Degree Of Difficulty

Teams Are Not Monolithic

The Padres improved their record to 48-41 with a win over the Texas Rangers on Sunday. Hidden within this is a bifurcation between the performance against teams with winning records and those with records below .500. The Padres have a sterling 32-11 record against teams below .500, but are a sobering 16-30 against teams over-.500. And it’s interesting to consider what’s beneath these numbers.

The Sub-.500’s

The teams the Padres have played with sub-.500 records include the Braves, Guardians, Athletics, Rockies, Pirates, Angels, Marlins, Diamondbacks, Royals, Nationals, and Rangers. What’s interesting here is that at least six of these teams (Braves, Guardians, Angels, Diamondbacks, Royals, and Rangers) entered the season with playoff aspirations. Several likely still think they’re in the playoff hunt. The Angels (43-46), Rangers (44-46), and Diamondbacks (44-46) are nearly .500 teams. The Pirates (38-53) are putrid by record, but are the best run prevention team in the National League (really). The Padres missed the apex version of the Pirates with Paul Skenes’ starts bracketing the series for the second year in a row, but Baily Falter, Andrew Heaney, and Mitch Keller are all turning in outstanding seasons on the mound. The Braves (39-50) are approaching the point of being trade deadline sellers in large part due to losing 6 of the 7 games against the Padres. But despite the Braves’ very bad record they have a positive run differential and don’t fit cleanly alongside the true dregs of the league (Rockies, Nationals, A’s, Marlins). Going 32-11 against this slate of teams isn’t a foregone conclusion.

The Winners

The Padres have gone a combined 16-30 against winning teams, which include the Cubs, Astros, Tigers, Rays, Giants, Yankees, Mariners, Blue Jays, Brewers, Reds, Phillies, and Dodgers. This cohort includes the teams with the four best records in baseball (Tigers, Dodgers, Cubs, Phillies). And you can add more context to get to a better understanding of what underlies the 16-30 record.

Degree Of Difficulty

Cumulatively this cohort has a winning percentage of .571:

To put that in perspective, the Yankees are currently leading the AL Wild Card race with a .544 winning percentage. The Mets are leading the NL Wild Card race with a .571 winning percentage. This cohort isn’t just a little over-.500, it’s a very tough group. In fact had the Padres played the Mets instead of the Reds they would have drawn the toughest 12-team cohort mathematically possible. It’s very safe to say the degree of difficulty was high.

There is some simple further analysis we can do just by looking at the game log:

The very clear difference is what everyone knows at this point: the offense just was not good enough, putting up only 3.13 runs/game. For perspective, the worst offense in baseball is the Kansas City Royals who put up 3.34 runs/game. Of course you would expect that against the best teams in the league offensive output would be worse than usual. But what really jumps out above is that despite the woeful offense, 11 of the losses were still only by 1 run. Six of the wins were also by one run. So 17 of the 46 games were decided by a single run. A small improvement in the offense would go a long way in these types of games.

The Padres also held the best teams in the league to 4.35 runs/game, below the league average of 4.37 runs allowed/game. That’s despite a 12-3 loss to the Yankees when Wandy Peralta was likely tipping pitches, and a 14-0 loss to the Blue Jays when the defense made four costly errors and Alek Jacob imploded.

It’s fascinating to think what the Padres might have been able to accomplish with a league average offensive performance.

We can take the analysis a step further by considering which version of the best teams the Padres played. Teams are constantly going through personnel changes, sometimes due to injury or individual performance, and these changes can be too numerous to track, making absolute precision impossible. But on a nightly basis the most heliocentric player on the team is switched out as the starting pitcher rotation cycles. And this is easy to track. The Tigers are a very different foe with Tarik Skubal on the mound over Jack Flaherty. It’s not a perfect model by any means, but it’s a decent approximation of whether you’re facing the best version of a team. You get the idea. And when you look at which version of these over-.500 teams the Padres faced, the degree of difficulty really starts to come into focus:

