The Good, The Bad, and That's What's In
Making sense of a disappointing stretch
The Padres are one third of the way through the season, and two thirds of the way to title contention. That’s the extra glossy framing of a season that to this point has been disappointing. Nonetheless, there’s some truth here. Bear with us.
The Padres enter Tuesday a disappointing 31-34, 2.5 games out of Wild Card contention. But the run differential in those games is a very encouraging +19, good for 4th best in the NL. In a normal year that performance would leave room for optimism: the team has played well and has a worse record than their performance would predict. But this isn’t a normal year. This is 2023, the year of the highest expectations in franchise history. The preamble to the season included Fanfest mayhem, every major media outlet picking the Padres to win the 2023 World Series, and the long awaited return of Fernando Tatis Jr, all of which had the world thinking the Padres were reaching their final form. It’s the weight of those expectations more than anything else that has fueled the despair that fans have displayed. This despair has been cast towards all facets of the team, from the front office to the coaching staff, and all the players in between. But is this reaction warranted by an analysis of the team’s performance?
We’ve chronicled previously that since the turn of the century, the team that won the World Series was on average ~7th in offense, ~8th in pitching, and ~8th in defense. When we say the Padres are two thirds of the way to title contention this is what we’re referring to, the pitching and defense are already there. As it stands the Padres are the best team in the National League in defensive efficiency and Runs Allowed per game. But they are an awful 23rd in MLB in Runs Scored per game. It is the offense. They have the pitching, they have the defense. The offense is what’s holding the team back.
How can a fan process this information? One way is to wear a paperbag on your head and sit behind homeplate to humiliate the franchise, and the owner who’s spent generously to put an exciting product on the field for literally the first time in all our lives. I guess they figured that’s what’s in. Have the bagheads and the That’s What’s In guys ever been seen in the same room together?
Another way to process the team’s performance would be analytically. Probabilistically. Let’s start with the good and end with the bad, and turn it into a season outlook by deciding what’s sustainable and what’s likely due for regression to the mean.
The Good
As stated the Padres lead the National League in Runs Allowed per game, as well as defensive efficiency. Such a stellar performance to date is certainly a good thing, but being analytic means questioning whether this performance to date reflects the skill of the team or some type of unsustainable performance.
We’ll start with the defense. Every indication is that the Padres defense is real. Jake Cronenworth is playing his first season at first base, but is a defensive wizard that excelled at a much more difficult position each of the past 3 seasons. Ha-Seong Kim is a gold glove caliber shortstop playing the easier second base. Xander Bogaerts leads the MLB in outs above average at shortstop. Only old “Eyewash” Arenado stands between Manny Machado and perennial gold gloves at third base. Juan Soto’s gold glove finalist appearance in RF was somewhat lampooned but as a LF his defense is more than adequate. Trent Grisham is a celebrated multi-gold glove winning center fielder. Fernando Tatis has been electric in right field with 10 defensive runs saved on the season as of this writing. The only hole on defense has been catcher where Austin Nola has been daring AJ to send him to El Paso all year and so far seems to be winning this ill-advised game of chicken. But the hole at catcher may very well have been filled by the arrival of Gary Sanchez who has been a revelation behind the plate demonstrating excellent receiving, blocking, and arm strength in his limited stint with the Padres so far. To summarize, every position is currently occupied by a player with a strong to elite defensive pedigree. The defense appears to be real, sustainable, and regression unlikely.
How about pitching? The Padres are second in the NL in ERA at 3.77, behind the Braves at 3.76. Is this result sustainable? Let’s look at the starters first: Blake Snell has a 3.78 ERA and 4.46 FIP, both slightly worse than his career averages. Yu Darvish has an ERA of 4.3 and FIP of 3.76, both significantly worse than career averages. Michael Wacha has an ERA of 3.18 and FIP of 3.50, better than his career averages of 4.00 and 4.04. Seth Lugo has an ERA of 4.10 and FIP of 3.94, both worse than his career averages. Joe Musgrove has an ERA of 4.35 and FIP of 4.21, both significantly worse than his career averages. Ryan Weathers in his age 23 season has an ERA OF 4.93 and FIP of 5.25, slightly better than his short career averages. To summarize, 4 of the 6 starters are putting up performances worse than their career averages, Michael Wacha is slightly overperforming, and the team’s 6th starter is treading water. In the aggregate the starters are likely performing in a sustainable manner. If there is to be regression it will probably be Wacha negatively regressing a bit as the season goes by, with a good chance of that being offset by positive regression from one (or more) of the 4 underperforming starters. Whether wild card Weathers improves as the year goes by remains to be seen but we suggest you not hold your breath. The verdict here is that the pitching performance to date from the starters appears very likely to be sustainable in the aggregate.
