters at the end of the day. So if we can all kind of get going here at the same time it could be pretty special.”

Drury’s home run leading off the bottom of the second began the comeback, and his two-run single broke a 4-4 tie in the fifth inning. Bell homered a pitch after Drury in the second and grounded an RBI single to right field three pitches after Drury’s single in the fifth. Soto’s RBI double, which followed an RBI single Austin Nola hit off his brother Aaron, had tied the score.

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Six of the Padres’ eight runs were scored off Aaron Nola, who previously had given up only one unearned run in 122/3 innings this postseason. The seventh run came against former Padres reliever Brad Hand, who relieved Nola and hit Jake Cronenworth before surrendering the singles by Drury and Bell. Manny Machado’s solo homer off David Robertson in the seventh provided the Padres’ final run.

The Phillies won 2-0 on Tuesday with two home runs and with Zack Wheeler and two relievers holding the Padres to one hit.

“Responding in the postseason is a crazy experience,” Bell said. “Coming back after last night, Yu [Darvish] pitched a helluva game and we couldn’t respond for him. So it was huge for us to be able to do that tonight.”

The Padres have scored in only four of their last 28 innings, but two of those have been five-run innings. The other was in the seventh Saturday, as the Padres came back to beat the Dodgers 5-3 and win the NL Division Series.

“Something we’ve shown here in the postseason, we have the ability to put up a crooked number,” Melvin said. “Just not scratching one across the board.”

The Padres got five innings from Blake Snell on Wednesday and got him the win when they scored their runs while he was the pitcher of record.

“My whole goal is to try to beat Nola,” Snell said. “I knew it was going to be tough because I know how good he is, but your goal is to always try to outlast their starter, and if you do that, usually you set your team up for a chance to win most of the time. I think you just focus on what I can actually control, what I need to do to set our team up to have our bullpen strong and healthy and not put those innings on those guys.”

Nick Martinez gave up a double to Bryce Harper to start the sixth before retiring the next six batters. Robert Suarez gave up a leadoff homer to Rhys Hoskins and then a single by J.T. Realmuto in the eighth before getting out of the inning with help from a double play. Josh Hader struck out the side in the ninth, giving him a postseason record eight straight strikeouts over his last three outings.

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