This is a list of the starters the Padres faced in each series, and the ERA of the starter at that time (including the outing against the Padres). League average ERA for starting pitchers is around 4.09, and you see above that when the Padres faced the over-.500 teams, 31 of the 46 games were against a starter with a better than league average ERA to that point. That’s not that surprising given that these are the above average teams. But 24 of these starters had an ERA below 3. That is elite. Cumulatively the specific cohort of starters the Padres faced has an unweighted ERA of 3.57 on the season. That would be the 7th best rotation in baseball. Only the Phillies, Tigers, and Brewers boast team starting pitcher ERAs better than 3.57. The above-.500 cohort has an overall starting pitching (including the pitchers the Padres didn’t face) ERA of 3.80:

What this suggests is that the Padres have faced not just one of the toughest cohorts of over-.500 teams, but also saw the best version of many of these teams. And through that, 11 of the 30 losses were in razor thin games. It’s highly rational to think that an improved offense would capture several more wins were the Padres to run the gamut again.

Uncertainty

When the season ends you are, by definition, what your record says you are. But until then there is uncertainty. As it stands the Padres are in possession of the final playoff spot. But there are 73 games left to play. The record against the best teams in the league suggests they are not very likely to succeed in a post-season contest with the upper echelons, but looking beneath the surface suggests that there is a pathway to considerably close the gap. The offense must improve, and the run prevention must persist. But how likely are either of those needs to be realized?

Monday Yu Darvish is slated to make his first appearance of the season. How he performs will cut through a bit of the uncertainty about what the team can expect from him down the stretch. Michael King remains out for an indefinite period of time. The run prevention is extremely likely to continue if both return healthy before season’s end. It’s a lot murkier if neither can return. And it’s not clear the team can do anything to further the chances of either making a healthy return. It’s a matter of fate.

The hope for better offense is just as murky. Jackson Merrill remains mired in the worst slump of his career, opposing pitchers baiting him with just-off-the-plate offerings that he can’t quite hit, but can’t resist. Fernando Tatis Jr. is also in the worst slump of his career, though he took very competitive at bats Sunday and came through with the biggest hit of the game. But both of their slumps are hard to definitively explain, and theories ranging from lingering injury to improper palmar sensorimotor preparation are being put forth to fill the void.

Luis Arraez has had some hits fall recently, but there continues to be a mountain of evidence that something changed over the past year degrading his quality of contact. And it’s not just a “Contact Rate Death Spiral”. He has profoundly worse numbers on pitches in the heart of the zone (ie the very best pitches to hit). He is on pace to surpass his own personal record for pop-outs in a single season which he set last year with 30 (shattering his previous career high of 18), almost entirely incurred after he tore through his left thumb ulnar collateral ligament:

And maybe it’s just a coincidence that his sudden dramatic spike in pop-out rate occurred after he tore the stabilizing ligament of his left hand grip. It might also be a coincidence that the deterioration of his quality of contact in the zone, and precipitous decline in exit velocity also occurred after that injury. Irrespective of the cause, it’s impossible to know how likely Arraez is to be this diminished version of himself the rest of the season. If his struggles are related to the injury he had surgically repaired in October, it can take up to 6 months to see return of ‘fine motor activity’. But usually the definition of fine motor activity is the ability to hold a fork or sign your name legibly. There just isn’t any corpus of data to draw on to inform a timeline for when a unicorn line drive specialist recovering from an unstable pinch grip in his top hand might stop doing this:

So while it’s true that Merrill, Tatis, and Arraez finding their previous form could provide a groundswell of offense (more than enough to close the gap), there just isn’t any lever to pull on to ensure that happens.

And that leaves one avenue to address the team’s greatest needs. Trade. The deadline is ~three weeks away. And there’s no way the above uncertainty will be reconciled by then. But there also isn’t a coherent argument that the Padres should be sellers. There is indeed uncertainty about their outlook on both the offensive and run prevention sides. But that uncertainty is bidirectional. And the roadmap for contention is clear. Improve the offense, maintain the run prevention. That’s not a path that requires trading away the farm. Leo DeVries should be nigh-on untouchable. Incremental improvements at the infamous catcher and left field spots would suffice. Or perhaps a two-way player at second base as some have speculated. Maybe even a sprinkling of long relief. Just enough to keep postseason hopes alive until fate resolves the uncertainty surrounding Darvish, King, Merrill, Tatis, Arraez, and indeed the entire Padres team. It’s time to keep the faith.