Expectations
These were not ours
The 2024 Padres have given up 47 runs through their first seven games. They’ve also scored 47 runs through their first seven games. That’s on pace for 1,087 runs scored and 1,087 runs allowed on the season. Since the league went to a 162 game schedule only one team has ever scored over 1,000 runs (1999 Cleveland Indians: 1,009), and only two teams have ever given up over 1,000 runs1 (1996 Tigers: 1,103, 1999 Rockies: 1,028)2. No team has both scored, and allowed 1,000 runs. This is small sample size mayhem. And this early season chaos makes for effective camouflage of the team’s true identity which remains very much at large. The team’s success was supposedly predicated on elite run prevention paired with good-enough run production. Maybe that’s who they are and we’ll see it emerge as the season goes on. But nobody had “on pace to both score and allow the most runs ever” on their 2024 Padres bingo card.
The early season makes drawing conclusions from the outcomes extremely fraught. But it’s a little easier to gain insight from process analysis since processes are not as subject to luck.
Processing the Processes
One process on clear display has been the team hunting slivers of win probability on the margins of the game. The Padres have been extremely platoon heavy at 3B and CF with the more favorable L/R matchup dictating who started the game (Tyler Wade and Graham Pauley at 3B vs RHP, Eguy Rosario vs LHP. Jackson Merrill in CF vs RHP and Jose Azocar vs LHP). Platoon switching is fairly garden variety margin hunting. The team’s taken it further in other areas. In the first game of the home series against the Giants the Padres found themselves up 2-1 in the 5th inning with runners on second and third and one out. Jurickson Profar was on third with Jackson Merrill coming to the plate. Manager Mike Schildt took this moment to make an odd substitution, pinch running Jose Azocar for Profar. Azocar might be the fastest player on the team and the substitution was clearly about chasing the marginal probability of scoring a run via productive out. It nearly worked, Jackson Merrill hit a sharp grounder to a drawn in Thairo Estrada who slickly fielded and fired a strike to home plate to just beat a sliding Azocar who was tagged out by a few inches.
The Padres have been taking a much more aggressive approach to bullpen usage. No Padres starter has gone six innings. Some of this has been due to the oddities of the start of the season with two isolated games against the Dodgers in Korea followed by a full week layoff before the greater MLB opening day. This rest period may have given the Padres more leeway to deploy bullpen arms early and often without risk of overtaxing. But in the first home game against the Giants, Yu Darvish was pulled after walking the first batter in the top of the sixth inning with only 78 pitches thrown and the Padres leading 2-1. But Darvish was facing the heart of the Giants lineup for the third time, and as Pads Above Replacement has covered, the third time through the order carries a balloon payment to the expected ERA of starting pitchers3. Tom Cosgrove was brought on in high-leverage relief. He got the job done and the Padres eventually got the win. We didn’t see many of these aggressive early substitutions when the starter was dealing in 2023. And we can’t know the exact reasoning behind it. It’s possible that the team just wants Darvish on a limited pitch count this early in the season. Michael King, Dylan Cease, and Matt Waldron were all pulled before reaching five innings pitched in their respective starts. It may be that these decisions were dictated by game script and early season conditioning considerations. But it may very well be a durable strategy. Time will tell.
There’s an obvious culture change at work within the bullpen itself. Robert Suarez has already recorded a four out save and Mike Schildt went on record to say he was ready to ask Suarez to do it again in the home opener. He didn’t have to because Yuki Matsui pitched five outs of scoreless relief. Matsui has been sharp in his four outings and his split finger looks like a real weapon:
Courtesy @PitchingNinja
That is unhittable. The best the batter can do with that is recognize it early enough not to swing. It’s probable that Matsui and Suarez will get the late game high-leverage innings.
The middle innings remain undecided. The team clearly hopes Tom Cosgrove can be a third high leverage arm. But he was torched for six runs in only a third of an inning in his second appearance against the Giants. The six runs came via consistent loud contact including two home runs. Cosgrove was stellar in his 2023 rookie campaign with a 1.75 ERA in 54 games in relief. But as some have noted those sterling numbers were accompanied by some concerning indicators. Cosgrove’s 2023 xFIP was 4.91. Cosgrove is a tough player to forecast because his success is dependent on a combination of unusual mechanics and enormous differences in the speed and movement of his off-speed pitches. He technically throws three pitches, but his four seam fastball and sinker both clock in around 91 mph and don’t have drastically different shapes. It’s his air bending 77 mph slider that makes his 91 mph fastballs feel a whole lot faster.
