Any baseball fan with half a brain knows: slumps happen. There are injuries. Bad calls are inevitable, even when Doug Eddings isn’t behind the plate. But despite the randomness, in any season there are moments when a team can tilt the odds in their favor, maybe enough to overcome the bad breaks. That’s why it’s so important not to fall into Padresing, especially its most virulent strain: Capitulating to the whims of fortune.
Peaks and Valleys: The Angels Series Compared to the Vast Ocean of Dreck That This Season Has Been So Far
The season bottomed out with the June 19th loss to the San Francisco Giants. Holding a 4-2 lead going into the bottom of the ninth, we didn’t bring in Josh Hader because he’d pitched in the previous two games. Instead, we brought in one of the many people on Earth who is not Josh Hader, specifically: Luis Garcia. And the game melted away.
Many Padres fans accepted that loss as a harsh outcome dished out by a cold, uncaring universe. “This is just how things are,” we thought, “We won’t have our world-beating (or at least Giants-beating) closer available three days in a row.” It’s easy to fall into that mindset, but we should realize: There was a choice. We could have thrown Hader three days in a row. The Padres are not Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men making decisions based on a coin toss: They can make choices.
On Wednesday, the Padres did choose differently. Having taken the first two games of the series against the Angels, we deviated from the Padresing path. In game three, With a 5-3 lead in the ninth, we brought in Josh Hader for a third straight game. It was a bit unorthodox. It could be considered a gamble. But it worked: Hader slammed the door shut and we won. We didn’t let some bad luck (Hader being needed three nights in a row) push us into a poor decision. We didn’t capitulate to the whims of fate. No Padresing, just Chad Wallach waving at a slider like an old lady cleaning a cobweb off her ceiling with a broom.
Speaking of brooms: We swept the Angels. The good news and the horrendous news is that it was our first sweep of the season. For us, the good part of that strange-to-write-in-July sentence is resonating more than the bad. After all: We’ve spent all season immersed in an ocean of dreck, and now it feels like we can see light breaking through the water. Because Wednesday proved that things can change.
Things Change, Even for the Better Sometimes
It’s astounding how much changed during this Angels series. July, in addition to being French-American Heritage Month (seriously!), has been Padres Bullpen Regression Month, and it’s been brutal. From Kevin Acee:
Padres relievers have allowed at least three runs in nine straight games. If that sounds like a lot, it is because there has never in the franchise’s 55-year history been another time that the bullpen allowed at least three runs in nine straight games.
Bullpen regression is fully here. That’s a season’s worth of regression in just those games. But negative regression has an attractive cousin (and not in a weird way) called “positive regression”, and that showed up in the Angels series: Manny Machado, Xander Bogaerts, and Jake Cronenworth – who have been the heaviest ballast dragging the Padres down into the Ocean of Dreck – each had good series. They made major contributions to each win – they provided buoyancy, not ballast. Because things change.
For perhaps the first time all season, we saw how terrifying and long this Padres lineup can be. With the bit of pop El Gary and Trent provide, there’s not really any spot in this lineup for pitchers to take a breather. When Ha-Seong Kim gets on to leadoff an inning, Tatis, Soto, Manny, Xander, and Crone are a daunting gauntlet to run…when they’re going right. They hadn’t been going right all season. We can’t know yet if they’ll stay in this groove – it takes longer than that to know anything in baseball. But if they’re getting right, there is a path towards postseason contention, and that path isn’t a one-in-a-million moonshot.
Change, Chaos, Goodbye to Nellie
This series saw Nelson Cruz DFA’d. That’s a sad day, but it’s a sign of meritocratic roster management. We saw Xander hit 5th all series, a spot his performance has warranted. We saw El Gary start all 3 games at catcher while Nola was benched. We saw Josh Hader asked to stretch beyond his comfort zone. This is what a focus on accountability and dynamism looks like. Things can change.
We also saw some poignant examples of the chaos of baseball, and how vanishingly unlikely events seem to happen all the time. Shohei Ohtani is the best player in the world, he’s having the best season of all time, everybody expected him to make minced meat of the Padres struggling lineup, but he got chased in five innings and tagged with the “L”. He had two career firsts: Three extra base hits in one game to the same player (Cronenworth), and back-to-back home runs (Cronenworth and Bogaerts). If you bet on that happening before the series, congratulations on your early retirement. Of course: That’s baseball. The improbable constantly manifests itself before our very eyes.
Many fear that – despite the Angels series – pursuing the postseason is still futile, and that trying to right the ship by adding talent at the trade deadline is just throwing good money after bad. There’s a notion that the season is an expense that cannot be recouped, and that continuing to play for the playoffs is succumbing to the sunk cost fallacy – here’s that notion in tweet form:
As we argued in our last piece, the Padres are not sunk, so neither are the costs associated with the season. Completing the season would not represent succumbing to sunk cost fallacy. There is actual hope to still make the postseason: As it stands, FanGraphs has increased its Padres postseason odds to 29.1%.
29 percent probability is not a sunshine-and-puppy-kisses number, but giving up on that would be a big deal. If we’re lucky, we live long enough to see 50-70 baseball seasons across all our days. There are Padres faithful who’ve lived through 55 seasons and still have never been to the promised land. If we’d had a 29% postseason chance each of those 55 years, we would’ve brought home a World Series title by now. This season has been disappointing, but through it all, the raw materials for a championship run are still in place. As a great leader once said:
Thursday is Manny Machado’s 31st birthday. Age comes for us all eventually, but it should not have come for Manny Machado at 31 unless he’s on some Benjamin Button-type development curve. Despite the sputtering start to the season, our stars are still in their prime. There’s a lot of downside to punting too early and letting another year go by. There’s an important deadline coming up August 1st. Once this deadline passes, one way or another, we will have committed to incurring one of the opportunity costs we talked about in an earlier post. We’re going to scrutinize the costs of the two strategies going forward: Competing this year, or making trades with a focus on 2024. If, by August 1, the calculus suggests that selling is the right thing to do, then we’ll advocate for selling. But for now, the rational position is to continue to be a fan, hope for win after win. Hope for that 29 percent chance of shooting the moon. Continuing to compete is not (at this moment) pursuing a sunk cost fallacy.
Tension
It can feel easier to just accept losing and rebuilding as the right course. It takes the tension out of things; it’s tempting to say “we tried, we failed, we’ll try again some other time”. But if we want to bring a World Series to the city, we need to be ready to deal with the high stakes of having hopes that can be dashed. We also need our organization to fight to achieve those hopes. We have to try to influence our fortunes. To make our own luck. We have to use the tools at our disposal to give us the best chance to win.
In the Angels series, We saw a team using everything it has. The pieces weren’t just in place: They were functioning. And that was a change. That was not Padresing.
Next up is the one team that has outpaced the Padres in the race for the Underachievement World Series: The Mets. And we know what we need to do: