BOSTON — The Padres had lost five straight games when they arrived at Citizens Bank Park on June 19.
They were one loss away from their first road trip with a result of 0-6 in 15 seasons.
They had hit .181 and averaged just over 2½ runs per game during the five losses. They no longer led the league in batting average and had fallen to three games below .500 and out of playoff position.
However, they kept talking about how everything would be fine, but they weren’t even that focused on winning.
“Keep playing, keep swinging,” Jurickson Profar said.
He also said at the time: “We have to play better.”
The Padres beat the Phillies that day in a game started by major league ERA leader Ranger Suarez, although he did not figure in the decision.
The victory allowed them a happy flight home.
And they kept flying.
On Saturday, an 11-1 victory over the Red Sox gave the Padres their ninth win in 10 games, a season-best streak that began that day in Philadelphia.
“This team has been incredible all year,” Manny Machado said Saturday. “During the last week we have gone up a level. “It’s been fun to be a part of and keep doing it.”
On Saturday, the Padres beat Tanner Houck, whose 2.18 ERA entering the game was second in the major leagues only to Suarez (1.83) and who had allowed just two home runs all season.
Machado hit that many homers off Houck on Saturday, Jackson Merrill hit one and Brett Sullivan connected off rookie Bailey Horner, who replaced Houck (7-6, 2.67) after his shortest outing of the season.
The Padres scored eight runs off Houck and were up 10-0 after five innings before earning their fifth straight victory, putting them five games over .500 at 46-41.
It is their longest winning streak and their best record of the season.
They are hitting .303 and averaging 7.3 runs over the last 10 games, scoring fewer than five runs just once in that span and scoring at least eight in each of the last four games. They started the series here on Friday by scoring all of their runs in the fifth inning of a 9-2 win.
“Things work out throughout the year,” Machado said. “Like I’ve been saying all year, it’s about staying consistent, doing our job… Lately, we’ve just been getting better. Maybe it’s the summer or, I don’t know… we just have a different feel here.”
Saturday marked the first time in 10 starts that Houck allowed more than three runs and the first time in his 17 starts this season that he allowed more than seven total runs and four earned runs.
The Padres scored in the second inning without hurting the AL leader’s ERA.
Despite allowing three consecutive one-out singles, Houck might have escaped if not for center fielder Jarren Duran botching the last of them.
With Donovan Solano and Merrill on second and first, respectively, Ha-Seong Kim lined a 102.5 mph ball up the middle that got to Duran fast enough for third base coach Tim Leiper to stop Solano from sending him out when the ball bounced off Duran’s glove. The run ended up being unearned when Sullivan struck out and Bryce Johnson grounded out to end the inning.
The rest of the races contributed to Houck’s ERA inflation.
It all started with two outs in the third inning when Machado hit a two-run homer over the Green Monster — and all the way through the four rows of seats beyond the 37-foot wall and out of Fenway Park — to ensure Luis Arraez’s leadoff single didn’t go to waste.
Merrill opened the fourth inning by sending a ball to roughly the same spot where Machado’s home run cleared the Monster in left-center field, but about 20 feet shorter.
Arrez’s walk started the fifth, and he moved to third on Profar’s single and scored on Jake Cronenworth’s single before Machado sent a ball 420 feet into a tarp-covered seating section beyond center field to make it 8-0.
After Solano lined out, Horner came in to make his major league debut and hit a line drive off Merrill before Kim singled and Sullivan hit his first home run of the season down the right field line.
Durán’s solo home run off Padres starter Michael King (6-5, 3.61) led off the sixth inning. King would finish the sixth before Yuki Matsui, Austin Davis and Enyel De Los Santos closed out the game with one inning each.
The Padres scored their final run in the eighth when Cronenworth reached on an error, moved to third on David Peralta’s single and scored on Merrill’s double.
“We have a really good team and it’s showing right now,” Profar said. “We’re doing the same things we were doing, but we’re getting those races done.”
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