Now This Is Padresing

Defining the defining feature

We’ve chronicled the team’s performance thus far, a record worse than it should be due to the random properties of luck. We tend to think of luck as an immutable quality, non-intervenable, a part of the uncontrollable chaos of life. We think of luck as something that happens to us. In some instances we truly give it our best and we just succumb to unlikely misfortune. May 7th the Padres were beating the Dodgers at home. Up 2-1 in the 9th the Padres brought in Josh Hader to try to seal the win. Hader got the first two outs. The Dodgers, down to their last out, needed a small miracle. They got one. Mookie Betts hit a homerun off of a 96 MPH fastball from the elite closer to tie the game, and the Dodgers would go on to win in extra innings. That outcome was the classic case of bad luck striking at its highest leverage point. The Padres gave their best, put themselves in the best position to win, and came up short because of an extremely unlikely event. All closers give up home runs periodically, how much damage they account for is to some degree a factor of the luck of distribution.

But there’s another school of thought, that luck is when preparation meets opportunity. This definition is often attributed to Roman philosopher Seneca, though there’s little proof this is its provenance. That definition suggests that luck is not immutable but in fact can be intervened upon. If a team is just prepared enough it can make its own luck. But that definition misses something also. Over preparation can lead to rigidness, a refusal to deviate from a plan. When that happens a team may miss actually miss the opportunity to influence its fortunes. In Monday’s loss to the Giants it was overly rigid preparation that led to the team’s downfall.

Monday was the first game against the surging Giants who had won seven straight including thoroughly vanquishing their former rivals the Dodgers. The Padres were on the road, and reportedly planned to rest the front end of the bullpen after having heavily taxed them prior two games. Despite continuing the historic run of futility hitting with runners in scoring position, they found themselves with a 4-2 lead in the bottom of the ninth. The team had prepared to be shorthanded, and had already stretched Tim Hill over the 7th and 8th innings. They had a tough choice to make: whether to squeeze one more inning out of Hill (who had only need 19 pitches to get through the 7th and 8th), or go deeper into the bullpen. It was bad luck that brought them to this moment, having to make this difficult choice. But we want to make clear that this wasn’t the type of ‘struck by lightning’ bad luck that they’d faced with Mookie Betts pulling off a 1% outcome in the most crucial of moments. The Padres still had agency to affect their fortunes. The ‘unavailability’ of the front end of the bullpen wasn’t some law of nature. It was self imposed, it was anticipated, this was a premeditated choice. There may have been downstream consequences to calling on Josh Hader or Nick Martinez to take the mound on short rest, but it was an option some teams would have considered. Instead the Padres chose to just accept their fate. The Padres went with the beleaguered Luis Garcia who could not find the plate, and in an eerily similar performance to his outing in the ill fated final game in Colorado earlier in the month, he promptly gave up 2 earned runs to allow the Giants to stretch the game to extra innings where Mike née Carl Yastrzemski hit an absolutely majestic walk off home run, completing the Padres meltdown.

Monday’s game is exactly what bad luck looks like. If there had been an off day, as there usually is between home and road series, Hader would have been available to close things out. But it was ultimately a choice not to deviate from the plan that was prepared, and it led to another unique Padres loss where it seemed they were truly the better team all night, but the Giants managed to find their achilles heel when it mattered most. What deserves special attention is that the Padres refused to exercise available agency when their achilles heel was exposed. That’s Padresing.

Padresing is a term of art, and we all instinctively know what we mean when we use it. It encompasses the unique ways the team finds to fail, ways which feel unlikely to plague a different team. One strain of Padresing is what we saw Monday night: capitulating to the whims of fortune, refusing to exercise remaining agency when bad luck strikes. It was bad luck that the bullpen had been taxed so heavily in the previous games against Cleveland and Tampa Bay, only to have such a close game with the red hot Giants in which a bad outing from the second and third strings of the Padres bullpen was the difference between winning and losing. But it’s capitulating to that bad luck to not consider deviating from self-imposed constraints on bullpen usage when such an opportunity presents itself. If luck is when preparation meets opportunity, Padresing is turning down an opportunity to put a thumb on the scale of fortune.

This was the worst loss of the season, and that’s saying a lot. But it’s only that, one loss. We absolutely can right the ship, and we have been playing much better baseball over the last two or so weeks. Unfortunately, these last few weeks have also been punctuated by extreme Padresing: the rainy Sunday loss to the Rockies, the ‘Bad Weathers’ game against Cleveland, and now this.

Make no mistake, we will soon be at the halfway point in the season and some would argue it’s no longer early, it’s no longer a small sample size. Your mileage will vary on that assertion. But we can all agree that the wasted opportunities are piling up, and every game counts the same in the standings.

There is one bit of outstanding good luck this team has experienced: the NL as a league, has been slow out of the blocks and the Wild Card remains very much in reach. Even though the Padres remain stubbornly below .500, there is still a path to the playoffs. But the Padresing must stop and be replaced by meritocracy, dynamism, and accountability. If that means shuffling pitching roles around, adjusting the batting order commensurate with production, and making hard roster choices, then so be it. The faithful deserve it. The fans just broke our single season sellout record in mid-June. This is the fans doing their part. The players by all accounts seem to be trying their hardest. After games like Monday’s, however, it’s fair to ask whether the entirety of the organization is appropriately focused on winning games even when it means deviating from the garden path.

LFGSD