The Padres’ seven game winning streak against the Rockies and A’s is an absolute breath of fresh air. New faces have been in the lineup and have contributed meaningfully to the late season surge. Craig Elsten had it right on Wenesday’s Padres Hot Tub when he noted that while it’s been fun to see what Eguy Rosario and Matthew Batten have been able to do, they represent replacement players, and it’s starkly noticeable how much better they’ve played than long time mainstays of the Padres starting lineup earlier in the season. Carpenter, Nola, Cruz, and (yes) Cronenworth collectively logged over 1,000 plate appearances this season and played mostly below replacement level. Replacement players are not supposed to be season saviors, but when you’ve got several sub-replacement level players in your lineup, then replacement-level guys are an improvement. And they’ve been a part of the Padres’ surge.
Of course, it helps that the replacements have been facing off against, well, replacements. The Rockies and the Oakland AAA’s field a fair amount of replacement level talent. But that only takes the shine off of what the Padres have done a little bit. Earlier in the year, the Padres struggled to beat the teams that they should beat. Now, they’re beating those teams. And their Wild Card deficit is at 4.5 games with nine games left to play and four teams ahead of them.
The Cardinals are up next and appear to be continuing the trend of rolling out replacement players:
It’s so strange to think about what replacement players have meant in the month of September; for teams like the Rockies, AAA’s, and Cardinals the replacement players are playing because winning is no longer a priority (and they may even be tanking for draft position). For the $248 million Padres the replacements are playing crucial games during the team’s last desperate bid to save the season. And they might be the difference. Wild.
The Cardinals replacement heavy roster looks eminently beatable, and so the Padres do have a real chance to extend their winning streak further this weekend. But the playoffs remain extremely unlikely. On October 1, if the Padres’ players are on flights home instead of on a flight to, say, Milwaukee, we’ll probably all think back to the calamitous series losses against teams like the Pirates, Nationals, and Royals. Every game counts.
The late-season surge is an indictment of the early-season roster construction. The ‘23 Padres gave playing time to players whom they felt were owed playing time instead of to players most likely to produce wins. The preseason gambles on Nelly Cruz and Matt Carpenter were reasonable. But when it became clear that those players were no longer major league quality, they kept getting at-bats. Cronenworth’s contract extension made him un-benchable even as his swing got longer than a Sunday morning line at Costco. It took until September for the Padres to finally replace all the below replacement level players with replacement level players. That is Winds of Winter-level procrastination. And not all of the changes have been on purpose: Cronenworth and Carp were only replaced because of injuries. We still don’t have any real indication that the Padres have changed to a meritocratic approach to roster construction.
It’s sad to see Crone and Carp injured, but it’s a relief that they’ve accepted stints on the IL and are focusing on getting healthy instead of playing (badly) through injuries. It’s become clear that Xander Bogaerts was playing injured in May, which probably caused the major slump that derailed his season. Bogaerts seems healthy now, and in September, he’s been the player the Padres hoped he would be. There’s a school of thought that players need to play through injuries; people think it shows heart and leadership. The Padres appear to give players wide discretion about whether to sit out and get healthy or play through. But when the results are months of below replacement level hitting, it’s worth revisiting the wisdom of that policy. It’s also worth considering the long-term health effects of gutting out serious injuries on the field in year one (née month one) of an 11-year contract... Manny Machado will need surgery before the start of next season, but he’s trying to play this season out. With only nine games to go and the Padres clinging to a last sliver of hope to make the postseason, it’s understandable that Machado would want to tough it out. But this wasn’t the case earlier in the season when he -- also in year one of a 10-year contract extension -- played hurt and saw his production suffer mightily. And one last Padre-who-struggled-through-injury story might be Austin Nola, whose catastrophic loss of skill was likely due to oculomotor dysfunction. One has to wonder if that was caused by getting hit directly in the face with a pitch in spring training. Oculomotor dysfunction prevents the eyes from coordinating tracking movements, which is a death sentence for a major league hitter’s career. In retrospect, it’s concerning that Nola missed almost no time and was cleared to play so quickly.
