Baseball does love a reunion angle, and Robbie Ray gets one right away when the Padres open their series against the Giants at Oracle Park. But San Diego isn’t showing up for the sentimentality. It needs Ray to find the zone and keep the game from turning into another stressful road mess.
The stakes are real enough without the nostalgia. The Padres carry the final NL Wild Card by half a game over Arizona, and they’re still 32-39 away from Petco Park. That makes a matchup with a 62-85 Giants club more meaningful than the record might suggest, especially for a team that has made life too hard on itself on the road.
Ray should know the setting better than almost anyone. He has a 16-10 record and a 3.41 ERA in 39 career starts at Oracle Park, and he’s back on the mound against the team that traded him five weeks ago. San Francisco sent Ray and cash to San Diego for Miguel Mendez and Joniel Hernandez, with the Padres hoping they were adding a veteran arm who could steady the rotation.
So far, the results have been uneven. In six starts with the Padres, Ray has posted a 4.71 ERA over 28 2/3 innings, and the traffic has been constant.
The biggest issue has been the walks. Ray has 20 walks and 20 strikeouts in his Padres stint, and he has issued at least two walks in all six starts.
Three or more free passes have come in five of those outings. For a former Cy Young winner, that kind of balance is hard to ignore.
There have been some better stretches mixed in. The four starts between his shaky Padres debut and last weekend’s blowup against the Yankees covered 21 1/3 innings and allowed six earned runs. Even then, the walks kept showing up, forcing him to work around problems he created himself.
Against New York, it got ugly fast. Ray needed 68 pitches to get just seven outs, gave up five earned runs and walked four. The Yankees never let him settle in, and the Padres’ offense never had time to catch up.
That’s the script the Giants will try to follow. Former teammates know where Ray can drift, and the easiest way to make Oracle Park work for San Francisco is to put runners on base for free.
Ray has gone six innings only twice since joining the Padres, and that matters because San Diego brought him in to go deeper than the rotation had been able to before the trade deadline. The full judgment on the move will take time. For tonight, though, the ask is simple: six innings would go a long way toward giving the Padres a chance to handle a Giants team they should beat.
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