Differentiation

The Playoff Prospectus

The most interesting regular season of our lifetimes came to an end Monday when the Mets and Braves split an emergency double header, both making the playoffs as a result. The second game of the double header was played at an absurdly fast pace finishing in only 2 hours and 13 minutes. After abbreviated post-game celebrations the Braves hopped on a plane headed for San Diego a little more than 24 hours before the start of the Wild Card series Tuesday. Before the games start we’re going to take a look at the version of the 2024 Padres we will see in the playoffs, and consider the only relevant question: whether they are good enough to go all the way.

Defense

First base is likely to oscillate between Donovan Solano and Luis Arraez. This might be the only clearly subpar position on the field. First base usually is. Shortstop was a position of defensive strength for much of the season, Ha-Seong Kim may have been the teams best individual defender. But they will be without him during the playoffs due to a lingering shoulder injury. In his stead Xander Bogaerts will continue to play shortstop and Jake Cronenworth will continue to play second. This is a solid if not spectacular tandem. Defense behind the plate has been bolstered by the late season addition of Elias Diaz who will backup Kyle Higashioka. The outfield is a very clear strength made up of playmakers, all former shortstops. Jackson Merrill and Fernando Tatis have played gold glove caliber defense. Jurickson Profar does not have their range but is a more than competent left fielder and made one of the wildest outfield plays of the season showing off athleticism and baseball IQ. Manny Machado sealed the Padres postseason berth with a play only he could make:

The Defense is good enough.

Starting Rotation

The Padres former aces Joe Musgrove and Yu Darvish have returned to join burgeoning aces Dylan Cease and Michael King. All four are healthy. A starting rotation with pitchers like this is a weapon in short series.

The starting rotation is good enough.

Bullpen

The Padres bullpen is elite. And without a doubt the September scuffles from Robert Suarez raise some concern. But his struggles had an identifiable cause: predictability. Throwing the same pitch again and again. Nothing but the fastball. Even when a hitter was repeatedly fouling it off and getting to better and better swing timing, neutralizing the effectiveness of the velocity with each pitch. And in his final outing, he made a noticeable adjustment:

Suarez’ final outing of the season ended with four straight changeups, the last of which induced a groundout to second base to secure home field advantage for the Padres in the wild card round. Mixing in some pitch sequencing isn’t a panacea, but it’s a step in the right direction and will at the very least make for a more complex scouting report. The real strength of the bullpen is how deep the quality goes:

The pitcher who’s likely third in line to close games has this in his arsenal:

The bullpen is good enough.

Offense

The Padres offense finished 8th in MLB in runs/game. This is good enough. But the offense deserves a little more description. Because it’s a really interesting offense to see in the year 2024.

The Padres led MLB in several categories. They had the most hits in the majors:

They had the fewest strikeouts:

They had the highest batting average:

They were the best contact hitting team in baseball. But that’s not the defining feature of their offensive identity.

Differentiation

The analytics revolution that started in baseball around the turn of the 21st century changed the sport forever. The lessons learned from the research efforts of Bill James, Tom Tango, and the Oakland front office led by Billy Bean altered our fundamental understanding of the game. In 2003, Moneyball was published, and with time, it became extremely influential: its lessons form the backbone of the sport’s dogma up to today. The orthodoxy contained in Moneyball is now so ingrained that it’s easy to forget how controversial it was at the time, but it was controversial. After all: The book and movie Moneyball aren’t just about new ways of doing things – they’re about the intense resistance to new ways of doing things.

You can get a sense of how long it took for the Moneyball approach to become conventional wisdom by looking at the league-wide adoption of one the analytics revolution’s key insights: Sacrifice bunting is bad for scoring. Here, we charted the total sacrifice bunts in the league by year¹

The understanding that bunting was costing teams runs rather than ‘manufacturing’ them didn’t really take root until 2011. Even then, it took almost a decade for bunting to reach its nadir. And there’s something important to realize here: When the analytics revolution swept through the league, most teams were not using data effectively to make decisions. And what that meant is that a team could gain a real competitive advantage by having its players rigidly adhere to the data driven rules-of-thumb of sabermetric baseball. But as the chart above shows, these days, every team has figured it out. The knowledge that used to give the A’s a competitive advantage has been commoditized. Using Moneyball wisdom now, doesn’t get you an edge – it just keeps you from falling behind. If you want to find a competitive advantage in 2024, you have to look elsewhere. And that’s what the 2024 Padres have done.

