The Padres were four outs away from beating the Dodgers Friday night, before things came completely unraveled. Saturday they sought to even the series. Yet, in the bottom of the eighth, they found themselves trailing 3-1, only five outs away from a second loss.
But with one out and one on, back to back walks loaded to the bases for Juan Soto. The Padres haven’t had a grand slam all year, and alas they would not get one here, but they would arguably get something that has been even rarer: good luck.
Courtesy @Padres
Infield hits are always lucky plays, and Enrique Hernandez making an error is a lucky break for the Padres. The extra bit of good luck here is that Soto is a slow runner. Soto’s slow footspeed made Hernandez think he might get him at first with a quick throw. If Soto is closer to first base when Hernandez fields the ball, he likely holds onto it, avoids the errant throw, and the inning might’ve unfolded much differently. Instead two runs scored, and the error allowed runners to advance to second and third. Manny Machado would then get a two run single to put the Padres up for good. They would add three more runs in the inning and go on to win 8-3. These are the weird breaks you need to win baseball games, and the Padres have been bereft of luck all year. But luck can change.
This game was a first, unbelievably. From AJ Cassavell:
It took all season for the Padres to finally get a win in a game they trailed by multiple runs this late in the game. That statistic beggars belief. But here it is, at last, better late than never. This was a big win. The Padres pulled within three games of a Wild Card playoff berth.
Here are the full game highlights:
Stretch Run
The Padres are entering the stretch run. They might make the playoffs, but it’s far from certain. If they play the way they played in July, the postseason is possible. If they play better than July, the postseason becomes likely. All of which is to say: Everything is still in the balance. To quote the old man from the “bring out your dead” sketch: We’re not dead yet. Let’s look at some factors that suggest we might be on the cusp of a miraculous recovery and some that indicate that we’re about to be chucked on a cart full of corpses.
Run Prevention: Elite
The Padres are the number one defense in the MLB by outs above average. The defense is real and on display every night. If you watched the highlights above you saw incredible defensive displays that have become a routine part of watching Padres baseball. The Padres also lead the majors in ERA at 3.72. The overall sterling ERA laundered the terrible performance of the bullpen for some time, but it’s been discovered and addressed. The bullpen getting healthy, and bolstered via trade, may make this weakness a strength down the stretch. It should at least not be worse. Taken together, the defense and pitching mean the Padres excel at run prevention. This is half of the championship equation.
Stealth MVP
Ha-Seong Kim has quietly become one of the best players in baseball. The case for Kim getting down-ballot MVP votes comes primarily from his 5.6 Baseball Reference WAR, which is the most of any player in the majors except Ohtani. WAR can be hard to understand1, but it does a decent job of estimating how much a player helped his team win. If Kim keeps up this pace, he will get MVP votes. That’s an astonishing improvement.
If you’d told the baseball world before the season that a fifth Padres player outside of Soto, Tatis, Machado, and Bogaerts would turn in an MVP-ish campaign, but that the Padres would be below .500 on August 4th, nobody would have understood. In terms of pure intuition, those facts don’t compute. And yet: This is reality. The Padres have five players at or near the top of their positional rankings, but they do not have a winning record. That reality might make you want to walk into the ocean, but it should also remind you that the Padres have some outstanding pieces for a stretch run.
Kim’s signing will probably end up as one of the best international professional free agent signings in MLB history. He was a superstar in the KBO at a very young age, the Padres front office made a bold investment in him, and that investment has paid off, big-time.
The Lucky Ones
Luck is an inextricable part of baseball. Look no further than the unholy results from Monday’s lawless calamity against the Rockies. On Thursday @CodifyBaseball tweeted this curiosity from baseball reference:
These numbers are the difference between each team’s expected W-L record based on the Pythagorean Win Expectation formula originally devised by Bill James. Baseball Reference simply calls this stat ‘Luck’. The Padres are the unluckiest team in baseball.
We clearly think that more than just luck explains the Padres underperforming their run differential. The team recently fixed what was fixable via trade. The Padres should be better the rest of the way. And luck tends to even out over time. The Luckiest teams in baseball happen to be the teams the Padres are chasing for the Wild Card: Cincinnati, Miami, Milwaukee, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Arizona. All this to say: Regression to the mean favors the Padres, and harms the Reds, Marlins, Phillies, Giants, Diamondbacks, and Brewers. The Padres are three games out of the Wild Card with 51 games left to play. This could happen.