Moving on to the bullpen: it’s been a mixed bag. Hader has been his usual excellent self with a 1.42 ERA through 26 games. Nick Martinez has started 4 games but most of his play figures to be from the pen the rest of the year and has a nice 2.84 ERA over 50.2 innings in line with his performance from the pen last season, but a FIP of 4.04 suggesting some fielding luck is keeping the ERA down. Brett Honeywell has been mediocre with a 3.90 ERA, but with an awful FIP of 5.28 which is more consistent with the eye test which has suggested he just isn’t fooling any hitters. Steven Wilson has an ERA of 2.84 but a FIP of 4.12 suggesting he’s also benefitted from some bail outs by the defense behind him. Tim Hill has an ERA of 3.42 and a worrisome FIP of 4.90. Luis Garcia has an ERA of 5.49 through 22 games but a FIP of 3.49 thanks to a strong K/9 and only giving up 1 HR so far. Tom Cosgrove set a team record for scoreless innings prior to giving up his first run in Sunday’s rainy mess at Coors Field, and sits at an unsustainable 0.57 ERA with a 2.95 FIP. Domingo Tapia put up a 2.60 ERA in 17.1 innings but his FIP of 5.40 may better represent the long term outlook. To summarize, the bullpen performance to date has a lot of signs of BABIP and fielding suppressing a lot of runs. Martinez, Honeywell, Wilson, Hill, Cosgrove, and Tapia have all pitched significant innings out of the Padres bullpen, and all have a FIP more than a run higher than their ERA. Now this observation needs to be analyzed carefully. It’s tempting to ascribe the difference in ERA and FIP largely to BABIP luck since quite often that is what explains it. But as we detailed above, there is every reason to believe the Padres defense is hyper-elite, and the ERA:FIP difference likely is more heavily due to the (sustainable) performance of the defense behind all these pitchers. Thus, the outlook for the rest of the season is a little more positive. There will almost certainly be some regression from the bullpen performance, but it will probably be a lot less than the ERA:FIP gap suggests.
Overall, the Starters’ pitching performance (327 of the 585 innings, 55.9%) appears very likely sustainable. The bullpen performance (258 of the 585 innings, 44.1%) is likely to show some regression, though it may be less than a typical team with a similar discrepancy between ERA and FIP due to how strong the Padres defense appears to be. If we project a regression of 1 run given up per 9 innings, and retroactively apply that performance to the 258 innings the bullpen has pitched so far, that suggests that to date the Padres aggregate pitching/defense performance might have been expected to give up ~4.37 runs per game so far this season, which would be 3rd in the NL just behind the Brewers. Things can change, but as it stands, even projecting a fairly bleak bullpen regression, the Padres pitching/defense appears poised to be extremely competitive.
The Bad
The brown and gold elephant in the room currently withering under the glare of the entire Padres fan base is the offense. The offense has been horrendous. Putting up only 4.22 runs/game, good for 23rd in the MLB just above the Chicago White Sox and just below the tanking Washington Nationals. Although batting average has lost a lot of cachet with analytic types, it is still the key to understanding the Padres woes to date. Through Monday the Padres have a .201 batting average with runners in scoring position and are near the league lead in leaving runners in scoring position averaging 3.62 per game. The team batting average sits at a miserable .228, yet as bad as that is it clearly indicates that some bad luck has affected the .201 average with RISP.
As bad as the RISP issues have been, the bigger issue has to do with the overall performance of several starters.
We won’t discuss Juan Soto or Fernando Tatis Jr, they’re performing close enough to career norms that it’s a distraction to say they’re a problem. Trent Grisham’s struggles are well chronicled, and his .675 OPS is an eye sore, but he’s out-producing 2022 Trent Grisham and his offensive limitations were baked into the team’s projections. Ha-Seong Kim has been as expected. Even Jake Cronenworth’s disappointing performance is not significantly behind his 2022 output.
The problem on offense can be best understood through the struggles from 3B, SS, DH, and especially C.
Manny Machado is not producing
Manny has an OPS+ of 89. That is not acceptable. He’s hit in the heart of the order all season and put up an OPS of .675. For reference that’s identical to Trent Grisham. His baseball savant page suggests it’s not luck undermining his performance:
He’s not hitting the ball hard. Performance like this is really worrying, but also is a bit inexplicable. Manny is 30, coming off a stellar season, and supposedly healthy. It seems very unlikely, even as we eliminate bad BABIP luck as a factor that Machado has suddenly become a AAAA hitter. But that is the question that this analysis raises. His career OPS is .828. It will take a lot of positive regression to get there this season.
Xander Bogaerts is not producing
Expected to be a big middle of the order bat, Bogaerts’ addition to the lineup looked to be off to a roaring start with a .914 OPS through March/April, but that was followed up by an abysmal .546 OPS in May. We’ve since learned that he’s been dealing with a left wrist injury that nearly landed him on the IL. This very likely explains his May swoon. However, the prognosis for recovery remains a little murky as it apparently was a problem dating back to spring training. Bogaerts is a career .811 OPS. He’s not terribly far off at .739, but his trend has been steeply downward.
