The Padres have a pivotal series against the Mets this week. The symmetry between these teams is remarkable. Both teams made waves with activist owners investing ridiculous sums of money in their teams. This raised the ire of other owners, who were content to lean on MLB’s massive barriers to competition to keep fans coming to the park rather than invest in creating the best product (Shout-out to Dick Monfort!). Both teams have underperformed. Both teams were 41-46 heading into Friday night; hundreds of millions have been spent to achieve bad results. If this was movies instead of baseball, then Friday’s game was John Carter vs. The Adventures of Pluto Nash.
Continuing the symmetry, both teams’ starters on Friday were highly-accomplished, late-career gunslingers. Yu Darvish faced Justin Verlander in a season in which neither has been their usual dominant selves.
The teams battled early, grinding out runs and constantly threatening with runners on base, but neither dealt the fatal blow. The most talked about play will be Ha-Seong Kim’s attempted stretch of a double to a triple. With one out in the 7th in a 3-3 tie game Kim hit a laser down the left field line:
Courtesy: SNYtv
As he rounded second, Tommy Pham already had the ball in left field. When you watch, you can see that Kim picked up a visual on Pham. It’s not clear what made Kim decide to run (Satan? The Dark One can’t be ruled out). At any rate: He didn’t hesitate. It really looks like he just felt he could beat Pham’s throw. And he almost did. We wonder if maybe Pham baited him.
Kim is an extremely instinctive player. He makes snap decisions on the base paths that translate into the small advantages that sometimes turn into wins . Look at the jump he got stealing in the first inning:
He’s halfway to second when the ball leaves Verlander’s hand. The catcher didn’t even think about making a throw, and Kim took second standing up. What you can’t tell from this image is that this stolen base came after Verlander made a lightning-fast pickoff attempt earlier in the inning that almost caught Kim. Verlander’s move is good for a right hander and would be enough to keep more deliberate runners closer to the bag. Only players with top-level instincts can absorb a wicked pickoff attempt and turn right around and swipe a bag easily. Of course, instincts can lead you astray, and that’s probably why he tried to take third when he shouldn’t have.
They say you should never make the first or last out of the inning at third base. This implies it’s defensible if it’s the second out, as Kim’s was. Of course, “they” don’t say anything about Juan Soto, and he was due up next. Should the rules be different when Juan Soto is coming up to bat? Probably. Soto demonstrated why “they” should really factor him in by lacing an opposite field double that would have scored Kim even if he’d been standing out on Harbor Drive. It’s a bit unfair to judge Kim’s decision in light of subsequent events, but it was another “what if” moment in a season that’s had way too many of those. The Padres would fail to plate Soto and took the 3-3 tie into the 8th.
Hidden Dread
Playing home games at Petco is unique. In years past, the influx of fans for the opposing team often neutralized home field advantage. Papa Pete has largely done away with that; Padres home games now sell out regularly and it’s nearly all Friar Faithful in the stands. But even with traditional home field advantage restored, you can sometimes sense a specter of dread looming in the background of every at bat. It’s the dread of our players getting Petco’d. Padres fans love to claim the highly disputed crown of worst hitter’s park in the bigs. There’re a thousand ways to analyze this question, but sometimes you just need to see something to believe it:
Courtesy: SNYtv
That really, really, really looked like it was hit well enough. Phrased another way: It sure looked like Gary Sanchez got Petco’d in the biggest game of the season. This is the hidden dread of watching games at Petco. Every hard-hit fly ball gives that jolt of excitement, but that jolt is quickly followed by apprehension. Petco devours home runs.
That non-home-run was a sliding doors moment. As DSG put it:
The 3-3 tie would persist through 9 innings. In the 10th, we didn’t bring in Hader but we did bring in Tom Cosgrove who has been the next-best high leverage reliever. This was a good move; we didn’t bring in our best but it wasn’t clear that our best was required. Cosgrove made a good pitch that rode in on McNeill, who put an awkward swing on the ball. If you just watched until the point of contact, you’d think that Cosgrove had won the battle. Alas:
Courtesy SNY
That’s a good swing if you’re a toddler experiencing your very first pinata. But it actually came from the reigning NL batting champ hitting a ball with an expected batting average of .080, and getting a game changing RBI double. Baseball is a hard sport to understand. The Mets would add 3 more runs after two more seeing-eye ground ball singles in a disaster inning where no one really did anything wrong.
The Padres fought back, down 7-3 in the bottom of the 10th:
Courtesy @Padres
You love to see Manny finally getting right, and he’s been on fire lately, but the fear we’ve had all along is that positive regression may come too late. It sure felt like that tonight.
News worsened later in the night when Rougned Odor unexpectedly replaced Kim in the lineup.
Kim made no excuses.
From Jeff Sanders:
“My over-competitiveness led to this result,” Kim said.
He added: “I thought it was an empty cooler. In that heated moment, I was not thinking hard enough.”
Grant some clemency to our introspective King.
