San Diego Padres manager Craig Stammen cracked a joke about a lack of hitting on Saturday night, when his team managed only two hits in a 2-0 shutout of the visiting Athletics.

“If you want to put it into football terms, we got our safety and got out of there,” he said.

Stammen will hope for a bit more offense from his team, as well as a series sweep, on Sunday afternoon when the Padres wrap up their weekend series against the A’s.

All jokes aside, winning without much offense has been the norm for San Diego much of this season. The Padres are last in the majors in batting average (.219) and are tied for last with San Francisco in on-base percentage (.293). San Diego stands 27th in slugging percentage (.365) and 24th in runs (209).

Yet the Padres are 11 games over .500 and have won six of their past eight games, mainly because they seem to score runs when absolutely necessary. And San Diego rarely gives up a late-inning lead because of its high-leverage arms in the bullpen.

Stammen said the Padres will figure things out offensively, citing the eight walks they drew Saturday night as proof they are taking the proper approach at the plate.

“We celebrate the small wins, and if we have enough of those, it’s going to turn into big things,” he said. “Any time we can find a way to hand a lead to our bullpen, it’s a good day for us.”

Having right-hander Michael King (4-2, 2.31 ERA) on the mound typically gives San Diego a chance to win, and he will start against the A’s on Sunday. King excelled in a 1-0 shutout of the Los Angeles Dodgers on Monday, firing seven scoreless innings and allowing just four hits while walking two and striking out nine.

In three career games against the Athletics, two of them starts, King is 1-0 with a 3.75 ERA. The win, 5-4, occurred on April 7, 2025, in West Sacramento, Calif.

Opposing King will be right-hander Luis Medina, who’s 1-1 with a 2.41 ERA in 14 relief appearances. This will be the first start since 2024 for Medina, who fired two scoreless innings Wednesday night at the Los Angeles Angels in a 6-5, 10-inning win for San Diego.

In his only previous game against San Diego, Medina worked 3 2/3 innings of relief in 2023, striking out seven and walking four while allowing two hits and an earned run.

This will likely be a second straight game in which the A’s bullpen does most of the work. J.T. Ginn left after only 2 1/3 innings Saturday night because he had thrown 73 pitches, given up two runs, walked six and hit a batter, forcing relievers to record 17 outs.

The bullpen gave up just two hits during its lengthy stint to keep the Athletics in contention, but the A’s couldn’t come up with timely hits for a second straight game. They were 0-for-7 with runners in scoring position and stranded eight runners.

But San Diego did see Nick Kurtz tie Rickey Henderson for the third-longest on-base streak in franchise history. Kurtz’s first-inning single marked the 46th straight game he has reached base. If he makes it 47 on Sunday, he’ll tie Jimmie Foxx for second. Mark McGwire leads with a 62-game streak.

“Every day is a new day for him,” Athletics manager Mark Kotsay said of Kurtz. “He’s not a hitter that chases hits. He’s a hitter that takes what’s given to him.”

–Field Level Media

Three-time All-Star second baseman Ketel Marte has spent much of this season underperforming with the bat.

But the Arizona Diamondbacks star is on a hot streak and has increased his batting average 42 points in just seven games entering Sunday afternoon’s contest against the Colorado Rockies in Phoenix.

Marte went 3-for-4 with a two-run homer to lead Arizona to a 5-4 victory over the Rockies on Saturday night. The Diamondbacks improved to 2-1 in the four-game series that will conclude on Sunday.

Marte’s homer came in the fourth inning, when he slammed a first-pitch fastball from Michael Lorenzen 424 feet to right field.

That was the signature swing of the night as Marte improved to 14-for-28 (.500) during the seven-game stretch. He has three homers, three doubles, nine RBIs and has scored nine times while lifting his batting average to a season-best .251.

Arizona manager Torey Lovullo said Marte is locked in and not swinging at pitches out of the zone.

“When he’s stubborn, you can see these results; that’s what happens,” Lovullo said.

Not surprisingly, the Diamondbacks are 6-1 during Marte’s hot streak.

Nolan Arenado helped the Arizona cause with a two-run double against his former club on Saturday. Arenado has 11 extra-base hits (nine doubles, two homers) this month.

Left-handed-hitting TJ Rumfield homered to left-center as part of a 3-for-4 night for the Rockies, who have dropped 10 of their past 14 games.

Rumfield’s blast ended a power drought that saw Colorado match a franchise record by going seven games without a homer. The Rockies previously had seven-game outages in 2007 and 2014.

Troy Johnston had two hits and an RBI to raise his batting average to .323, and Hunter Goodman also had two hits for Colorado.

Rumfield, who is batting .289, leads major league rookies with 54 hits.