The DH platoon is not producing
Matt Carpenter and Nelson Cruz have between them 271 plate appearances and have put up a grizzly .669 and .651 OPS respectively. To make the outlook bleaker, their AB’s have largely come against favorable L/R matchups (that’s the point of a platoon). Carpenter is 37 and Cruz is 42. It may simply be that they are in the waning years of their careers.
Matt Carpenter’s baseball savant page suggest performance decline:
Cruz is currently in a minor league rehab assignment, he hit well in El Paso but there is no reason for optimism here.
The outlook for DH is surprisingly bleak, and an underappreciated source of the Padres offensive struggles.
The production from C has been unacceptable
By far, the worst performance to date has been Austin Nola who has been given 132 plate appearances and put up a .436 OPS. His baseball savant page will make your eyes water. He is not putting up major league quality at bats this year and has made 97 outs in his 111 AB’s. Replacing Nola with Gary Sanchez may have as much impact on the lineup as upgrading from Profar to Tatis has. That is in no way a slight on Profar or Tatis, neither is it an over-exuberant endorsement of El Gary. It is a reflection of how poor Nola’s performance has been. It is very hard to win games when a starter is essentially a free out.
The outlook for the offense is mixed. At this point there is little reason to expect the DH position to suddenly become more productive. It’s more likely the Carp/Cruz platoon won’t recapture the success from early in their careers. Bogaerts is a complete wild card. His injury is nebulous, his performance decline seems drastic even for an injured player, and his avoidance of the IL somehow feels like a bad thing. But there is some reason for positivity. Despite Machado’s poor performance to date, there is no reason to think he’s suddenly become one of the worst hitters in baseball. That type of performance decline, absent a major injury, is nearly unheard of. While we can’t explain his struggles thus far, in purely probabilistic terms he’s more likely to perform better than he has. The real optimism comes at catcher. Nola’s performance with the majority of the catcher AB’s so far has been historically bad. There is virtually no chance that the production from catcher for the rest of the year is as a bad as it’s been. Things at C are going to be better. For the offense as a whole, it will most likely be better for the remaining 97 than it has been so far.
Season Outlook
Strangely the most rational analysis of the Padres season thus far is that they’re a good team. Their run differential is the 4th best in the NL despite a horrific offensive performance. The starting pitching should hold up, and the regression in the bullpen, even if it’s a full run per 9 innings worse from here out, should still keep the Padres near the top of the NL on the defensive side of the ball. On offense, things are very unlikely to get worse, and might get better. Even if Bogaerts continues to decline, that production should be offset by positive regression from Manny, and anything that El Gary contributes above Nola, a bar so low you couldn’t slip a credit card underneath. The DH position is most likely going to continue to be bad, but shouldn’t get worse. If Manny positively regresses, Bogaerts returns to form, and El Gary puts up his career averages, the Padres offense is going to be legitimately good. The most likely worst case scenario still has the Padres as a top 7 team in the NL, the most likely best case scenario has them pushing past the Diamondbacks for the 3rd best team in the NL. The top 7 teams make the playoffs in the NL and as we lived last year, anything is possible in the post-season. Despite the struggles, the disappointment, and the media hate, the most likely outcome is a Padres playoff berth.
Finally, let’s not forget about the great confounder of analytics, luck. The first 65 games of the season started and ended with the Rockies. Hidden in plain sight is a mocking bookend to the two series. On opening night, the Padres were leading the Rockies 2-1 when Blake Snell got into a jam. Being the 5th inning in the first game of the year, Melvin went to his bullpen. Nabil Crismatt came in and surrendered one of the cheapest homeruns hit at Petco Park this year to C.J. Cron. It was a 3-run shot to boot and irrevocably changed the game. To add insult to injury, Cron’s devastating homerun would only have gotten out in exactly one ballpark…
Fast forward to this past Sunday and that species of horrendous bad luck struck the Padres again, but in reverse This time, Juan Soto smashed a pitch from former Padre Dinelson Lamet deep into right-center. With a projected distance of 425 feet, it would have been a long homerun in every ballpark except one…
That’s two pieces of game changing bad luck against the same opponent that, had it gone slightly differently, we might be looking at the season differently. The game of baseball always sits on an invisible knife’s edge. Certain moments bring this into stark relief. It’s true that at the end of the season “you are what your record says you are”, that’s how we define success. But the twists and turns of the season are always underpinned by that most capricious element: Luck. All we can do is hope that this kind of luck evens out.
In any case, we hope that the foregoing will help you keep the faith. We certainly are.
LFGSD