PHILADELPHIA — The Padres continue to thrive with a good pitching staff and a just-enough offense.
Through 38 games, that combination has them 10 games above .500 and has kept them from losing consecutive games for more than a month.
A 2-0 victory over the Phillies on Thursday afternoon at Citizens Bank Park was the latest exercise in walking a thin line between scary and exhilarating.
The Padres scored twice in the fourth inning and got seven scoreless innings from Yu Darvish before Luis Garcia recorded two outs in the eighth inning and Taylor Rogers got the final four outs to assume the major league lead with his 15th save.
Since losing two in a row to the Braves on April 15 and 16, the Padres have gone 19-9 and followed every loss with at least one win.
They rank 20th in the major leagues with a .664 slugging percentage, 22nd with 30 home runs and are tied for fourth with 24 victories.
The Padres are 4-2 on this trip and would secure their third winning road trip in the three they have taken this season by winning one of their three games this weekend in San Francisco.
They fell a run short of making it a perfect three-for-three at 3-0, as they won Tuesday’s series opener 3-0 and the Phillies won Wednesday by the same score.
The two runs they scored — on consecutive singles by Jurickson Profar, Wil Myers and Robinson Cano and Ha-seong Kim’s sacrifice fly — were plenty for Darvish.
The right-hander allowed six hits and did not walk a batter as he improved to 4-1 with his sixth quality start.
The Phillies had two hits through the first four innings.
The first was a broken-bat flare to left field in which the top of Rhys Hoskins’ bat made it almost all the way to shortstop and the ball just cleared Kim running back into left field from shortstop. That was the first batter Darvish faced. The next six were out, with just one ball leaving the infield.
Garrett Stubbs led off the third inning by slapping a bunt to the right side that sailed through the air all the way to the dirt and would have been an out if second baseman Robinson Cano had not been playing so deep. Darvish retired the next seven batters and did so in 22 pitches.
Johan Camargo’s one-out single, this one a line drive to center, was followed by Stubbs grounding into a double play.
Hoskins reached out for a slider three inches off the plate to send a single to right field with one out in the sixth inning. Alec Bohm’s single sent Hoskins to third before Darvish struck out Kyle Schwarber and got Nick Castellanos to end the inning on a fielder’s choice grounder to Cano.
Odubel Herrera reached on an infield single with one out in the seventh before Darvish got the final two outs of his afternoon. He was at 108 pitches, nine more than he had thrown in any of his seven starts.
Garcia allowed a leadoff single before getting two outs in the eighth. Schwarber grounded a single up the middle off Rogers to put runners at the corners before Castellanos grounded out.
After getting the first two outs of the ninth, Rogers walked Camargo to bring up pinch-hitter Jean Segura as the potential tying run. Segura struck out looking.
The Phillies entered the series with the highest slugging percentage of any major league team (.431) and slugged .211 in the three games. The Padres were fortunate to not have to face Bryce Harper, whose .995 OPS is fifth highest in the majors, because he was recovering after receiving a platelet-rich plasma injection in his right elbow to treat a tear in his UCL.
The Padres have, of course, been playing all season without Fernando Tatis Jr. as he recovers from his March wrist surgery.
