ARLINGTON, Texas — The Padres did it again.
It is not something they want to do so much as they are happy to have the ability to do.
David Peralta capped a comeback victory with a two-run homer in the seventh inning to lift the Padres to a 6-4 victory on Wednesday night over the Rangers.
“In baseball, you always want to be ahead,” Peralta said. “But that’s not always going to happen. And good thing, we have the ability to come back.”
Four relievers covered the final five innings without allowing a run, with closer Robert Suarez getting the final four outs for his 21st save.
It was the Padres’ 21st comeback victory of the season, their 10th when down by two runs or more. That is two more victories after trailing by multiple runs than they had all last season.
It was also their 20th victory in a game in which they lost a lead, two more than they had the entirety of 2023.
“Grit squad shows up again,” manager Mike Shildt said.
“We stay in the fight,” Jackson Merrill said. “We said it the whole day — ‘Stay in the fight. Don’t give our identity away to the other team.’ That’s our identity. We stay in the fight.”
The resilience does not come close to assuaging one of the club’s main issues — they get down early in games because their starting pitchers too often give up too many runs.
That is a problem they know they must address, both with internal adjustments and external acquisitions.
For now, with their 10th victory in 13 games, the Padres sit four games above .500 (47-43) and in playoff position 90 games into the season.
Down 4-2 after four innings, the Padres got to 4-3 with a run in the fifth and tied the game with a run in the sixth before Peralta’s first home run with the Padres provided the winning margin.
Manny Machado’s two-run homer in the third inning had put them ahead 2-0, their first lead in 21 innings following a 4-1 loss Sunday in Boston and 7-0 defeat here Tuesday.
But the Rangers answered with three doubles, a single and a sacrifice fly to go up 3-2 in the bottom of the third against Adam Mazur.
The Rangers scored another run on a pair of singles and a sacrifice fly to start the bottom of the fourth before Mazur completed his final inning.
It was the 17th time this season that a Padres starting pitcher allowed four or more runs in the first four innings to put his team in a hole.
Then the Padres began their fifth comeback from such a deficit.
Jurickson Profar led off the fifth with a single, and Jake Cronenworth followed with a walk. That ended Rangers starter Jon Gray’s night, and reliever José Leclerc retired Machado and Donovan Solano.
With Merrill at the plate, Profar and Cronenworth executed a double steal. Merrill then sent a slow roller off the end of his bat rolling down the third base line and just over the edge of the bag, scoring Profar.
Ha-Seong Kim walked, stole second and scored the tying run on Luis Arraez’s single.
With Yuki Matsui having gotten four outs after starting the fifth and Adrián Morejón finishing the sixth, Solano singled to start the seventh before Merrill struck out and Peralta sent a 1-1 changeup from Dane Dunning into the Rangers’ bullpen beyond right-center field.
“We never give up,” Peralta said. “We’re going to fight every single at-bat, every single out until the end.”
Morejón retired all three batters he faced in the seventh, and Jeremiah Estrada got the first two outs of the eighth before a single by Nathaniel Lowe prompted Shildt to go to Suarez. The right-hander retired all four batters he faced.
“Little things, big things, a lot of things in between,” Shildt said. “Base running was on point tonight, and the at-bats were really good. … Bullpen was A-plus. It was just A-plus.”