The Padres turned Padres Vs. Giants into a runaway by the end of the third inning Friday, building a 7-1 lead that left the Giants digging out of a hole before the game had settled in. Anthony Molina struck out two hitters with his four-seam fastball in the first, but the inning after that opened the door and the Padres kept walking through it.
Jackson Merrill started the second with a ground-rule double, Dustin Harris scored him on an elevated fastball and Freddy Fermin drove in Harris from first base. In the third, Jake Cronenworth lashed a 107 MPH single off a change-up and Luis Campusano followed with a double that brought him home. Seven Padres reached base in that inning and five scored, a burst that made the early scoreboard look final long before Friday was over.
The search interest around this matchup was not just about the score. Robbie Ray made his first start against the Giants since the trade, and he answered with one run on two hits over four innings while walking one batter. For a pitcher who had opened his season with a 3.42 ERA over five starts, the outing looked like a reset after an August stretch that had gone sideways, with 16 walks and 19 strikeouts over 26.1 innings.
Then the game tilted again in the fifth. Andrew Knizner opened with a double, Andrew Koss and Jonah Cox drew back-to-back walks to load the bases, and Rafael Devers came up with the bases full as the Giants tried to turn a buried start into something more. Ray had already held the line through four innings, but that sequence threatened to erase the calm he had built and showed why the Padres and the Giants still had unsettled business after the early damage.
What mattered most by then was simple: the Giants had already been pushed into a deep enough hole that any comeback would have had to begin immediately. The scoreboard told that story in the third inning, and the fifth only sharpened the question of whether the Giants could do more than load the bases before the night slipped away.