Pods on the Pads
In the August 2nd episode’ of the Padres Hot Tub podcast, Craig Elsten made a brilliant observation: One of the major reasons why the start of the Padres season didn’t go as planned was the shocking regression of Austin Nola. Elsten noted that if Nola only been mediocre, A.J. Preller likely would not have gone to the waiver wire to bring in Gary Sanchez. In an alternate universe in which Nola is simply mediocre, Preller probably doesn’t acquire Sanchez when Campusano gets hurt. And Sanchez has been a revelation; he’s already among the Padres single season home run leaders for catchers in only 52 games. He’s third fastest player to reach 100 home runs in a career finishing just ahead of Tatis who recently achieved the feat.
He’s also younger than you might think, younger than Bogaerts and Machado. He has a role in the present and might also be part of the Padres’ future. The Padres likely never get him without the terrible misfortune early in the season. Baseball is weird. Kudos to Elsten for reminding us of that.
We mentioned above that the Padres have the best defense and pitching ERA in baseball. If the bullpen improvement is real they likely have half of the championship equation down. The other half is the offense. Here is the current iteration of the Padres lineup:
For all the team’s struggles, the current lineup is looking better than it did in the preseason.
A Troubling Diagnosis, Or Lack Thereof
On Friday afternoon, we learned that Joe Musgrove will be shut down for three weeks due to signs of shoulder inflammation. As is often the case, this injury report doesn’t tell us much. Usually, only extremely mild injuries (e.g. flu) or extremely serious ones (e.g. gored by bison) yield easy-to-interpret injury reports; most others are vague. And Musgrove’s condition is, indeed, hard to decipher. That’s especially true because shoulder inflammation is a symptom, not a diagnosis. Inflammation could represent anything from a mild bursitis to adult onset Still’s disease2. We’re unlikely to know how Musgrove is doing before the three weeks are up.
The good news is that – with the acquisition of Rich Hill and the pending return of Michael Wacha – the Padres do still appear to have five bona-fide, major league-caliber starting pitchers. Having a five-man rotation for three weeks should be survivable. Without a doubt the loss of Musgrove hurts, but perhaps not as much as it would in different circumstances.
The Bear Case
The bear case for the Padres stretch run comes down to one question: did they lose too many winnable games early in the season? They left themselves no margin for error down the stretch. It’s very rational, if you’ve studied this team in depth, to believe they are much better than their record suggests. But at the end of the season the record is all that matters.
Every Series Is The Most Important Series
The Padres have split the first two games with the Dodgers 1-1. This series is the first of many Most Important Series of the Season(s). When you’re in the position the Padres are in, every series is The Most Important Series of the Season. They have the defense, the pitching, and the offense to survive the stretch run. But as has been the case all season, nothing is certain. Well, almost nothing. It’s certain that we’ll be watching exciting baseball down the stretch.
WAR can be hard to understand. It involves hundreds of steps and there are slightly different approximations made by Fangraphs and Baseball Reference – that’s why their numbers are slightly different. But the upshot of the statistic is this: The stat doesn’t say how much better a player is than average, but rather how much better a player is above the theoretical replacement player. The idea behind a replacement player is that there is an abundant pool of talent that is just below being major league quality -- we’re talking about “AAAA” players . Some examples from recent Padres past might be Alfonso Rivas, Brandon Dixon or Brett Sullivan – guys who weren’t totally overmatched in MLB, but who also didn’t make much of an impact. In theory, a team could replace any player on its roster with a replacement player, because they’re abundant and cheap. This is the waterline against which WAR measures players: A player with zero WAR is a replacement-level player, but a player with five WAR would net a team five more wins than a replacement-level player. A team made up entirely of replacement players would be expected to go 48-114 across a full season (historically bad!), so a team’s total WAR tells us how many wins above 48 that team should earn.
The 2022 Padres had 39 total WAR on the roster, which predicts 87 wins. They finished the season 89-73. Imperfect though it is, WAR provides a pretty good estimate of the value a player provides to his team.
It won’t be adult onset Still’s disease
The Padres are now attempting the equivalent of a superior NBA team mounting a comeback down 18 in the third. It's doable, quite doable. But you have to lock down on both ends of the court over and over and over again in order for it to happen. REALLY helps when the other team turns over the ball (e.g. the failures of the teams ahead of SD) but you can't let up. It takes a lot of energy, and you can never afford to fade. It's a narrow path but yesterday was a LeBron chase-down block and fastbreak slam the other way.