The Padres came into this one having lost six straight one-run games, the kind of stretch that turns a fanbase paranoid every time the score is close in the ninth. Max Fried and Walker Buehler traded zeros early before Xander Bogaerts poked a single past a slow-reacting Trent Grisham in center to make it 1-0, and Ben Rice answered with a 444-foot blast to dead center for his 36th homer of the season, tying it right back up.
From there it turned into a bullpen game, and San Diego's arms were the reason it stayed alive. Will Warren gave the Yankees 2 1/3 scoreless out of their pen, but Adrian Morejon and Mason Miller matched it and then some for the Padres, combining for 6 outs and 5 strikeouts to keep it tied. Miller in particular was a strike away from a perfect ninth.
Mason Miller was one Ben Rice 0-2 popup from an immaculate ninth inning. Rice popped up, and Miller punched out the next two Yankees on three pitches. Tied at 1, headed to the bottom of the ninth. The Padres have lost their last six one-run games.
That's the kind of inning that usually ends a rally, not a nightmare, and it briefly looked like it had. But the Yankees weren't done pushing the pressure back on San Diego. Austin Wells lost the ball out of his glove on a Padres double in the 9th, and Austin Hays struck out with the winning run standing on third to send it to extras. Then in the top of the 10th, Spencer Jones, who's from the San Diego area and was getting a homecoming game in front of family, ripped a go-ahead single to put the Yankees up 2-1.
Spencer Jones puts the Yankees ahead in extras! (Via: @Yankees)
It's the exact kind of moment that would've made this a quiet, deflating loss for San Diego — a hometown kid coming back to spoil the party against a team that couldn't buy a big hit all night. Instead, Luis Campusano stepped in against the Yankees bullpen in the bottom of the 10th and ended it immediately, sending the Padres dugout into a full sprint.
ITS A WALKOFF IN SAN DIEGO
The homer capped an absurd night for Campusano behind the plate too — he threw out three separate base-stealers on top of the walk-off, the kind of two-way performance that gets old teammates and beat writers alike pointing out how long the Padres have stuck with him. San Diego took Campusano in the 2nd round of the 2017 draft and once had him rated among the game's better catching prospects, but he's bounced up and down for years, including a 2025 season where he managed just 10 big-league games. San Diego still re-signed him to a modest one-year, $900,000 deal in November rather than moving on, and a thumb injury cost him more time earlier this year before he made it back after the All-Star break.
None of that history is why the win matters, though — the standings are. The Padres are scrapping for their playoff lives in September, and a loss like this one, with Jones' hit hanging over them into extras, is exactly the kind that's buried them lately given their recent run of one-run defeats. Instead they get a 3-2 win, a caught-stealing hat trick, and a walk-off from a guy who's spent half a decade proving he belonged. That's a night San Diego can build a week around.