Nick Pivetta starts strong with Padres, who finish off sweep of Braves

Kevin Acee, The San Diego Union-Tribune on Mar 30, 2025

Published in Baseball

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SAN DIEGO — The Padres are 4-0 for the just second time in their 57 years of being a Major League Baseball team.

In that 97.5% of this season remains, it is far more significant how they got there.

They did it with four days of nearly flawless baseball, or about as close as a team can come in a game in which perfection over any length of time is impossible.

At the start of the Padres’ 5-0 victory over the Atlanta Braves on Sunday, Nick Pivetta came close to achieving it across seven scoreless innings, during which he faced the minimum 21 batters.

The Padres’ intense new pitcher stalked around the mound, the infield grass and to and from the dugout. He wasted little time between pitches and little time getting through the Braves.

Pivetta, who signed a four-year, $55 million contract in February, purposefully and expertly mixed his curveball and sweeper with his fastball in an extraordinarily efficient Padres debut. He allowed one hit, struck out four and threw 57 strikes among his 82 pitches, a 69.5% rate.

The 32-year-old right-hander retired the Braves’ first six batters before an Orlando Arcia single leading off the third inning. Two pitches later, the inning was over, on a fielder’s choice grounder and double play grounder.

He then set down the next 14 batters to finish his day and leave his team a two-run advantage.

The Padres added a run in the bottom of the seventh and two in the eighth, and Jason Adam and Jeremiah Estrada finished off the game to run the bullpen’s scoreless streak to 15 innings.

The 18 pitches Pivetta threw in the fifth were his most in any inning. He got through the second inning in 10 pitches, the third in six pitches and the seventh in eight pitches.

By then, the Braves had gone 20 innings without a run.

By the end of the game, they would be 0-4. That is not the start any team desires. But the last time they lost four at the beginning of a season was 2021, the year of their most recent World Series title.

The only other time the Padres were 4-0 was 2021 and 1984, which ended with the first of their two World Series appearances.

Braves starter AJ Smith-Shawver had trouble with his command, walking three and surrendering a half-dozen hits. But he minimized the damage by escaping at least some semblance of trouble in each of his four innings. In all, he stranded five runners in scoring position.

The Padres took a 1-0 lead in the first inning when Fernando Tatis Jr. led off with a check-swing double grounded down the right field line and Manny Machado sent a double to the base of the wall in right field.

Machado was left standing on second base that inning, and the Padres left the bases loaded in the second after getting them that way with two outs.

Xander Bogaerts followed a two-out walk by Jake Cronenworth in the third inning to put the Padres up 2-0. An infield single by Gavin Sheets, though, was followed by Jason Heyward’s second strikeout of the game.

Smith-Shawver was replaced by left-hander José Suarez, who worked a 1-2-3 fifth and worked around a one-out walk in the fifth before giving up a run in the seventh on Tatis lead-off walk and a two-out double by Jackson Merrill.

Closer Robert Suarez was able to sit down as the Padres added on in the eighth against Hector Neris when Bogaerts walked, stole second and scored on Brandon Lockridge’s double and Lockridge stole third and scored on Tatis’ single.

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