Did a lack of depth force players to play through injury? Not in any sense that would have benefitted the Padres: Bogaerts and Machado were abysmal when playing hurt. Replacement-level players like Batten may not have been better, but at the very least they would not have been much worse, and if that allowed Bogaerts and Machado to get healthy and return to form the Padres may have been much better off. Nola actually had an above-replacement-level replacement in Luis Campusano, at least until Campusano ironically got injured catching warmups in a game he probably should have been playing starting. It does now appear that Campusano has replaced Nola for good. The 2023 season is probably beyond saving, but introspection about how to handle injuries would probably help the Padres in 2024.
The Price of Padresing
The Padres are only 4.5 games back of the Wild Card. It is entirely possible that at least five winnable games got away this season due to bad strategic decisions like not using their best closer in winnable games, not playing the best players on the roster, and allowing players to play hurt. But the real price of Padresing, as far as the front office might be concerned, is the withering scrutiny placed on the culture of the team and the front office as losses added up. Last week, Dennis Lin and Kevin Acee published articles with concerning allegations about the team culture and the front office. At least one point from those articles deserves to be highlighted: Several employees accused AJ Preller of micromanagement. Micromanagement causes problems no matter how brilliant the micromanager might be on a personal level because it removes agency from members of an organization. It causes inefficiencies that slow the transformation of ideas into action – it creates problems as surely as water runs downhill. We have to wonder if micromanagement is partly to blame for a season in which, time after time, it looked like the team wasn’t maximizing their odds of winning. Like there was some invisible force preventing them from exercising available agency. It’s very hard to know.
Some fans have wondered how Preller could be guilty of both micromanagement and of being unavailable frequently during scouting trips, as some people said he was. That confusion is understandable, but micromanagement doesn’t always take the form of a boss breathing down people’s necks. It can occur in an organizational structure that disempowers staff from making decisions. If the top of the organization is required for decisions, but are also unavailable for sign-off, then institutional gridlock occurs. Maybe this is what happened with the Padres (though we don’t know – we’re relying on a few employees’ characterization of the organization). This is not to say that AJ Preller is definitely guilty of this, just that the idea that he can both be micromanaging and be off on long scouting forays frequently are not at all incompatible.
While the style of journalism of the Acee and Lin articles leaves open the possibility that there is more to the story, it creates an uncomfortable situation for the articles’ subjects. That includes Manny Machado, whose leadership was called into question. The solution to the problem, of course, is winning. Winning papers over a lot of flaws, and make the press less likely to write these types of articles. Of course, that’s a catch-22: A team can get past organizational dysfunction by winning, but organizational dysfunction makes winning hard.
Highly Improbable, Not Impossible
The seven game winning streak has breathed life into the last hopes for a miracle. A very small amount of life:
Mathematicians have confirmed: 0.6% is not quite zero.
Most of the season has been played. What remains can’t even be called a “puncher’s chance”. And the Padres don’t control their own fate – even a perfect finish to the season wouldn’t guarantee a playoff spot: As AJ Cassavell noted:
The Padres have to win out, and they need all of their opponents to fall flat. This is a loooooooooooooongshot. But 2023 is the year we had to endure hourly ”Luis Arráez quest for .400!“ updates from MLB TV…in June. It is no more ridiculous to breathlessly scoreboard watch as the Padres try to capitalize on their number-that-is-technically-not-zero playoff odds in September. This is already a season of the absurd. As long as we’re in nonsense-land, we might as well embrace the not-quite-zero-ness of the Padres’ playoff odds and convince ourselves that the Padres are still playing relevant games in late September.
Disappointing, but not uninteresting
For all its frustrations and disappointments, this season has been interesting. The most interesting we can remember. And weird. There are strange omens in the air. As the Padres won their lucky seventh game in a row on Wednesday, a disoriented bird once again disrupted play at Chavez Ravine1.
Was that another goose? Or was it a black swan? The harbinger of an unpredictable event with significant consequences…
We hope you’re right Rich. Because there’s no serious rational reason to believe that the Padres will make the playoffs. And that’s why it’s called keeping the faith.
Video Link: Courtesy Fox Sports