Michael King shines as Padres beat Mariners for sixth straight win

Jeff Sanders, The San Diego Union-Tribune on Apr 15, 2026

Published in Baseball

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Michael King isn’t quite back to his old self.

But he’s getting there.

Hours after rotation-mate Nick Pivetta landed on the injured list, King fashioned his second straight quality start, Xander Bogaerts drove in three runs and Mason Miller was dominant again in a 4-1 win over the Mariners on Tuesday night in front of a crowd of 38,152 at Petco Park.

The victory extended the Padres’ winning streak to six games, their longest since a six-gamer last year from July 26-Aug. 1.

“King’s competed well for us and got us through the sixth inning a couple times,” Padres manager Craig Stammen said after his team’s 11th win, tied for the second most in the majors. “It just speaks to how good a pitcher he is. He can go in there without his best stuff and get through a really good lineup like they have tonight.”

King struck out five and allowed one run on four hits over six innings. Really, the only thing to nitpick was command as he threw just 49 of his 85 pitches for strikes, walked two batters and hit two batters.

But King helped himself with a double-play to end the sixth inning with left-hander Adrián Morejón warming for a grouping of five left-handed-hitters looming had the inning not ended as quickly as it did.

“I still don’t feel super confident in the pitch locations that I got right now,” King said. “Mechanically, I’m definitely making adjustments throughout every start. I like to get on that roll where I don’t think mechanics at all. Luckily, I don’t think mechanics while I’m actually competing, because I just want to compete. But the five days in between, it’s a lot of work getting put in there. So today was better than my last one, but yeah, still a long way to go.”

The outing, nevertheless, lowered King’s ERA to 2.78. He finished his best season as a starting pitcher with a 2.95 ERA in 2024 before drawing the Padres’ playoff opener that fall. He was limited to 73⅓ innings in an injury-riddled 2025 season.

“I felt like my mechanics were the best in 2022 when I was a reliever, because I was touching the mound so consistently,” King said. “And then with the injuries last year and only having however many innings, I feel like it’s almost foreign out there. So I’ve got to get as many innings under my belt as possible and get as comfortable as I can.”

Morejón entered in the seventh and breezed through a perfect frame for only his third scoreless appearance in seven outings this season. Right-hander Jason Adam erased a one-out walk with an inning-ending double play in the eighth and Miller struck out a batter in a scoreless ninth for his fifth save.

Miller’s outing extended his scoreless innings streak to 29⅔ innings, four frames off the record that Cla Meredith set in 2006. It is also the longest active streak in the majors. Miller has struck out 20 of the 27 batters he’s faced this year.

The Padres got to Mariners right-hander Bryan Woo in the third inning, with new leadoff hitter Ramón Laureano tripling off the wall in right with one out to start a three-run rally.

Fernando Tatis Jr. followed with a single through a drawn-in infield. Jackson Merrill also singled and stole second to put runners on second and third for Bogaerts, who drove in both runs with two out with a single to center.

The three runs in the third inning alone were more than Woo had allowed the Padres in any of his previous three starts combined against them. He entered the game with a 2.33 ERA over 19⅓ innings against the Padres.

While he allowed only the three runs, Woo was dancing around traffic in every inning outside the sixth inning. He struck out three and allowed eight hits and a walk over seven innings.

The Padres added an insurance run in the eighth inning when Merrill greeted reliever Casey Legumina with a double, moved to third on Manny Machado’s fly ball to left and scored on Bogaerts’ third single of the game to raise his batting average to .270.

“To me, he’s been taking great at-bats the entire season,” Stammen said. “He had a little two- or three-day funk where he wasn’t trusting what they were working on in the cage, and then he kind of went back to it. And we’ve just seen him barrel a lot of baseballs tonight. He didn’t really hit them as hard as he’s been hitting them. But we talk about the luck kind of turning our ways and some of those softer hits falling in.”