The Detroit Tigers handed the San Diego Padres an 8-2 defeat at Petco Park on March 26, 2026, completing a dominant performance that erased the DiamondIQ model's pre-game 54% home win probability and drove it to zero by the final out. Detroit struck quickly, plating four runs in the first inning and adding two more in the third and again in the fifth, effectively burying San Diego before the game reached its midpoint. The Padres managed a run in each of the sixth and seventh innings but never mounted a credible threat, finishing with just five hits against a Tigers pitching staff that controlled the game from start to finish.
The decisive swings in win probability came early and belonged largely to Tarik Skubal. In the bottom of the first, Skubal induced a groundout from Miguel Andujar that shifted San Diego's win probability down by 10.2 points, and in the bottom of the second he struck out Freddy Fermin for a 10.4-point swing, the single largest win-probability play of the game. Those suppressive moments in the home half were bookended by Detroit's own offensive contributions, as Javier Baez's strikeout in the top of the first — an out that preserved a favorable count situation — registered a positive 8.5-point WPA for the Tigers, and Riley Greene's flyout in the top of the second added 8.3 points. Parker Meadows also contributed a fifth-inning single worth 5.2 points of win probability added.
Skubal was the clear standout by the model's metrics, finishing with a cumulative WPA of plus-27.4%, far outpacing any other contributor on either side. Greene and Baez each closed with WPA figures just above 8.0 points, while Meadows added a modest 5.1. Tyler Holton and Will Vest provided negligible but clean relief work behind Skubal. The DiamondIQ model's estimate gave San Diego a slight pregame edge on home turf, but Detroit's early offensive explosion and Skubal's methodical dismantling of the Padres lineup made that projection obsolete well before the stretch.
Analysis generated by DiamondIQ's model.