Father's (Padres) Day
The Padres show up, but still not with RISP
After game 1 of this weekend’s series with the Rays many Padres fans had seen enough:
In defense of the author, what they’re saying is true, it did feel to many like it was a an example of a good team playing an overrated team. But feeling is not the same as knowing. You can’t know the tendency of a coin to land heads or tails based on one flip. That is not how knowledge accrues. A single game just can’t tell you which team is better and which is overrated. But single games can start narratives and after the first game of the series, a closer than the final score 6-2 loss, the narrative was firmly that this series was the ultimate acid test for the Padres: finally facing real competition and withering in the face of it.
Funny thing, though: The Padres swept the next two games against the Rays.
Fittingly it was on Father’s day, literally Padres day, that what feels like a pivotal game unfolded during which the Padres defeated the “best team in baseball” for the second game in a row to secure a series win. The narrative after this game couldn’t have been more different. Everything seems to be clicking, the Padres are turning the corner. That’s the thing about narratives: They’re ephemeral, they can change at the drop of a hat. They’re not built on a rigorous scrutiny of the relevant processes. They’re stories we tell ourselves based on our feelings about a situation.
The Padres beat the Rays in back to back gritty hard fought playoff-atmosphere games and won the series. We agree it does feel pivotal, but not so much because it indicates a team finally getting it together after a season of lackluster play, but because it’s the expected outcome of luck starting to normalize.
We covered recently that the peripheral indicators suggest that the Padres are a much better team than their mediocre 35-36 record.
It’s so tempting to just look at a team’s record and work backward to determine why they are what their record says they are. The Rays are an incredible 51-24, but a look at their lineup raises a question or two about how sustainable that performance is.
Do we think Yandy Diaz is going to have a .1000 OPS by the end of the year? It’s possible. Is it likely? Harold Ramirez has been mashing as the team’s number 3 hitter. Has he turned over a new leaf in his age 28 season? Or is he more likely to be the .743 career OPS hitter from here on out?
The inverse can be asked about Manny. Is Manny Machado now a .692 OPS hitter? It’s possible, but doesn’t seem likely.
The 2023 Padres’ struggles to date are very clear: to this point they have been the worst team in MLB history hitting with runners in scoring position sitting at a .199 BA. Here is the list of the previously worst teams in MLB history batting with RISP:
While it does seem ominous that the Padres occupy the first and last slot on this list, it’s important to note that the majority of these teams were the worst offenses during baseball’s second deadball era. The only modern era team to make the list was the putrid 2022 Pittsburgh Pirates (or Pyrites given their due-for-regression performance this year). The question we need to ask first is whether we think this Padres lineup is as bad as the worst teams from the deadball era. That’s an obvious no. Next, when dealing with awful performances over a relatively short stretch of time (71 games this season might feel long, but it’s not), the question to ask is whether the results likely represent the underlying skill of the players, or just variance which will regress to the mean. We feel it can be asserted that this year’s Padres are not worse than the most inept offenses during the second deadball era. Thus it is highly likely that the performance by season’s end will have regressed positively. But there’s no guarantee that will happen. Even if the odds of the Padres finishing the season as the worst team with RISP in MLB history are only 1%, those 1% outcomes happen 1 in a hundred instances. You can never be certain with matters of chance.
The theme of this season so far has been “That’s why you play the games’. The Rays had been anointed the class of MLB going into this series, but if you read this tweet today which team would you assume the author rooted for?
The Padres won an important game on Father’s day. Their best win of the year, against their toughest opponent, which also secured the first winning home stand of the year. Everything about that feels pivotal. Only time will tell. But the evidence to date suggests the Padres were very due for a change in fortune. Keep the faith.
