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Szczur restores order, lifts Padres past Giants in wacky extra innings affair

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Some prefer the Cobb, others prefer the egg. On Friday night at AT&T Park, fans had no choice. They were treated to a large helping of Szczur salad.

In the top half of the 11th inning, Padres’ outfielder Matt Szczur (pronounced Caesar) looped his fourth hit of the game over Giants’ third baseman Eduardo Nunez to plate Hunter Renfroe and give San Diego a 10-9 lead and propel his team to a 12-9 victory.

Sczcur entered the ballgame in the fifth inning on a double switch, and proceeded to collect a career-high four hits while finishing a home run shy of the cycle in one of the wildest, wackiest affairs the division foes have played in recent memory.

After falling behind 6-2, San Diego rallied to take a 9-6 lead into the ninth inning, but closer Brandon Maurer failed to protect the lead.

The Giants and Padres had already played for three hours and 54 minutes when Conor Gillaspie came to the plate in the bottom of the ninth to pinch hit for Steven Okert, and Gillaspie represented the tying run. Surely, though, Maurer would find a way to secure the final out of the game, right?

Instead, the dozens of fans remaining from a capacity crowd of over 41,000 watched Gillaspie yank a two-run blast over the brick wall in right field to tie the game, and send San Francisco and San Diego into extra innings.

“We couldn’t have had a bigger hit than what we got from Conor,” Giants’ manager Bruce Bochy said. “Tied the ballgame, just couldn’t quite put it away.”

Eventually, though, Szczur would restore order to the world against Giants’ reliever George Kontos, as San Diego continued its dominant ways against San Francisco with an extra innings win.

Keep in mind, the San Diego Padres are not a good baseball team. But when they play the San Francisco Giants, they look like the National League All-Stars. Particularly when Hector Sanchez is in the lineup. On Friday, Sanchez, who spent five seasons with the Giants, launched a home run, a double and a single and played a key role in the middle innings, while Szczur lifted the team late.

Even though San Diego improved to just 42-54 after its second win in two nights, the Padres are now 8-3 against the Giants this season, and have won 16 of the past 21 matchups between the two sides dating back to last year’s All-Star break.

After scoring the game’s first four runs, and mounting a three-run comeback in the ninth inning, the Giants still found a way to lose to the Padres. Such is life these days.

“It’s hard to sum up, really,” Bochy said. “We couldn’t have a better start, it’s one of our best starts. In the first inning, you score four runs and you know, Shark, he just didn’t have his best stuff tonight.”

While the Padres began the season expecting to finish at the bottom of the National League West, the Giants wasted little time crashing and burning, falling 20 games below .500 by the middle of June. To put it mildly, both teams are largely irrelevant right now, but at least for the next week and a half, important eyes will be trained on certain players’ every move.

Though San Diego and San Francisco entered Friday’s game a combined 36 games under .500, scouts from contending ballclubs were on hand to file reports on whether any of the two teams’ assets were worth picking off at the trade deadline. So while a game featuring two teams in a heated battle for fourth-place might not move the needle for many on a mid-summer Friday night, the pitching matchup between Trevor Cahill and Jeff Samardzija, a pair of trade candidates, kept the game in the news cycle.

Five days after Cahill outdueled Samardzija at Petco Park in San Diego, the two hurlers squared off again at AT&T Park on Friday, with Samardzija hoping to exact revenge after San Diego touched him up for seven earned runs in his previous stint.

On the other hand, Cahill stymied the Giants last Sunday, allowing just a single earned run in 6 and 2/3 innings of work. But on Friday evening, San Francisco was determined to author a different tale.

Thanks to first inning RBIs from Brandon Belt, Brandon Crawford and Hunter Pence, the Giants jumped out to a 4-0 lead before Cahill even had the chance to record the second out of the inning.

The four first inning runs mark 10 percent of San Francisco’s total first inning output for the season, as the Giants have often fallen behind opponents at the beginning of games.

In the third inning, Padres’ center fielder Franchy Cordero launched a triple to dead center field that caromed off the front edge of the top of the wall, and eventually scored on a Cahill groundout to cut the Giants’ deficit to 4-1. However, San Francisco added on with Pence’s second RBI of the game in the bottom half of the frame, and appeared destined to maintain control of the game.

In the fourth inning, though, Sanchez clobbered a solo home run over the center field wall, recording  his fifth home run, and 10th hit, in 20 career at-bats against the Giants. The towering shot off of Sanchez’s bat was the second time he’s taken Samardzija deep in the past week, as his three-run homer at Petco Park on Sunday set the tone for the Padres’ offensive outburst.

“They’re all different guys,” Samardzija said of San Diego’s lineup. “Mark (McGwire) has done a great job over there with giving these guys confidence to go up there to the plate and swing like they’re supposed to, like big leaguers. That whole lineup has gone up there with a lot of confidence and been all over the plate looking for a fastball and they hit the ball down really well, which is tough because that’s where you want to be as a pitcher.”

Remarkably, the former Giants’ catcher continued to pound Giants’ pitchers, as he poked an RBI double down the left field line in his next at-bat that cut San Francisco’s lead to 6-4. By the time Sanchez hit in the seventh, it was a wonder Bochy still wanted to pitch to him, but Sanchez slapped a single off of reliever Hunter Strickland.

Speaking of Strickland, it was he who surrendered the go-ahead run for the Padres in the seventh, as Wil Myers smashed the seventh pitch of his at-bat into the left field seats to give San Diego its first lead of the game. After dropping his earned run average to 1.85 thanks to eight consecutive scoreless outings, Strickland gave up six hits and three earned runs in 1 and 1/3 innings Friday, allowing San Diego to take the lead and add on insurance runs that would prove invaluable.

Though Gillaspie’s sixth career pinch-hit home run tied the game for the Giants, San Diego and Szczur, who was cool as ranch dressing, wouldn’t be denied, regardless of how long the game took.

“Long game, long innings, it was a grind all night,” Bochy said. “But for our guys to come back in the ninth inning it was quite a comeback there. It was a shame we couldn’t find a way to win that ballgame.”