Courtesy @PitchingNinja
The challenge for the opposing hitter is essentially timing up a slow fastball, or a very slow but very bendy slider. Hitters will look foolish when they guess wrong but there will be some thunderous contact when they get the pitch they’re looking for.
It’s worth spending a moment on the idea of expected stats and the future of this branch of analytics. Expected stats, the xBA and xERA (and xFIP) that you see are statistics derived from the expected outcomes of events based on statcast data. And that’s a good place to go looking for meaningful information this early in the season. Statcast data is going to continue to revolutionize analytics as it becomes the key input for ever more complex modeling and prediction. But even just ground level data can provide some insight into the Padres player who has shown the most noticeable difference between 2023 and early 2024: Joe Musgrove (honorable mention to Jake Cronenworth)
Starting with the Good: Musgrove has the longest outing of any Padres starting pitcher thus far going 5.2 innings in his last start against the Giants. That’s pretty much where the good stops. He’s been touched up badly in both of his outings carrying a 9.72 ERA, and has a K/9 of 5.4 which is approaching position-player territory. There’s some evidence that there’s bad process behind these outcomes. Here is a simple pitch speed comparison between 2023 Joe and 2024 Joe:
He’s suffered loss of velocity on every pitch type. Not massive, but very consistent. His very bad outcomes so far this year are in line with his expected outcomes:
The 2024 sample is small but this is a bit nerve wracking. It doesn’t suggest it’s just bad luck. Again, the 2024 Padres path to success is supposed to be elite run prevention. Joe Musgrove is a load bearing pillar of that strategy. The easiest way to hand-wave away the above is to just say it’s early and he’s still playing himself into shape. Let’s hope.
Enough Analysis
We can bandy about advanced stats until the cows come home but the bottom line is unless the pitching dramatically improves our xwOBACON is cooked. The Padres are off to a 3-4 start and that’s not great. But there have already been great moments. And we should cherish those:
Courtesy @Padres
Graham Pauley is in the Show because he has a strong hit tool, lightning quick hands, and a very good idea of the strike zone, combined with a near mechanically perfect swing. That culminated in elite production in the minor leagues last year. Make no mistake, he’s on the Padres out of desperate need, but he didn’t look overmatched at the plate. And his first big league hit was taking one of the best closers in the game deep. Doesn’t get much sweeter than that.
Courtesy @MLBPipeline
Jackson Merrill is the team’s top prospect. He was a shortstop until a little over two months ago. Now he’s the team’s starting CF. That’s kind of hilariously bad from a roster construction standpoint, but he’s looked just fine in center, and he has the athletic pedigree of a potential star. He was pretty thin when he was drafted in the late first round out of high school. But he’s developed a power hitter’s frame since then. Hitting his first MLB homerun by going oppo in a night game a Petco is pretty rarified air. There’s a player here to be sure.
Perhaps the most tantalizing consideration thus far is whether Tatis might come all the way back. There are certainly moments when it seems so.
Courtesy @JimRussellSD
He’s set a career high in exit velocity already (a 116.7 mph single off Michael Grove). But watching him play you can’t help but feel this is a version of Tatis that has cancelled his subscription to Cycle World. He’s not exhibiting the reckless abandon of his first couple years. That might leave some feeling maybe he’s lost a step. But it may also just be a sign that he’s finally developed a patina of risk aversion. From a team culture perspective the directive may be to maximize his durability and availability even at the expense of some entertainment - Tatis’ brand as it were. But other times it looks like it’s still right there, beneath the surface, waiting for the right moment to be unleashed.
Courtesy @blackwings2011
Peaks and Valleys
The 2023 season and especially the offseason were unusually emotional for a professional sports team given the gravity of a beloved owner’s passing. Thoughts about the legacy he’s left are going to be with us all season long. And this is baseball so there are going to be some peaks, and unavoidably, some valleys. When we find ourselves in the deep we’d be well served to remember the message captured by the supremely talented Ivan Burgueno (@IvanBurgueno_):
We’re going to be alright.
Before the league moved to a 162 game schedule a number of teams accomplished the ignominious feat of giving up 1,000 runs in a season but, like, that was the Cleveland Spiders and Louisville Colonels. Teams of civil war pensioners and the narrow survivors of cholera epidemics. Not quite apples to apples.
Darvish is better than many pitchers when facing the order a third time but his performance still falls off relative to the first two times through the order