It’s that time of year. Sometime around the sixth inning on Tuesday night, the scoreboard at Petco Park flashed a new final: The Diamondbacks had won in Kansas City. The Padres, at the time, were trailing by three runs. “Whoever tells you they’re not looking -- they’re lying,” Manny Machado would later say. “We knew that Arizona won. And we needed to win this game bad.” They got it. The Padres staged a relentless four-run rally in the bottom of the eighth inning and emerged with a pivotal 5-4 victory over the Nationals. In the process, they kept pace with the Diamondbacks in the race for the final National League Wild Card spot. Arizona maintained its half-game lead, but the two teams remain tied in the loss column. Here’s some takeaways from Petco Park: **A ferocious rally … when they desperately needed it** For seven innings, the Padres struggled to get much of anything going against a Nationals bullpen game. They mustered just one hit through the first six. They stranded a runner at third in the seventh, then fell behind, 4-1, on Andrés Chaparro’s pinch-hit home run. The Padres were down, but they weren’t out. After loading the bases with a trio of walks, Austin Hays got one back with a sacrifice fly, before Machado tied the game with a two-run single. A couple of batters later, Luis Campusano’s broken-bat bloop landed in no-man’s land in right-center field, plating the go-ahead run. The Padres needed this rally in the worst way -- especially considering the stakes in the current playoff picture. “That whole inning, everyone had unselfish at-bats,” Machado said. “Great at-bats as a team, as a group to lead to that victory tonight.” **Morejon steps up** The Padres led after eight innings, and the lights at Petco Park went out. But it wasn’t Mason Miller who emerged. It was Adrian Morejon. Miller has been taxed heavily lately. Of course, so has Morejon. But he was just a bit fresher. (Morejon had pitched only one inning in Friday’s victory, while Miller went two.) So the Padres called on Morejon for his third straight game and his fourth appearance in five.
