Padres trade deadline acquisition Rich Hill made his team debut on Sunday Night Baseball against his former squad, the Los Angeles Dodgers. To put it nicely, it didn't exactly go as planned.
Hill got roughed up against LA, allowing six earned runs in just three innings of work. He was on the losing end of a primetime showdown, and wasn't able to make a strong first impression with his 13th team.
After the game, Hill didn't mince words when talking about his rough outing.
“It was a terrible outing,” Hill said. “Just too many deep counts and didn’t throw the ball well, so put us in a hole. Just overall poor performance. That’s it. I mean, there’s nothing else to sugarcoat or anything like that. It was crap. So get back to work tomorrow and get ready for the next one.”
The Padres acquired Hill to be a strong veteran presence who can eat some innings, and on Sunday, he wasn't able to do it.
He threw a whopping 77 pitches across three innings, and forced Pedro Avila to throw 4.2 innings and 90 pitches in long relief.
Hopefully for Hill and the Padres, this is just a blip in an otherwise strong second half performance. The Padres need Hill to be a reliable starter for them, especially with Joe Musgrove out for the foreseeable future.
We'll see if this was just a one-game struggle against a really good offense, or if his 4.76 ERA in 22 games with the Pittsburgh Pirates was, you know, a good representation of how he was going to pitch the rest of this season.
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