Hit It Where They Ain’t
Friday’s loss feels like a game that was given away. Four runs in the 10th without a single line-drive feels like one of those outcomes you get in a sloppily-played little league game. But that wasn’t the case Friday. Ha-Seong got too ambitious on the base paths, yes. But the loss wasn’t due to sloppiness as much as it was due to the weirdness of baseball: In extra innings, the team that hit a two run home run lost to the team that spelunked a few grounders in just the right spots. They hit it where they ain’t.
The Padres drop to 0-8 in extra innings this year. Extraordinary.
It’s how you lose
Part of any baseball season is preparation. You acquire talent to address areas of weakness; you load the magazine with the highest caliber ammunition available. But that only takes you so far. Reflection is also important. Once you’ve assembled the best team you can, you have to reflect on the whole. Because more weaknesses will pop up. The best teams understand this; after they build, they reflect, adapt, and reinforce. This team had weaknesses that weren’t immediately obvious, but they’ve become apparent over time. Hader’s need for beauty sleep was a major weakness, and the fates conspired to expose that weakness to the tune of (likely) two losses. That seems to be rectified. Austin Nola had a catastrophic loss of skill this offseason, and yet he kept getting at-bats. He’s had 150 plate appearances this year, with a .451 OPS. But he hasn’t played since July 1st. His play was an unacceptable weakness and it’s finally being addressed; the nepo starts have become fewer and far between. Juan Soto is very often Jualk Soto, and his propensity for getting on base is best-leveraged by having big power behind him. To wit: Fernando is hitting third and Soto is hitting second despite rumors of his preference to bat lower in the order. Xander still looks like he’s pressing. But he’s consistently hitting 5th now, a spot more in line with his production, and which lengthens the lineup.
Things will break the other team’s way sometimes. They certainly broke the Mets way Friday night. But this team has begun to recognize its weaknesses, and address them. They still lost, but this is how you want to lose, with your best foot forward. On Friday, the Padres didn’t make any foolish strategic moves. No one rested unnecessarily. No one was given a nepo start that they didn’t earn (as bad as Carpenter has been it’s hard to argue there’s an obviously better alternative). There was no deferential treatment in constructing the lineup. Pursuing the winningest strategy was the focus the entire night. This is how it has to be the rest of the season; the question is whether it’s already too late.
Analysis
On Friday morning, ESPN published an article that failed to capture any of what has led to the Padres and Mets becoming ‘First half failures’. It contained the type of skin-deep analysis you’ve come to expect from ‘The Worldwide Leader in Sports’, a company fresh off a round of massive layoffs. The article shows how easy it is to look at outcomes and assume that the underlying process is bad. A lot of people probably watched Friday’s game and thought “Same old Padres”. There were definitely signs of the same old Padres: they grounded into a double play to leave the bases loaded, they scored all their runs in the first two innings until tacking on a couple once the game was out of reach. But we just don’t think that’s all we saw. The team looks focused. They’re showing signs of meritocratic management. The game against the Mets was notable for what we didn’t see: Padresing. That’s not just a moral victory; it portends better things to come. It suggests that they’ve improved their process – they seem to be in the top-right quadrant of this chart:
This game felt like a bad break. Daniel Vogelbach became Ichiro for a day. We made an error of over-aggression, and that may have been the difference. On a different day, Kim makes it to third, scores on a sac fly, and we win. Of course, what actually happened is that Kim was thrown out, the baseball Gods gave the Mets three gifts in the 10th inning, and we lose. But despite the loss, it feels like the team has turned a corner into seriously pursuing success. Let’s hope so.
Mirror Images
The Mets are our mirror image. After any game, fans reflect on what could have been and where things stand. That’s a bit easier against the Mets, since their approach is familiar and their struggles are relatable. It would be easy to mistake them for our reflection in the mirror. But we like to think the Padres are changing; we like to think the best version of this team is coming into focus.
Though there’s nearly half a season still to play, the season within the season is almost over. The trade deadline is approaching like a bullet train. Both the Mets and the Padres are flawed teams with big decisions to make. Every game from now until the deadline will influence their decisions. If either team stinks it up this series, their owner might decide it’s not worth it to pursue the marginal upgrades that might help them get to the playoffs. After all: If your ship is sinking, there’s no point bothering with a fresh coat of paint. A bad showing in this series might cause either team to scuttle the season. The Padres lost the first game, but they didn’t look awful doing it. They’re not sunk yet.
Feeling vs Knowing
One of the hardest things about watching a team like this, so laden with potential, is the glacial pace at which their fate is revealed. We’re drip-fed information one game at a time, and as long as the Padres aren’t mathematically eliminated, there’s still time to fulfill their potential. So it might feel like one game has sealed the team’s fate, but we know that it hasn’t, and the difference between feeling and knowing is important. What we know gives us reason for hope. Even though last night sure felt like a gut-punch. It’s ok to admit it. This one hurts.
Courtesy Jomboy Media