Pittsburgh Pirates at San Diego Padres: Final Score & Recap

The Pittsburgh Pirates escaped Petco Park with a 3-2 victory over the San Diego Padres in twelve innings on August 24, 2026, overcoming a pre-game DiamondIQ model estimate that gave San Diego a 60 percent chance of winning at home. The game was scoreless through five innings before both teams traded runs in the sixth, Pittsburgh scoring twice against one for San Diego. The Padres answered with a run in the eighth to tie the contest at two, and neither side could break through in the ninth, tenth, or eleventh, sending the game into a twelfth inning that ultimately decided everything.

The decisive sequence came at the top of the twelfth, where Nick Gonzales delivered a go-ahead single off Jeremiah Estrada that shifted Pittsburgh's win probability by plus-36.5 percent, the largest single-play swing of the game. Two outs prior, Oneil Cruz had struck out against Estrada, a moment that had swung win probability plus-21.1 percent in Pittsburgh's favor in the process of getting there, underscoring how precarious each at-bat was at that stage. San Diego mounted a threat in the bottom half, with Ty France drawing a walk off Kirby Yates in the eleventh that had already pushed the Padres' position by plus-20.0 percent, and Jake Cronenworth's eighth-inning single off Luke Weaver had added plus-20.1 percent for the home side. But it was Yohan Ramírez failing to retire Dustin Harris in the bottom of the twelfth that sealed it, as Harris's strikeout added plus-31.6 percent to Pittsburgh's win probability and closed out the game.

Among the standout performers by the DiamondIQ model's accounting, Gonzales finished with the highest batting WPA at plus-37.5 percent alongside a RE24 of plus-0.8, while Cronenworth led Padres hitters at plus-23.3 percent WPA and plus-1.1 RE24 despite being on the losing side. On the mound, Braxton Ashcraft topped Pittsburgh's pitching staff with plus-20.8 percent WPA, followed by Mason Miller at plus-13.5 percent and Mason Montgomery at plus-10.3 percent. The Pirates needed every one of those contributions to hold off a San Diego club that the model had favored from the first pitch.