Padres Daily: Beating the weather; Weathers’ return; Profar weathering slump

Good morning from Cincinnati,

Phew!

The rain slowed. The grounds crew was out working on draining the warning track. And by the time the Padres’ buses pulled from Great American Ball Park, the rain had stopped.

But the call had been made made, at 11:24 p.m. ET, to end last night’s game after five innings with the Padres as the 7-5 winners.

“The way the forecast looked, and with all the rain that had fallen, we wouldn’t have been able to start the game until around 1 a.m.,” Reds manager David Bell said. “It was determined that it was too late to start a game.”

The Padres have been through enough scheduling quirks and long games this year. They dodged another challenge last night. Playing a game that ends at 3 o’clock in the morning is difficult to recover from. It’s the kind of thing that catches up to a body the next day or the next week. And who knows how many pitchers the Padres would have had to use after their bullpen covered nine innings Tuesday.

“I feel that was the best decision, both sides, just because there’s real effects if you’re having to play at 1, 2, 3 in the morning,” Padres manager Jayce Tingler said.

They may have to endure another prolonged evening before their flight to Philadelphia.

After a 52-minute delay before the start of Tuesday’s game and a 37-minute delay before last night’s first pitch, the forecast calls for rain into the early evening tonight.

Whatever happens, it won’t top the five days the Padres spent here in September 2018, enduring more than five hours of rain delays over the course of a four-game series. And that total didn’t include the start time of one of the games being moved back three hours to let a storm pass. Another game had the start time moved up three hours to beat a storm. And one of the games was called after seven innings, the last shortened game the Padres played before last night.

“It seemed like it was about a week long,” Eric Hosmer said after hitting a game-winning home run in the ninth inning of the finale.

Returning home

Longtime Reds employees will see something they didn’t expect when Padres rookie Ryan Weathers takes the mound tonight.

“When I saw he got drafted as a pitcher, I was like, ‘What?’ ” said Rob Butcher, the Reds’ Vice President of Media Relations.

Those who recall Weathers from when his father, David, pitched for the Reds remember a young boy hitting balls pitched by his dad.

“They’d stand out there in the grass,” Butcher said, pointing to just beyond second base. “(David Weathers) would have a bucket of balls. You’d look out there and (Ryan) would be hitting bombs and you’d be like, ‘How old is that kid?’ He’d be launching balls off the batter’s eye. We all thought he was going to be a hitter, not a pitcher.”

Ryan was five years old when his dad joined the Reds in 2005 and, according to Butcher and others, was at the ballpark all the time until David Weathers departed for Milwaukee in August of 2009.

“Players’ kids come and go,” Butcher said. “But you could you ask anyone in that clubhouse, and they’ll remember David Weathers’ kid. He was always here.”

Ryan Weathers arrived in Cincinnati last night. He will be officially recalled today.

Happy soon?

Jurickson Profar seems to always be smiling. But it’s been more difficult lately.

“A little bit,” Profar said as the smile slipped from his face. “You always want to do good. But when you’re not doing good, that’s when you have to keep pushing. You can’t get down.”

Profar, who started at first base and went 0-for-2 with a walk last night, is batting just .111 in 45 at-bats since June 4. And that is after he singled Sunday and doubled Tuesday.

What helps him and the Padres maintain optimism is that Profar has hardly changed as a batter during this slump. He remains among the Padres’ most disciplined hitters. In this run of paltry production, he has chased just 15 of the 97 pitches he has seen outside the strike zone. That includes one of the past 20.

“Things are not going my way right now,” he said. “The thing that’s weird is I’m still feeling good in the box. I just need to find a way to keep going through it. I know it’s going to turn. … I’m not helping, but I’m very positive it will turn. A month from now, nobody is going to remember I was struggling.”

Tidbits

(mlb.com)

A mother’s love

One thing Padres players have talked about for months is how “sneaky funny” Ha-seong Kim is.

They’re right.

At the end of a conversation yesterday about his recent improvement, we discussed his home run against Clayton Kershaw last week.

The Dodgers are popular in Korea, and his mother would often watch their games. A particular left-handed pitcher was her favorite.

“My mom, she loves Clayton Kershaw,” Kim said. “She probably loves him more than me. We always talked about me one day playing him. It happened. I hit a home run off him. She cried a little bit.”

All right, that’s it for me.

Talk to you tomorrow.