Home Field Advantage

Strategic Decision Making

Sunday marked the end of the toughest stretch of baseball to date. The Padres finished 13 games against the Dodgers and Giants with an 8-5 record, nominally tied for first place in the NL West with a record of 74-57, and 4.5 games ahead of the Mets in the Wild Card standings. This is unquestionably a good outcome. But with ambitions beyond merely appearing in October, even hard-earned achievement cannot place the team’s process beyond reproach.

Did Enough

The Padres did enough in their bouts with the Giants and Dodgers to give themselves a real chance at winning the National League West, and there is even a shot to finish with a good enough record to secure home field advantage in the divisional round of the playoffs. And this is very important. The Padres are a much better team in Petco than on the road. Part of this is the unrivaled atmosphere of Petco Park and the enormous crowds that are a testament to the uncommon vision of Peter Seidler and the stewardship of the team’s management, who continue to invest in his legacy. But a big part of the success is the atmospherics of Petco, and the fact that the team is built around its unique features.

Last week saw the second start from JP Sears, an incredibly fly ball prone pitcher with unique pitches and release points, and a thesis for why he may be effective playing in Petco. In the first inning we got to see a stark example of why the incremental advantages of pitching in Petco might unlock some value:

A few inches further and this is out of the reach of even Fernando Tatis Jr. Petco’s ability to shave distance from fly balls is a real and measurable phenomenon:

Nick Pivetta was an elite strikeout pitcher his entire career, but his fly-ball prone pitch mix led to trouble with home runs in the very home run friendly confines of Citizens Bank Park, and the absurdly short dimensions down the line in Fenway. It’s probably not a coincidence that moving to Petco has led Pivetta to a career low HR/9 and unlocked a borderline Cy Young campaign:

The first inning Sunday again exhibited how even a few inches less travel can lead to wild swings in win probability:

The Padres have played to a 43-22 record at Petco, tied with the Brewers for the best home record in baseball. And it’s not an exaggeration to say that chasing down home field advantage in the playoffs could be the very difference between appearance and deliverance in the later days of October.

The Winning Formula

It’s deep enough in the season for the Padres’ success to be well understood. They are an elite run prevention team. Through Sunday the Padres have given up the second fewest runs in baseball with 491, behind only the Texas Rangers with 483. They’ve done this despite an extremely turbulent starting pitching rotation which has seen 14 different pitchers start games this season. Nick Pivetta, Michael King, Yu Darvish, and Dylan Cease appear likely to form the post-season rotation. The bullpen is deep, and elite. Likely the best in baseball.

Where they struggle, as they have all season, is on offense. On the season the Padres rank 22nd in runs/game, 29th in home runs, 26th in slugging%, 21st in OPS, and 22nd in runs scored:

But here the landscape has shifted seismically. The additions of Ryan O’Hearn, Ramon Laureano, and Freddy Fermin represented an overhaul of an offense that had fielded AAAA solutions for much of the season. And this has rendered the cumulative season offensive statistics obsolete.

14% of the season’s at bats were taken by players who are not going to be playing for the Padres the rest of the season, and the cumulative production from this cohort was astoundingly bad:

The Padres current roster has been far more productive:

But even here, the contributions of the players added at the deadline are underweighted. There’s no perfect way to do this, but the best way to project the type of offense the Padres can expect down the stretch is to look at the season-long production from all of the currently rostered players, including those just arrived. This presumes that O’Hearn, Laureano, and Fermin will perform for the Padres similarly to how they performed for their prior teams. Thus far there’s been no reason to think that won’t be the case. And taking this into account the projection becomes interesting:

Indeed, since the trade deadline the team has scored 4.7 runs/game, a mark that would be 10th in the league just behind the Phillies and just ahead of the Mariners.

But they still project below league average in home run rate (albeit by a much slimmer margin than before the trade deadline). This places more leverage on having optimized lineup sequencing in order to cash in on the increased base traffic. And lineup sequencing is something the team can control.

Lineup Optimization

After the series in Los Angeles last weekend we wrote about how Ryan O’Hearn had been in a marginal role, either as a pinch hitter or DNP in 40% of the games since arriving to the Padres. O’Hearn has since started six straight games, batting in the important 4th spot in the order each time. This is tremendous progress towards lineup optimization. This move was made easier due to the absence of Jackson Merrill who’s been sidelined with an ankle injury, clearing space in the lineup to insert another left handed bat. Gavin Sheets has also gotten playing time in left field as a result. Both hitters have been productive, including providing slugging which the lineup needs most.

