Padres recall JP Sears, place Lucas Giolito on injured list

The Padres recalled left-hander JP Sears from Triple-A El Paso and placed right-hander Lucas Giolito on the 15-day injured list with right elbow inflammation, leaving San Diego to patch a rotation spot in the middle of a 17-game run before the All-Star break.

Giolito’s IL move was made retroactive to June 22, one day after he worked against the Texas Rangers and felt elbow soreness afterward. Padres manager Craig Stammen said Giolito would be shut down from throwing for a couple of days before getting back to work, a sign the club moved quickly once the soreness lingered beyond the outing.

Sears was the obvious arm to pull from El Paso, even if his Triple-A numbers were ugly. MiLB listed him at 4-3 with a 7.92 ERA in 14 games and starts for the Chihuahuas, along with 63.2 innings, 62 strikeouts and a 1.84 WHIP. That line says plenty about the shape of his season in the Pacific Coast League, where run prevention was a problem and traffic on the bases was constant.

The Padres are betting on the bigger-picture version of Sears, not the El Paso stat sheet. San Diego acquired him from the Athletics in the July 31, 2025 trade-deadline deal that also brought reliever Mason Miller to the Padres, and Sears had already logged five MLB starts across four separate stints with the club before this call-up. That history gave the Padres a familiar option at a time when they needed one.

The urgency came from Giolito’s recent work as much as the injury itself. Over his two most recent starts, on June 15 and June 21, he allowed seven earned runs, 14 hits and five walks in nine innings. By June 24, Sears was scheduled to take Giolito’s place in the rotation and start against the Atlanta Braves at Petco Park, giving San Diego a quick test of whether Triple-A depth could hold up when the major league rotation needed an immediate answer.