Situational Hitting

Baseball has accepted that a power-first approach typically maximizes runs scored across the course of a season, so that’s the approach they take. But the ‘24 Padres are different: They’ve emphasized situational hitting. Why? If prioritizing power over contact generally maximizes runs – and pretty much everyone agrees that it does – why would a team ever deviate from that?

Runs vs Wins

The sabermetric revolutionaries of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s correctly understood that sacrifice bunting costs runs, and that sacrificing power for contact, generally, costs runs. And if the season was one long game where the goal was to accumulate the most runs, then the run maximizing strategy would be the dominant strategy to pursue at all times. A Newtonian law of the game. But the baseball season isn’t played like one long game where whoever has the highest run differential at the end wins. It’s broken up into many nine inning games and whoever has the lead at the end of the nine innings wins that game. The end of the game is an irreversible event. And so it can make sense to deviate from the path of scoring the most runs when there’s a different path that offers a higher probability of scoring enough runs to secure the win.  Sometimes you only need one run to win. The final weeks of the season provided stark examples that the Padres have sewn this understanding into the fabric of their offensive identity. They understand that they can differentiate from the rest of the league by deviating from the run maximizing strategy when there is a win maximizing strategy.

Best Applications

The final two weeks of the season showcased the best examples of situational hitting, and we’ll highlight them again here. The opening game against the White Sox was tied 2-2 to start the bottom of the 10th. With the free runner on second, Fernando Tatis Jr. was at the plate. Tatis is the Padres best power hitter, indeed one of the best in the league. His A-swing will lead to the most run scoring across the course of the season. You want him to take his A-swing as often as possible. But in this particular instance a single would likely win the game. And this was the swing he chose to take:

That swing would fit in a phone booth. It was 72.8 MPH and 7.1 feet long, both far below Tatis’ season averages. Here’s a closer look at the swing’s mechanics:

That is a line drive swing. It’s not his A-swing. He wasn’t trying to score the most runs possible – he was trying to score enough runs to win. In this case, the Padres needed one run – an opposite field single got them the same outcome as an upper-deck homer. The key here is that the team had gathered enough information across the game to understand how many runs it needed to win; they didn’t have to maximize run expectancy to maximize win expectancy.  It’s good for the Padres if a player like Tatis can recognize a situational hitting opportunity and deliver. This has been a point of emphasis for the 2024 Padres since February, and this is an example of Tatis doing exactly what he needed to do when the situation called for it.

You don’t want Tatis hunting singles all the time, because he’s capable of this:

In almost every at bat of the season you want him taking these swings. But you can see how sometimes, the game might call for something other than a run maximizing strategy.

Here’s a more nuanced application of situational hitting from last Sunday’s game against the White Sox, our pick for the best at bat of the season:

In the bottom of the 8th, Jurickson Profar entered his at-bat with a runner on second in a tie game. This was his swing at the first pitch:

That was a 76.6 MPH swing, which is a monster cut for Profar – his average bat speed is 71.8 MPH. It was a good swing decision, because a single here doesn’t necessarily win the game. A run is nice, sure, but with no outs, the possibility of a big inning is still there, and with the doubt about how many runs will be needed to win the game, taking a run maximizing approach still makes sense. With no strikes, he could afford to swing from his heels and stay alive for another crack if he whiffed. In that instance, the run maximizing strategy was basically the same as the win maximizing strategy.

