Questions

Only The Padres Know The Answers

2024 has unquestionably been a rollercoaster. That’s the hallmark of a .500 season. You can’t sleep easy. You can never feel safe. Neither can you give up all hope, at least until you truly see the dying of the light. And that’s rarely visible before September. You’re just stuck, crossbar over your lap, going up and down, up and down.

The Padres gave back everything they’d gained in their first sweep of the season last week by getting swept at the hands of a deeply flawed and dysfunctional Mets team over the weekend. In the process they may have reignited the Mets’ season hopes, adding to an already crowded field of NL wild card contenders:

After Sunday there are nine teams within a game and a half of the third wild card spot which currently sits tied between the Padres and the Nationals. In fact there are probably only two teams in the NL that aren’t in the playoff hunt: Miami (12 games back of the wild card) and Colorado (10 games back).

Getting swept occasionally is going to be part of almost every .500 team’s story, but what’s troubling is the eerie similarities between both of the sweeps that befell the Padres in the past two weeks. When facing both the Angels and the Mets the Padres offense could do nothing against the two left handers that started games one and two, and in game three the Padres’ stopper Dylan Cease got lit up by the home run ball. Cease has been quietly struggling for the past month, though there’s no real physical sign that something is wrong with him. This may just be a slump. But the offensive struggles against left handers don’t seem to be just a slump. There’s real reason to think this is a long term risk to the team.

The Dead Horse

There’s a physiologic explanation: the Padres offense has been propped up by strong performances by three left handed batters: Luis Arraez, Jake Cronenworth, and Jackson Merrill. These hitters are all gentled at the hands of left handed pitching. This is not unique to these players, left handed pitching gentling left handed hitting is a constant league wide. Overcoming this is a matter of getting strong performances from the right handed bats in the lineup, or deploying platoon options to replace the left handed bats against unfavorable matchups. Injury to Xander Bogaerts and demotion of Eguy Rosario has limited the platoon option. Fernando Tatis, Ha-Seong Kim, Manny Machado, and Luis Campusano have not performed well against left handed pitchers this year. But the difference between these four hitters is that Tatis and Kim are having decent seasons at the plate overall, and it’s likely that positive regression will come as the quality of left handed pitchers, which has been very high (even Sean Manaea can be counted as a tough matchup; his sinker has been one of the best pitches in baseball this season) starts to normalize. But Machado and Campusano have been well below average overall, so with their struggles in the lineup along with gentled left handed bats and no good platoon options¹ available, the Padres are sending out a lineup in which five of the nine hitters are likely to be well below average when facing left handed pitchers. That makes for a very tractable lineup on the whole. We’re aware that continuing to write about this might seem like beating a dead horse, but when that dead horse keeps losing you ball games you feel compelled to keep mentioning it. We’d love to have something else to write about.

Questions

The thing is, it’s not clear the team thinks it has a systemic problem here. They seem as bewildered as fans. Manny Machado is 1 for his last 15 and continues to primarily hit high in the order despite very clearly not being near 100% physically. That’s a choice. That’s something that can be controlled. This brings to mind several questions that can’t be answered from outside the organization, but could certainly be answered within the organization:

1. Does the team still see the current version of Manny Machado as one of the best hitters on the roster?

2. If the Padres do feel Machado is one of the best current hitters on the roster, is that based solely on historical information? Or is he putting on incredible game-speed batting practice displays? Or do the Padres see something in the film or the statcast data that the rest of us are missing?

3. Do the Padres think Eguy Rosario would be performing worse than a hurt Manny Machado?

It’s entirely possible that the team, which has more information about Machado than anyone outside the organization can possibly access, may truly feel that Machado is playing a lot better than the numbers he’s putting up, and that course correction is simply a matter of letting him play and waiting for mean regression. If this is their assessment, then by all means Machado should continue to bat fourth and play every day.

The reason this matters is that there’s evidence that shows that hitting fourth is a crucial spot in the game sequencing across the season. It’s a spot that’s too important to give to a player on reputation alone. There needs to be some real time information suggesting that hitting Machado fourth is the appropriate allocation of the Padres resources. The team should only continue to award this spot to Machado if they have conviction that Machado’s performance results have been worse than the underlying process.

There’s reason to think that this is not the team’s assessment. In the final game against the Mets Machado was dropped to fifth in the batting order. Earlier this season we saw a similar persistent performance degradation from Xander Bogaerts. In that case it finally culminated with a drop in the order to hitting sixth. That was sad to see, but it was meritocratic.

Devolution

The other right handed bat in the lineup that is performing well below league average overall is Luis Campusano. Campusano seemed to be cashing in on his considerable promise as a hitter last season when he batted .319 with seven home runs and an .847 OPS across 49 games, numbers which did not seem far fetched as they essentially matched the type of production he’d shown at every level in the minor leagues. Largely because of this success, Padres fans were alarmed to see that he started 2024 with a noticeable change in batting stance. Campusano always had something of an open stance but initially in 2023 his hands would start in the load position:

As the season went by Campusano did start bringing his hands forward in his pre-load stance:

But in 2024 we saw an exaggerated open stance and his hands held out in front of his face well away from a load position:

Campusano must bring his hands several inches down and posterior to get to his load position:

Once he’s made it to the load position it doesn’t look terribly out of the ordinary. But without question this is a very noisy stance, and the mechanical changes coincided with performance degradation which has lasted nearly a half season now. It’s fair to wonder if the two are related.

Dennis Lin recently asked Padres hitting coach Victor Rodriguez if the Padres had considered asking Campusano to simplify his swing. Rodriguez responded:

All the time, but when you get a guy that works his butt off the whole winter working on those things, it’s tough for him to go, ‘Oh, let me eliminate all the work that I did to simplify things.‘

You get the sense in reading comments like these that perhaps the mechanical changes to the swing were not the team’s idea. This is something only the team can know. But with Campusano’s development at the plate faltering we hope the team asks a key question:

1. Does the team feel it’s just a matter of giving Campusano more time to figure it out?

If they genuinely think that Campusano just needs more time with his stance to work through the kinks, and that a good hitter will emerge on the other side, then by all means make no adjustments. But if they look inwards and find the only justification for not attempting a change is that he put a lot of work into adjusting the stance, they must ask themselves whether this line of thinking is just the sunk cost fallacy.

Crossroads

The Padres are at a crossroads where it seems there is a playbook on how to get an advantage on them. Machado and Campusano’s struggles are a part of this. And it seems the Padres have been reluctant to take action to address their struggles. By week’s end the Padres will have played their 81st game, and surely that should mark the end of any grace period. The Padres appear to have a critical weakness. Serious questions need to be asked. And while no one outside the organization can provide answers to the questions above, the Padres can. The rest of the season may hinge on whether they do.

1. Donovan Solano has been frequently needed in the field while Machado has been injured and thus has not been available as a platoon fill in for Cronenworth, though this may be an option going forward.