Over that span Luis Arraez has continued to occupy the 2nd spot in the order, and this late in the season it’s fair to continue to question whether this is the optimal way to deploy him. 2025 has been far and away the worst season of Arraez’s career. We’ve written about this extensively, but there’s reason to continue to explore this, because the season is in its final stages, and conversations about Arraez seem to be stuck in a rut. There are two camps locked in internecine discourse about Arraez, we’ll call them the ‘Three-time Batting Champion’ camp and the ‘Singles Merchant’ camp. And both are overlooking what should be the focus of discussion of Arraez’s role on the 2025 Padres.

Three-time Batting Champion Camp

The problem with the statement “he’s a three-time batting champion” is the use of the present tense. While it’s true he is, and will always be, in possession of the three trophies, the implication of invoking that pedigree is that he’s still the player that amassed the three batting titles. The real qualification was that for the first five years in the league Arraez was an elite hitter, irrespective of hardware. From 2019-2023 Luis Arraez was one of the most productive hitters in major league baseball with a 123 wRC+, the same mark as Kyle Schwarber, Willson Contreras, Marcus Semien, and a top 50 mark in the league. Referring to Arraez as a three-time batting champion is a facile description of what Arraez accomplished his first five seasons in the league.

Singles Merchant Camp

2022 and 2023 were Arraez’s best seasons when he maintained a wRC+ of 130, just behind Alex Bregman, and ahead of Vladimir Guerrero Jr. Over that span he had a wOBA of .359, the 16th best mark in baseball just behind Kyle Tucker and ahead of Manny Machado. The observation that batting average was over-indexed as marker of run production is now 25 years old, but there is still an eager contingent of detractors who make the same mistake as ‘Three-time Batting Champion’ camp, only in reverse. They confuse Arraez’s pedigree from 2019-2023 as an empty calories singles merchant.

Luis Arraez: Productive Hitter

From 2019-2023 Arraez underwent a transformation as a hitter. He entered the league with excellent strike zone awareness and paired his high contact rates with good plate discipline earning enough walks to put up very good on-base numbers and strong OPS:

His 2023 season was the first in which he was moved into the heart of the order and asked to drive in more runs. His walk rates plummeted as he found success swinging early and often, and his quality of contact was some of the most consistent in the league with the smallest standard deviation in exit velocity and launch angle in baseball. There was no more consistent hitter in the league, and this was the apotheosis of his abilities. He simply became the best version of what he’d been since entering the league: a very productive hitter.

Something Changed

This was the player the Padres thought they were trading for at the start of the 2024 season. And that hitter was absolutely worthy of hitting 2nd, even in an era contemptuous of the way in which he was able to be so productive.

And it’s instructive to compare his batted ball profile from 2023 through his two seasons with the Padres where every look beneath the superficial batting average and contact rate similarities makes it clear that something has changed.

While Arraez was indeed the winner of the batting title from 2022-2024, the final year of that stretch was one of precipitous decline with only the surface level indicators of batting average and contact rate resembling the remarkable seasons he had in 2022 and 2023. In 2024 his on-base percentage dropped to a career worst, in part due to his walk rate dropping to worrisome levels:

The batting average was still good enough to top the league, but the underlying batted ball profile was starkly different:

His soft contact rate ballooned to a career high, and his exit velocity, and hard-hit rate reached career lows. Something a bit more subtle is his pop-up rate (IFFB%) also reached a career high. And this is worth dissecting, because pop-up rate is not necessarily a sign of being a bad hitter. Jose Ramirez has led baseball in pop-ups the past three seasons. That’s because pop-ups can be a byproduct of swings optimized for launch, and they’re a worthwhile tradeoff for power hitters who will collect a lot of home runs along the way. But Arraez was successful by creating consistent line drive contact, and for him the pop-ups do represent a failure mode. And there’s an interesting inflection point in the 2024 season we’ve highlighted before. Here are Arraez’s pop-up rates in his career, with the 2024 season split before and after he suffered a terrible left hand injury that he played through for three months before getting offseason surgery:

He would have set a career high in pop-ups in the partial season after the injury alone. Here are his average exit velocity, hard-hit rate, and bat speed before his injury:

And after his injury:

Despite these poor indicators Arraez still finished 2024 with a 109 wRC+ and was an above average hitter by almost any measure, if noticeably less so than in prior seasons. The same can’t be said of his on field productivity in 2025:

He’s dipped below league average with a 96 wRC+, and his underlying performance indicators have not improved. Three quarters through the season he’s setting new career lows in exit velocity, hard-hit rate, and bat speed:

And his soft contact rate has dipped even further while his pop-up rate has not recovered to pre-injury levels:

What’s most troubling is looking at where the pop-ups are coming from:

His pop-ups are coming from pitches that are either high or on the inner half of the plate. And while this might look like evidence that the league has figured him out as a hitter, we don’t think it is. Here is how he performed on pitches in those same zones in 2023:

The pop-ups are coming from pitches that were in his most productive zones just two years ago.

