SAN DIEGO — Charlie Blackmon turned, resigned and offered his back as a sacrifice. You could almost hear him sigh. The Rockies are running to nowhere.
In the fourth inning Saturday night, with two runners on base, Troy Tulowitzki lined a single to right field. Blackmon rounded third base and received a stop sign from his coach. DJ LeMahieu kept chugging from second. And the Rockies had two runners at the same corner.
Blackmon could only give up. Two runners. One base. One ugly out.
The Rockies continued their circus of baserunning at Petco Park and the Padres wrangled two home runs to beat Colorado again, winning 5-4.
“I probably should have checked for Stu when I was rounding second,” LeMahieu said of Stu Cole, the Rockies’ third-base coach. “I was figuring it was a run. I guess Charlie read it as a line drive, and he froze a little bit.”
The last-place Rockies (39-51) fell three games behind the fourth-place Padres (43-49) in the National League West. Colorado is only 2-7 against San Diego this season.
The Rockies also ran into three equally embarrassing outs in the series opener Friday night — including Ben Paulsen, who was thrown out at second base after a pickoff move … to third.
“The guys know what they did wrong,” manager Walt Weiss said Saturday before the Rockies’ latest round of ugly baserunning.
“It’s just a level of awareness and focus when you get on the bases,” Weiss said. “That’s what baserunning is. They’ve been reminded of that. They know what they need to do. We lost a little focus, to be honest.”
Chad Bettis, making his first start of the second half, left after six innings with a 3-2 deficit. He held the Padres to two hits in five innings, including Austin Hedges’ solo home run in the third.
But San Diego bounced Bettis around in the sixth. He worked two quick outs to open the inning, then walked two batters in a row. Both scored on Matt Kemp’s double to center field.
“In the sixth,” Bettis said, “I got a little tired. I couldn’t find the strike zone after we got two outs. That’s unacceptable. That was a pivotal point in the game.”
Said Weiss: “He started throwing some balls in the middle of the plate that inning. That’s usually a sign of fatigue.”
The Rockies erased the Padres’ lead in the seventh inning to get Bettis off the hook. Barnes tripled to right-center to score Paulsen, then Wilin Rosario doubled to score Barnes.
But the Padres scored twice in their half of the seventh after Christian Friedrich walked leadoff hitter Will Venable. Tommy Kahnle then gave up a two-run homer to former Colorado infielder Clint Barmes, who has only three home runs this season — two against the Rockies.
In the eighth inning, after Joaquin Benoit buzzed Tulowitzki with an inside pitch, the Rockies’ all-star shortstop stepped out of the batter’s box and fiddled with his gloves. Fans booed. Tulowitzki then homered to left field on the next pitch. That cut the Padres’ lead to one run.
But San Diego closer Craig Kimbrel struck out the side in the ninth, retiring Paulsen, Nick Hundley and Barnes in order on 13 pitches.
This article was corrected in the online archive to remove reference Brandon Barnes getting picked off. He was caught stealing.
