First Impressions

And Familiar Reflections

The Padres opened 2025 with a four game sweep of the Braves in a rematch of last season’s Wild Card playoff round. Last season the Padres didn’t get their first sweep until June. And the Padres hadn’t completed a four game sweep since 2021. It’s the first time the team has started 4-0 since 1984, one of the most important years in franchise history. But what really stood out besides the 4-0 start is the way the team played. There was a fascinating sequence in the seventh inning of game one, which would seem to be a statement about the identity of the 2025 Padres.

Tied 4-4 in the bottom of the seventh with no outs Elias Diaz singled, bringing Fernando Tatis Jr. to the plate. Tatis had already stolen two bases, scored a run, and collected a pair of hits including this 112 MPH ‘single’ two innings earlier:

Tatis would work the count to 3-1 and got a good pitch to hit from Hector Neris:

That was a very healthy cut, but Tatis couldn’t quite square it up running the count full to 3-2. And this is when things got very interesting.

As soon as the count became 3-2 Mike Shildt decided to pinch run for Elias Diaz with Jason Heyward. It’s not unusual to pinch run late in a close game to get more speed on the bases, but waiting until a full count to do so is very unusual. And Diaz was not injured. It implied there was a strategic reason for the change. And it became clear what that was fairly quickly.

As soon as Heyward reached first base he took an aggressive lead, drawing a throw over from Neris. Heyward dove back safely, and then got right back up and took the same aggressive lead, drawing a second throw. Here’s the sequence:

Neris had now used both of his disengagements, and Heyward took an even bigger lead. Here’s the comparison with the edge of the grass as a reference point:

Heyward is not a speedster, he ranked in the 36th percentile in sprint speed last year. But he was clearly signaling his intent to try to swipe second. With good reason:

You can see second baseman Ozzie Albies looking down dejectedly during the play. Here’s why: prior to Heyward running this is how the Braves’ defense was aligned against Tatis:

Now here’s a still frame of where Tatis hit that ball:

What would have been an easy play, perhaps a double play, is now a single because Albies had to move to cover second base. Tatis punched the ball right through the vacated space. Textbook hit and run tactics. Tatis is very good at this, last season we saw him make swing adjustments when the situation called for it. What’s very telling on this play is that Tatis actually got the exact same pitch on 3-1 and on the 3-2 hit and run:

The fifth and sixth pitch are not only the same pitch type and shape, they are in the identical location (their circles are completely overlapping in the graphic above). Yet this is the swing Tatis put on the 3-1 pitch:

Note the full extension:

That’s a power stroke. His bat speed was 75.2 MPH and swing length was 6.7 ft. He was trying to hit that 112 MPH.

Now here is the close in replay of his swing on 3-2 hit and run:

Tatis’ bat speed was 71.3 MPH, and swing length was 6.2 ft. That is a super short inside/out swing meant for contact, and specifically to drive the ball the other way into the gap vacated by Albies who is forced to cover second base due to Heyward’s well publicized attempted steal. This is clutch hitting. Executing what the moment calls for.

This entire sequence appears to be a set piece. To recap: with Elias Diaz on first Tatis was allowed to work the at bat and try to get into a favorable hitters count. He did so and got a good pitch to hit on 3-1 and put a powerful swing on it. This is good situational baseball: a hitter with Tatis’ power can drive in even a plodding runner like Diaz from first base. But Tatis fouled the pitch off. And suddenly, like being dealt a new card in blackjack, the situation changed. Jason Heyward was immediately put in to pinch run for Diaz, and let everyone in the stadium know his intent to steal second, baiting Neris to use both his disengagements with enormous leads. Tied 4-4 with no outs in the bottom of the seventh the Braves can’t afford to be indifferent about a runner stealing second. Ozzie Albies has to vacate his defensive position to cover the potential throw to second base. And Tatis shortens up and punches a soft liner through the now gaping hole on the right side of the infield.

Statcast will record Tatis’ single as a poorly hit ball with an exit velocity of 89.2 MPH. WAR and wOBA will count it as a contemptible single, hardly better than walk. In reality it was a game changing play. After the single put runners on first and third the Padres’ win probability jumped to 81.9%. To put that in perspective, had Tatis instead lead off the inning with a solo home run the Padres win probability would have jumped to a very similar 82.28%. One of the key blind spots in the new WAR-centric orthodoxy is that context matters very much when it comes to winning games. This orthodoxy posits that players are essentially a collection of outcomes that are randomly distributed across the season. Tatis is worth X number of singles, doubles, home runs etc. across the season, and it so happened that one of those singles occurred in that moment, so it shouldn’t be weighted any higher than a single in any other context, and certainly shouldn’t be considered an outcome on par with a home run. That Tatis’ single raised the Padres win probability to within a fraction of a percent of what a solo home run would have is considered purely a matter of chance, and not an indicator of his quality as a hitter.

The statistics that dominate the new orthodoxy often fail to capture situationally specific information, and frequently misinterpret outcomes as due to luck, when in fact they are due to that player’s agency. Take for example what Tatis did next: with Aaron Bummer now in to pitch for the Braves, Tatis took second on a ‘Wild Pitch’:

The wild pitch designation assigns all of the agency of the outcome to the pitcher, Tatis is just a passive recipient of some good luck. But that play has the DNA of a stolen base. Tatis was the creator there. Bummer was unlucky that a pitch in the dirt that his catcher actually handled pretty well happened while a baserunner like Tatis was on first. The Wild Pitch designation distorts the understanding of how value was created in this play.

This fascinating sequence ended with an unmissable irony. With runners on second and third Luis Arraez found himself with a two strike count. And he did what he does better than anyone in baseball: he avoided striking out.

This was ultimately the play that scored the winning run for the Padres. It raised the win probability up to 87.59% (and likely higher than that given the Padres deep bullpen). Yet in driving in the winning run, Luis Arraez accrued negative WAR¹.

What the Padres seem to have internalized is considering game flow, situational context, and elevating wins over accruing back of the baseball card statistics. Fernando Tatis Jr. undoubtedly has aspirations to win an MVP award, and contact hitting will not get him there. Yet when the situation calls for it he’s leading by example, sacrificing favor from the new orthodoxy for Padres win probability.

In years past it’s been hard to identify a durable team culture. Padres teams often have that etch-a-sketch quality: the roster shakeups at the end of the season erase whatever was there. But our biggest takeaway from the opening series in 2025 is the familiarity of this brand of baseball. We saw this in 2024: doing what the game calls for. An approach that differentiated the Padres from much of the league, and indeed from the worst versions of themselves in years past. It’s unwise to draw too firm a conclusion from such a small sample of games, but our first impression of the 2025 Padres is that this is still the grit squad.

1. One reason WAR is difficult to discuss is its innumerable iterations. Here we are referring to traditional WAR calculations based on wOBA and its derivatives for which a sacrifice fly appears only in the denominator.