WASHINGTON — Luis Arraez dropped to the ground to get out of the way of a 94 mph fastball headed up and in near his head.
His body fell faster than his hands, and the ball ricocheted off the handle of Arraez’s bat, which vibrated violently inches from the thumb on his left hand that has been bothering him for almost a month.
Three pitches later, Arraez launched a ball off the top of the tall wall in right field and into the seats beyond it.
A pitch after that, Jurickson Profar lined a ball over the Padres’ bullpen beyond left field.
With that, the Padres were on their way to what would become a 4-0 victory over the Nationals.
The Padres did not execute at anywhere near their highest level, failing time and again with runners in scoring position and committing two errors, but what they did was enough for a team that continued to get excellent starting pitching.
Randy Vásquez was about as efficient as a pitcher could be for five innings and worked into the seventh before yielding a lead-off double and being replaced after 68 pitches.
In the four games on this road trip, Padres starters are 3-1 and have allowed two runs in 26 innings.
Vásquez (3-5, 4.17) overcame an error by third baseman Manny Machado in the first inning, and Jeremiah Estrada overcame his own error to pitch a scoreless eighth inning.
The Padres were 2-for-9 with runners in scoring position, the failure including their getting just one run (on an out) after loading the bases with no outs in the eighth inning.
Despite the slider he hung to Arraez and the changeup he left in the heart of the strike zone for Profar, Nationals rookie left-hander DJ Herz (1-4, 4.95) had a better outing against the Padres on Tuesday than he had on June 26 at Petco Park.
After allowing the Padres four runs in 3⅔ innings in the finale of their series last month, Herz made two more starts before being sent to Triple-A, where he made one abbreviated start, as the Nationals sought to give him a rest.
The Padres went down in order in the first two innings before stirring with a single and a walk in the third and loading the bases with two outs in the fourth.
Hertz was done after five innings, and the Padres added a run against reliever Derek Law in the sixth on Manny Machado’s lead-off double and Jackson Merrill’s two-out single.
Vásquez was at just 50 pitches when he began the bottom of the sixth. He got two quick outs before Lane Thomas lined a double to left field. With Adrián Morejón warming, Vásquez got out of that inning.
When he yielded another double, to Juan Yepez to start the seventh, Padres manager Mike Shildt went to Morejón.
The left-hander faced just two batters, with Yepez running into a fielder’s choice and Keibert Ruiz grounding into a double play.
Singles by Xander Bogaerts and Machado and a walk by Ha-Seong Kim loaded the bases at the start of the eighth before the Padres made three straight outs. Bogaerts was able to score on the middle out, a grounder to the right side by Merrill.
After Estrada navigated the bottom of the eighth, Robert Suarez finished the game with a perfect ninth.
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