Good morning from my layover,

Jackson Merrill is not slowing down.

He sprinted 83 feet and launched himself across the turf in right-center field to make a diving catch in the bottom of the third inning yesterday. And in the next half-inning, he blasted a fastball 421 feet to center field for a two-run homer.

There were plenty of heroes in the Padres’ 4-3 victory over the Rays, which you can read about in my game story (here).

But Merrill was again in the middle of it all.

In the process, he reached 416 plate appearances for the season, tying his total last year between Single-A and Double-A. He has already played in 20 more games than he did in 2023.

But here he is, having just gotten through the dog days while maintaining his most productive stretch of the season, batting .326 with a 1.006 OPS over his past 36 games.

Merrill continuing to go strong is not entirely because he turned 21 just 4½ months ago, which is 10 years younger than the player to his right and 16 years younger than the player to his left in the Padres outfield yesterday.

No, the MLB season will grind down anyone of any age. And adapting to it is its own taxing learning curve.

The overriding (and correct) impression of Merrill is as an exuberant kid with uncanny presence and rare talent. But there is also a level of maturity and commitment that belies his years and experience level.

Merrill spent much of yesterday morning in the training room in the visitors’ clubhouse at Tropicana Field, ending his stay with some time in the hot tub.

He would not have taken fly balls on a Sunday morning anyway, but he has curtailed his daily pregame work on most days.

“Trying to save my energy off the field,” he said.

It sometimes takes young players years to figure out what they need to make it through a full season playing at their best. Merrill said he has always been good about recovery, and he has paid attention to what his body is telling him his first year in the big leagues.

“Throughout the entire year I’ve gone through my days in the beginning and been energetic the whole day,” he said. “It’s been hard to kind of get through the game and stay with the same energy (lately). … I’ve never been this far. My body is not used to it. Obviously, I want to be there when it matters.”

He wants to be ready for the best part.

“I’m excited,” he said when asked about the Padres’ playoffs chase. “We’ve been in a pennant race all damn year, dude. I feel like we’re doing a really good job of conserving ourselves, and we’re ready to go. We’re ready to attack.”

The catch

Shortstop don’t get the opportunity to make catches like the one Merrill made yesterday, which you can watch here.

“Those are fun,” said Merrill, who was a shortstop in the minor leagues and began working in center field in the offseason. “In the moment, you don’t think about diving or anything. You just think about going and catching it. After, you look at it and you’re like, OK, that was more impressive than you thought.”

He got it

Dylan Cease had the first three balls and a place set aside for the fourth.

But then right in front of his eyes, the baseball used to complete his 200th strikeout of the season was gone.

Cease yanked a slider past Christopher Morel to end the second inning and, as is custom, catcher Luis Campusano threw the ball to third baseman Manny Machado, who then threw it into the stands.

Cease had tried to get both of his teammates’ attention before they let go of the ball.

You can watch how that went down here.

Machado immediately motioned for the fan who ended up with the ball to throw it back. The fan complied, and Cease got the memento.

“I overreacted a little bit,” Cease said after the game.

The 28-year-old right-hander is the only active MLB pitcher with four consecutive seasons with at least 200 strikeouts.

The mark means a lot to him for what it requires.

“I think I’m most proud of just having the amount of starts and innings it takes to do that,” he said. “That’s definitely something I take pride in.”

Cease, who is at 993 career strikeouts, is tied with the Tigers’ Tarik Skubal for the MLB lead with 201 strikeouts this season and ranks 11th with 164 innings.

Cease working

There is often a difference between how a pitcher evaluates a performance and how others view the same outing.

For example, Cease did not think the sixth inning yesterday (two walks, a single and no outs) was much worse than the previous five (one walk, one hit).

“The first five, I was still a little bit too out of the zone,” Cease said. “Just didn’t adjust and didn’t make good pitches in the sixth. … I thought my mechanics were decent. I was a little out of rhythm. If anything, I think I should have aimed more middle. There are a lot of different ways to get back on track. I just didn’t do it.”

Jason Adam allowed all three runners he inherited from Cease to score, leaving Cease’s final line at five innings, two hits, three runs, three walks and four strikeouts.

It continued a season in which Cease’s 29 starts can be separated into four distinct silos.

Pitching coach Ruben Niebla was asked about Cease’s ups and downs before yesterday’s game.

“We’re going through a long season, and he’s our workhorse,” Niebla said. “He and (Matt) Waldron were carrying the load all year. These cycles these guys go through is a very common thing. It’s very difficult to go, ‘I’m going to have 30 starts. I’m going to be really good in all of them.’”