“TJ put up four solid at-bats on a night in which the ball definitely wasn’t flying,” Rockies manager Warren Schaeffer said. “To get it the other way, that’s real strength. TJ’s had a solid approach since the beginning of the year.”

Colorado’s Jake McCarthy, who spent the past five seasons with Arizona, is just 1-for-13 in the series.

Rockies infielder Willi Castro was scratched prior to Saturday’s game due to low-back tightness. Castro told reporters he thinks he’ll miss two to three more games.

Arizona placed left fielder Lourdes Gurriel Jr. on the 10-day injured list Saturday because of a hamstring strain. He was hurt during the sixth inning of Friday’s game while making a sliding catch of Rumfield’s fly to shallow left.

The Diamondbacks were mindful that Gurriel returned to action last month after a right ACL tear sustained last September. He was back roughly 7 1/2 months after being hurt.

“He probably would have gotten better in three or four days, but we wanted to make sure that we give him enough time, given what he’s worked through, and put his body through to get back to this point,” Lovullo said.

Rockies left-hander Jose Quintana (2-2, 4.08 ERA) will oppose Diamondbacks right-hander Ryne Nelson (1-3, 5.19) on Sunday.

Quintana, 37, beat the Texas Rangers 7-6 on Monday when he gave up three runs and seven hits over 5 2/3 innings. He has struggled against the Diamondbacks, going 1-3 with a 6.85 ERA in nine career starts.

Arenado is a lowly 3-for-26 against Quintana despite hitting two homers, and Corbin Carroll is just 1-for-10 vs. the left-hander. Marte is 5-for-14 with a homer.

Nelson is winless in seven starts since defeating the New York Mets on April 8. He is 1-1 with an 8.80 ERA in three career starts vs. Colorado.

The Rockies’ Ezequiel Tovar is 3-for-7 against Nelson.

–Field Level Media

The Los Angeles Angels will try to finish their first three-game series sweep of the season on Sunday when they close their 10-game homestand with a contest against the Texas Rangers in Anaheim, Calif.

The Angels, just 8-24 over their past 32 games, followed a 9-6 win over Jacob deGrom in Friday’s series opener with a 5-2 victory against Nathan Eovaldi on Saturday.

A win on Sunday would match the longest winning streak of the season for Los Angeles, which won three games in a row from April 4-6.

You have to go back to Aug. 11-13, 2025, to find the last time the Angels swept a three-game series. The opponent was the eventual World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers.

Left-handers Reid Detmers (1-5, 5.07 ERA) of the Angels and MacKenzie Gore (3-4, 4.78) are the scheduled starters on Sunday.

Detmers is 3-3 with a 4.43 ERA in 16 career appearances (10 starts) against the Rangers, and Gore is 0-1 with a 2.35 ERA in two career starts against the Angels.

On Saturday, Mike Trout hit a two-run homer in the first inning — his 13th homer of the season and the 417th of his illustrious Angels career. It also was the 108th first-inning homer of his career, which ranks seventh all-time. He needs two more to pass Frank Thomas for No. 6 and four to push Ken Griffey Jr. out of the No. 5 spot.

“He usually comes after me, and I was just trying to be aggressive and got a good pitch to hit,” Trout said of Eovaldi, who had allowed just one run in his three previous starts covering a span of 22 innings.

Angels manager Kurt Suzuki was pleased with the first two games of the series.

“It was good team performances the last couple of nights,” he said. “Timely hitting, pitchers making pitches to get out of innings, and the energy is really good. It’s fun to be a part of when you’re doing something like this on a nightly basis. I know it’s only been two nights, (but) it’s a good reminder of how we can play and, when things are going good for us, how good we can be.”

Texas, which fell to 3-5 on its nine-game road trip, left 11 men on base Saturday. The Rangers were 2-11 with runners in scoring position.

“We just left guys on base all night,” manager Skip Schumaker said. “Bases loaded three times. Tough not to get any runs across there.”

The Rangers, already without shortstop Corey Seager and outfielder Wyatt Langford because of injuries, took third baseman Josh Jung out of the game with left- shoulder soreness after he dived for a ground ball by Zach Neto in the third inning. Jung had labrum surgery on the same shoulder in 2022, but he appears to have escaped injury.

“It scared me more than anything because I had that labrum tear in ’22,” Jung said. “I hadn’t had any pain or weird sensation in that area in a while. So it freaked me out a little bit. I think it’s more precautionary. All the tests are negative, so I think I’m all right.”

Gore was removed from his most recent start Monday after one inning at Colorado due to left lat tightness, but an MRI of the area came back negative. He had allowed one run on three hits in eight innings in his previous start, a 7-4 victory over Arizona on May 12.

–Field Level Media