The Padres completed back-to-back sweeps Sunday. They’ve managed to get some players back healthy and it’s making a difference. And they’re experimenting with new additions.
Old Friend, New Role
After a resounding win on Friday and a harrowing win on Saturday, the Padres closed out the Pirates series with Stephen Kolek, opting to bring up the converted reliever instead of erstwhile starter Kyle Hart. Kolek spent all of 2024 on the Padres roster as a rule 5 draft pick whose rights the team would have forfeited if they didn’t keep him rostered. Kolek is an interesting prospect. He struggled mightily all last year. But his pitch shapes and stuff+ actually looked pretty good. His struggles were with command, especially his breaking pitches. His sweeper in particular looked very good on stuff+ modeling, but he abandoned it for long stretches of the season, presumably because of early season misses like this:
He spent all of last season in the bullpen, but made his MLB debut as a starter on Sunday. The results were quite good. He pitched 5.1 innings without giving up a run. He did strike out four hitters, but didn’t really do it with swing-and-miss stuff accruing only six whiffs on the day. And he did give up fairly hard contact with an average exit velocity of 93.2 MPH. Including seeing his life flash before his eyes:
But there were some things to like on Sunday, primarily very competitive pitch locations for most of the day:
Courtesy @TooMuchMortons_
Kolek’s calling card is getting ground balls, and he was effective in this regard Sunday. The hardest hit balls of the day had diminutive launch angles. He wasn’t effective enough to declare the Padres have found their fifth starter. But it was enough to ensure he’ll get another look this season.
On the other side of the ball, it’s still hard to believe Fernando Tatis Jr escaped the IL after a HBP and these visuals Friday Night:
He took two fairly uncompetitive swings on balls in play on Saturday before hitting it hard in his final at bat. He hit the ball very hard on Sunday as well, recording terrific bat speeds and exit velocities of 106.7 and 108.1 MPH in his 4th and 6th inning ABs; but both balls were hit right to the shortstop. Neither had healthy launch angles. He fared worse in his other at bats, popping up once and striking out twice on the way to an 0 for 5 day. He’s playing, but he’s undoubtedly experiencing pain in the left forearm. It’s hard to know if that’s affecting his swing at all. It’s something to watch.
Staying healthy has been the biggest challenge of the season. Monday looks to be the day Jackson Merrill will make his return to the lineup. And the team will need the extra firepower as they head to New York to face the Yankees. Though there is an interesting early season trend that the Padres are on the right side of.
Getting REK’d
There’s a curious stat that the Padres are among the league leaders in. In the crucial base/out state of two outs with runners in scoring position (RISP), the Padres hitters are excelling at avoiding striking out, and Padres pitchers are excelling at striking out their opponents. These don’t seem to be small sample size theatrics as both trends are extensions of the teams greater identity: contact heavy offense and a fire-breathing pitching staff. And there’s some reason to think this has been source of win probability the Padres have been harvesting all season.
Through 33 games the Padres are among the best in MLB in how frequently they strike out opposing hitters with two outs and RISP:
And Padres hitters are among the best at avoiding being struck out:
Modern analytics wouldn’t make much of this; after all with two outs there is no possibility for a productive out, and so there isn’t any extra value in making an out on a ball in play versus making an out by strikeout. Or so the reasoning goes. But this misses something: before a ball in play becomes an out, it is simply a ball in play (BIP). And historically, with 2025 being no exception, balls in play tend to lead to a runner reaching base by hit or error about 30% of the time. And with two outs, especially with runners in scoring position, that’s a very big deal. Because a ball in play has a 30% chance to keep the rally going, while a strikeout has 100%1 chance of ending the rally.
A strikeout with two outs and runners in scoring position doesn’t really have a name of its own. But maybe it should. Let’s call a strikeout in this situation a Rally-Ending K (REK). If it’s true that a BIP has some intrinsic value over getting REK’d, that should be quantifiable. It turns out that using changes in win probability yields some surprising results.
We can walk through a simplified example to illustrate the point: Say it’s the bottom of the 8th with two outs in a tied game. There is a runner in scoring position who will score if the hitter reaches base via hit or fielding error, but the inning will end if the batter makes an out of any kind. The win probability for the team at bat starts at 61.69%. If the hitter reaches base and the run scores, the win probability rises to 87.99%. That’s a win probability added (WPA) of 26.3%. If the hitter gets REK’d, the rally ends and the win probability drops to 52.35%, a WPA of -9.34%. The math for the value of simply putting the ball in play is straightforward:
xWPA of BIP = (30% * 26.3%) + (70% * -9.34%)
That works out to an expected value of +1.35% WPA for a BIP. Again, not a hit, just simply putting it into play and avoiding a strikeout. 1.35% WPA alone is not that impressive. But the way this value needs to be treated is as an alternative to getting REK’d, thus it is the change in win probability that properly captures the value of replacing getting REK’d with a BIP:
1.35% - (-9.34%) = +10.69%
This is a gigantic swing in win probability. Over 162 games an increase of 10.69% would mean 17 additional wins.