And his swing profile in these zones hasn’t changed much:

It’s just very hard to sort through the eye test, the surface level statistics, and the underlying metrics, and not feel that something has changed. That something happened to this hitter:

Courtesy: @NotGaetti

Injury is not the only possible explanation for these findings. And it’s not the relevant question.

The Relevant Question

These changes could have come about from injury, deterioration of swing decisions, the league figuring out how to pitch to him, age (though he’s only 28), or any combination of these factors. But when the bottom line is a degradation of on-field production does it really matter what the cause is? The relevant question is whether these trends are reversible.

That is the only thing the different camps should be focusing on. If Arraez is destined to return to the player he was for the first five years of his career, he’s going to be fine as the 2nd hitter in the order. And if he’s not likely to return to that form, the three batting titles shouldn’t be invoked to describe expectations of his performance going forward. Whether Arraez’s struggles are transient and reversible is worth discussing precisely because the team is so vastly improved, and in such a good position to reach its goals.

Not Reversible

There’s something else that is probably affecting Arraez. Something which is not reversible. He now plays in Petco. We’ve discussed that Petco, with its shorter down the line dimensions, is not an ideal park for Arraez to hit in. But how much explanatory power does this have for his struggles? We can approach this by looking at outfield positioning through the years. And here we do see a difference, especially in one facet: the left field positioning has dropped significantly in 2025:

But is this due to playing in Petco? Not entirely. Teams are actually playing Arraez slightly deeper in Petco than on the road:

Here again there appears to be at least some explanatory power having to do with the deterioration in his ability to hit the ball hard. In 2025 Arraez has lost a tremendous amount of exit velocity on opposite field fly balls, and it shows up with a drastic drop in average distance of fly balls to left field:

The batted ball profile on straightaway fly balls has also suffered significantly:

And what you see game after game is teams positioning themselves expecting short fly balls to the opposite field, routinely leaving large swaths of open field down the line in right:

And it seems that he hasn’t been able to punish these alignments. He played in Petco in 2024 and did seem to suffer home splits that added to the thought that Petco was a large part of his struggles:

But that trend didn’t hold year-over-year, and in fact has reversed in 2025:

Petco Park might have some explanatory power, a few would-be hits taken away by the shorter outfield dimensions in left. But the vast preponderance of available information suggests that the problem lies somewhere in Arraez himself. Which makes us wonder if Arraez may find more success by looking inward for a part of his game that might still be there.

Still There

Though it won’t have come through so far, we are fans of Luis Arraez. He is unique. Despite all of the criticism above, he’s still a player the team can win with. But there can be no doubt that he’s undergone a transformation in his time in the league, and his present form leaves much to be desired. Which is why it’s so interesting to explore his past. There is a legendary at bat from his rookie campaign that Twins fans will never forget, and we wonder if some of that player still exists within him.

In 2019 Arraez was a recently called up utility infielder sharing the second base platoon with All-Star Jonathan Schoop. On July 16th, the Twins were down to their final outs in the 9th inning, trailing the Mets 3-2. Edwin Diaz was on to close the game and had struck out the first batter of the inning. Diaz quickly got ahead of Schoop 0-2 on a check swing strike, but Schoop injured his shoulder on the play and had to be removed from the game. Luis Arraez was called on to pinch hit with the count already 0-2 against Diaz who was mounting the fire breathing campaign that would eventually earn him a 5-year $102 million deal, the largest ever for a reliever. Arraez repeatedly fought off pitches close to the zone, and used a careful eye to take the pitches he was sure weren’t strikes. He battled for 11 more pitches after starting down 0-2 and eventually drew a walk:

This was before Arraez knew what he was capable of with the bat. Before he became a heart-of-the-order hitter. This was a very different version of Arraez, acting with singular purpose to protect the plate and get on base to give his team a chance. It was no fluke that his first years in the league earned him a reputation for having a great eye, and saw him achieve terrific walk rates and on-base percentage. He had that ability. And in a season where the preternatural bat control that made him one of the best pure hitters in the league has seemed to (at least partially) abandon him, we wonder if he might chart a course back up the skill tree, and rediscover the old ways. The version of himself that could steal an inning’s worth of pitches in a single at bat, command the zone, and become that promising table setter once again.

Home Field Advantage

The Padres are at the starting line of a sprint to win the NL West and wrest home field advantage from the Dodgers. The price of their success, and of solving their greatest weaknesses, is further scrutiny into the marginal decisions they still control. Asking for more even while praising the accomplishments to date. Because the goal is deliverance, and the candle of the season burns low. 31 games to go.