Nick Pivetta dominates Giants as Padres break losing skid

Nick Pivetta fired six dominant innings Tuesday night and the San Diego Padres snapped a four-game losing streak with a 5-1 win over the visiting San Francisco Giants.In beating San Francisco for t

Nick Pivetta dominates Giants as Padres break losing skid

Nick Pivetta fired six dominant innings Tuesday night and the San Diego Padres snapped a four-game losing streak with a 5-1 win over the visiting San Francisco Giants.

In beating San Francisco for the third time this year, Pivetta (13-4) allowed just three hits and a run while walking two and striking out 10. Pivetta threw a season-high 109 pitches and moved into a tie for second in the majors in wins.

Kai-Wei Teng (1-3) lost to San Diego for the second time in seven days, permitting three hits and three runs — two of them earned — over 3 1/3 innings and 80 pitches. Teng walked one and whiffed four.

The Giants’ only productive swing offensively came on the game’s second pitch. Jung Hoo Lee turned around a 94 mile per hour fastball, launching it an estimated 400 feet to right-center for his seventh homer of the year. It was the Giants’ second leadoff homer in as many nights.

Unlike Monday night, when San Francisco followed Heliot Ramos’ leadoff bomb with two more first-inning homers that scored all its runs in a 4-3 victory, the team wasn’t able to muster up any other offense off Pivetta. He fanned the side in the third and fourth, getting mileage from his fastball and sweeper.

The Padres scored in four different innings. Manny Machado tied the game in the bottom of the first with a groundout that plated Fernando Tatis Jr., who reached on a throwing error to start the inning and got to third via Luis Arraez’s double.

San Diego took the lead for good with two runs in the fourth. A leadoff single by Ryan O’Hearn and two hit batters filled the bases for Jose Iglesias, who poked an RBI single to left that knocked out Teng. Reliever Spencer Bivens walked Tatis with two outs to score Gavin Sheets.

O’Hearn made it 4-1 in the fifth with an RBI single that chased home Machado, who led off with a double. Arraez knocked in the final run in the sixth on a fielder’s choice bouncer.