But a few pitches later in the at-bat, the situation had changed in two important ways. First, Profar took a second strike. A few foul balls later, pitcher Fraser Ellard threw a wild pitch that put Brandon Lockridge on third. So, the situation had transformed: Any ball in play had a good chance of scoring a run. And one more swing-and-miss would lead to an unproductive out. The situation called for an adjusted approach, and – after working the count to 2-2 – it looks like Profar adjusted:

That swing was 67.8 MPH and had an ultra-short length of 6.9 feet. He switched from damage mode to contact mode as the situation changed pitch to pitch. And he executed a productive at bat that got the Padres the lead. The risk calculus of sticking with a run maximizing strategy had shifted. The reward for simply putting a ball in play had increased, and the penalty for swinging and missing had increased dramatically. He correctly recognized that the win maximizing strategy had changed despite the run maximizing strategy being the same.

Wonderful statistical tools like weighted on base average (wOBA) and the run expectancy matrix implicitly assume that the goal is to maximize run expectancy at all times. And the 2024 Padres have differentiated themselves by understanding that the real goal is to maximize win expectancy. That is: They know that there’s a time for small ball. That’s the good news. The bad news is that Padres have at least one instance from the last week of the season that raise the question of whether they’ve over-indexed on this style of play.  

Worrisome Applications

Last Thursday’s game against the Dodgers shows that the Padres might not be experts at knowing when to throw the switch from “get as many runs as possible” to “just get SOMETHING”. The Padres were leading 1-0 in the top of the 6th with runners on first and second and no outs when Jackson Merrill, perhaps the best hitter on the team, came to the plate. And this is what the Padres did:

That is clearly not a run maximizing strategy. Not with Merrill at the plate – if it had been Bryce Johnson or some other end-of-the-bench bat, the move would be more understandable. But this was a good hitter being asked to make a near-automatic out, and the Dodgers have averaged over five runs scored per game and were still due to hit four more times. Small ball against a run-scoring juggernaut with the game only a little more than halfway over is a decision that should be questioned. They need to get these decisions right in the playoffs. Because there won’t be second chances. Over-indexing on a particular style of play without understanding which situations that style is best suited for is the wrong kind of differentiation. That is exactly the strategy that the observations of the early 2000’s blew out of the water.

There was a time when simply sticking to a mantra of ‘never bunt’ or ‘small ball is bad’ gave a team a leg up on the league. But that’s no longer the case. The 2024 Padres have won a lot of games playing small ball across the season, but it’s important that they understand that that’s not because small ball was actually good all along.  Their successful differentiation came from applying the shift away from the run maximization strategy at the proper moment. Phrased another way: when playing small ball, timing is everything.

Offensive Identity

If you’ve watched the 2024 Padres all season you’ve undoubtedly heard their mantras, often spoken by Mike Shildt in his postgame pressers. Be elite adjusters. Do what the game calls for. The identity that most stands out on the 2024 Padres is a focus on situational awareness. Being comfortable moving away from the orthodoxy when there’s an alternative path that gives them the best chance to win.

There is one offensive statistic that doesn’t focus on scoring runs. A statistic that tries to capture the a team’s ability to execute a win maximizing strategy when it matters most, irrespective of whether it’s run maximizing. A statistic whose only inputs are win probability and the leverage of the moment. In this mercurial statistic² there was one team that stood above the rest:

Clutch hitting is not supposed to be a skill. And perhaps it’s not. Any outcome in life can always be due to luck. But almost nothing is monocausal. After a season like that of the 2024 Padres offense, you simply have to ask whether the Padres leading MLB in clutch performance was more than just luck. Was some part of that due to their process? Where does their position atop the clutch hitting leaderboard belong on this matrix:

Prospectus

The 2024 Padres are good enough to win the World Series in every facet of their game. And they have a clear identity on offense, one that differentiates them from many teams in the league. But this is the playoffs. Short series where nothing is guaranteed. Better teams have been knocked out in the early rounds, and worse teams have gone all the way. That’s why they play the games. Game 1 starts this afternoon. We’ll see you there.

1. Data is prorated to 162 game seasons to normalize the 1994 and 1995 seasons which were shortened by the strike, and the 2020 season, which was shortened by COVID.

2. The statistic “Clutch” compares how much win probability a team’s offense adds in high leverage at bats compared to context neutral at bats.