Cease is tied with the Giant’s Logan Webb for most start in the majors, though one of Cease’s was ended after one inning by rain. He is tied with the Reds’ Hunter Greene for most games with at least 100 pitches.

Cease likely has at least four starts remaining, with each likely coming with more than four days’ rest between them. He leads the Padres with 13 such starts.

“We anticipated he would be our workhorse,” Niebla said. “And we still anticipate it.”

Will walk

With first-year hitting coach Victor Rodriguez preaching a philosophy that espouses walks as a good thing only if that is all the pitcher is going to give, the Padres lead MLB with a .265 batting average and rank 22nd with just 399 walks.

The Padres took what was given to them yesterday, as they had 10 walks and just six hits.

The 10 walks were their third most in a game this season and most since walking 11 times against the Rockies on May 13.

The Padres also don’t strike out much, doing so an MLB-low 912 times. Yesterday, they struck out seven times. It was the 12th time this season they had more walks than strikeouts. That is something they did 13 times last season. The last time they had more games with more walks than strikeouts was 2012 (14).

In another life

Jake Cronenworth went 5-for-13 with a double, a home run and three walks in his first series at Tropicana Field, the place he at one time thought he would be playing regularly.

“I had one pinch-hit at-bat in a spring training game here in ‘19,” he recalled earlier in the weekend.

It was after that season that he was traded to the Padres, and in 2020 he made his major league debut.

Cronenworth said it was “cool” to catch up with people he knew from his five years in the Rays system. Rays first base coach Michael Johns managed Cronenworth in Single-A, and third base coach Brady Williams managed him in Double-A and Triple-A. But Cronenworth has been a member of the Padres for so long, he wasn’t all that nostalgic.

“I played in the minors with them, but I never played in the big leagues with them,” he said. “So it’s a little different.”

Close to home

The Padres are finished with games outside the Pacific Time Zone. They have one one flight remaining that will be longer than two hours, 15 minutes. After today’s game at home against the Tigers, which will conclude a run of 18 games without a day off, the Padres have just 22 games in the season’s final 27 days.

The second year of the balanced schedule, wherein every team plays every team in both leagues, plus a season-opening trip to South Korea, has the Padres flying more air miles than any team in 2024. But all that remains after traversing at least two time zones on nine of their 11 road trips in the past four months, are visits to Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix.

“Abso-(expletive)-lutey,” Machado said when asked if that was a positive development. “It’s gonna be great staying out West, for sure. This new schedule, man, it has a lot of teams messed up, coming east. I think this is our sixth time coming out this way. Two different time changes in less than a week. On top of that, 18 in a row doesn’t make it any better. But yeah, for sure, our September schedule is a lot better. Couple off days in there, short flight, I think that’s definitely gonna help our bodies and our minds. Gonna be a good, nice little finish.”

Tidbits

• You can read in my pregame story (here) about all the roster moves made yesterday and the roster moves to come this week.
• Robert Suarez became the 11th Padres pitcher to have 30 saves in a season. It has been done 26 times. Trevor Hoffman reached the mark in 13 seasons, Heath Bell in three and Rollie Fingers twice.
• Tanner Scott worked a scoreless eighth inning yesterday before the Padres went ahead in the ninth, which moved Scott into a tie with Hector Neris for the major league lead among relievers with nine wins.
• Jurickson Profar was 0-for-2 with two walks and a sacrifice fly yesterday. He is batting just .171 over the past 21 games. But he walked seven times in the three-game series against the Rays and remains atop the National League with a .383 on-base percentage.
• Merrill’s 21 home runs are fifth most by a Padres rookie. He is five short of Hunter Renfroe’s rookie record set in 2017. Merrill’s 79 RBIs are tied with Benito Santiago (1987) for most ever by a Padres rookie.
• Campusano, who had walked 16 times in 281 plate appearances before this weekend, walked twice on Friday and twice yesterday.
• Xander Bogaerts was 2-for-4 with a sacrifice fly yesterday. It was his first time in 10 games with multiple hits. He had multiples hit in 14 of the 32 games before that.
• The Padres began the season 19-20 away from Petco Park. They are 22-10 since.
• Here’s an update to the chart I use to illustrate some key differences between this year and last:

All right, that’s it for me. Early flight today and then a game at Petco Park this afternoon (3:40 PT).

(Yesterday’s game started 28 minutes later than originally scheduled following a ceremony to induct Fred McGriff into the Rays Hall of Fame. Then the game lasted more than three hours. And my planes don’t wait for me to cross all those time zones, Manny.)

Talk to you tomorrow.

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