The swing in win probability is different depending on the inning, including whether the visitor is batting or the home team is batting. The payoff for avoiding getting REK’d is more modest early in the game, and much higher late in the game. It varies depending on the score, with much less value for a BIP when a team is far ahead or behind. But when the score is close, especially when the game is in the later innings, simply avoiding striking out carries significant value. Below is a payoff matrix for a tied game with 2 outs and RISP calculated inning by inning:
When you average it out, the expected win probability added by simply avoiding getting REK’d once in a tied game is around 7%, or close to 11 games over 162 game season. The swing can be as high as 14.25%, or 23 games across the season. There’s more to this obviously; runners in scoring position don’t always score on a hit, and batters occasionally reach base after a dropped third strike. But you get the idea. The swings in win probability are a lot more than first meets the eye.
What this implies is that a team can snatch an advantage by cultivating an approach to hitting that trades off some power output for more contact in the right situations. The Padres have placed emphasis on situational hitting, especially avoiding strikeouts in important situations, and they’ve executed well on this strategy. This is definitely zigging while (much of) the rest of the league zags ever further into the launch angle, pulled fly ball, ignore-the-extra-strikeouts-it’s-worth-it, paradigm. But it’s possible that the Padres approach can differentiate them in a particular type of game. Namely, a close game with good pitching on both sides. The type of game they seem poised to be playing in frequently this season. And hopefully beyond…
Hitting with 2 outs and RISP is a very specific situation. But that situation is more common than you might think. On average there are about 4.4 of these at bats per game, per team. ~700 per season. Currently opposing hitters are getting REK’d in 25.8% of these at bats, on pace to get REK’d 180 times this season. Meanwhile Padres hitters are getting REK’d only 17.33% of the time, on pace for 121 REKs over the season. A projected difference of 59 balls in play with a chance to keep a rally going. That’s not nothing. That’s 15-20 extra rallies extended. Padres pitchers killed eight rallies with strikeouts across just their last five games, including the final K Sunday. Eight high leverage at bats with runners in scoring position where BABIP luck didn’t matter. That’s favorable calculus. And it’s interesting to consider BABIP luck as the Padres enter a series with the Yankees in New York on Monday, where Aaron Judge seems to be reaching Bondsian heights:
Those are truly absurd numbers. And there are some surprising findings when looking under the hood at Judge’s stats:
He’s actually putting up the lowest Home Run Rate, Exit Velocity, and Hard Hit Rate of the past four years, and his ground ball rate is much higher. And at first it’s hard to square that with stats that look like he’s been playing on rookie mode. But these stats make sense when you look at his strikeout rate and batting average on balls in play (BABIP). He has a significantly lower strikeout rate this year, and despite the down-trending exit velocities and hard hit rate, his BABIP is an unbelievable .500. So he’s putting many more balls in play by not striking out as much, and the balls in play have been falling for hits at unprecedented rates. If his BABIP remains in this range he will shatter the all time record which has stood since before the advent of Penicillin:
In fact no player has ever sustained a BABIP as high as Judge’s through his first 153 plate appearances of the season, though apparently Jared Triolo came close two years ago?
It’s unbecoming to suggest a player as good as Judge is getting lucky, but nothing is monocausal. Every outcome is some combination of skill and luck. There’s probably some luck at work here. Stating that isn’t taking anything away from him. He’s an all-time great hitter. And given Judge’s strengths this season (reducing strikeouts, increasing BABIP), if he comes up to bat with 2 outs and RISP it’s going to raise an interesting dilemma for the Padres… lean into the team’s strength? Or lean away from the strength of an all-time great on an all-time hot streak? For what it’s worth Judge’s OPS of 1.287 is significantly higher than the 1.000 OPS that’s accrued when a player is walked. In case that knowledge comes in handy over the next three days.
For purposes of this though experiment we’re considering strikeouts leading to an out 100% of the time for simplicity’s sake, even though hitters reach base after striking out on a wild pitch or passed ball an infinitesimal part of the time.
Excellent stuff again Archi! It's a great follow on to your conversation with John Gennaro on the Section 1904 podcast.
Maybe you could mention somewhere here when you appear on other podcasts?
Also you got good mentions last week on both Ben & Woods and the 97.3 Padres Roundtable about your Compounding post. Plus 17 comments on the Reddit post for that, whoa! (just ignore the fact that most of those comments were 2 people sniping at each other about Xander...)
Interesting concept but I see a need for a little more nuance. Using the 30% of bips going for hits is a bit too simplistic.
The kind of contact matters significantly. Bunts don't go for hits 30% of the time. Nor do weak ground balls. This is why people don't bunt with 2 outs and RISPs.
A better way of thinking about it might be to maximize your xba, not just minimizing your strikeout rate.
A deeper analysis would include walks. With the bases loaded down a run or in a tie game in the bottom of the 9th in a 3-0 count, swinging and making contact with a 30% chance of getting a hit is suboptimal to taking and potentially drawing a walk.