Plus: Top prospect earns a promotion
Thursday, July 30
SAN DIEGO -- The standings really don’t look all that different than they did in the middle of June. At least not from the Padres’ perspective.
They were fighting for the final Wild Card spot then, too -- hanging out right on the fringe with a few would-be contenders. A month and a half later, they still are. Except they’re an entirely different team.
If they were still playing like they did during the season’s first 2 1/2 months, you’d have a hard time convincing me they should buy at Monday’s Trade Deadline (3 p.m. PT). But they are not that team anymore.
They’re hitting.
Through mid-June, the Padres were the worst offense in baseball. That’s not hyperbole. Pick your stat, they probably ranked last. On June 12, they had the fewest runs in the Majors, the worst wRC+ and the lowest average, on-base percentage and slugging percentage.
Here’s the funny part: The solution was always simple. They didn’t need a major reshuffling. They didn’t need a roster overhaul. They just needed their best hitters to hit.
Fast forward a month and a half. The Padres’ best hitters are hitting. Everyone else is, too. They look like a different team. A different team with a different type of ceiling.
The Padres rank in the top 10 in all of those categories since mid-June. In large part because Manny Machado has been Manny Machado and Fernando Tatis Jr. has been Fernando Tatis Jr. More recently, Jackson Merrill has been Jackson Merrill.
Jake Cronenworth is back from the concussion IL and looks like the All-Star version of himself. Ty France is still raking. A couple shrewd pickups like Luis Rengifo and Samad Taylor have done their part.
Add it all up, and it’s hard not to come to this conclusion:
If the Padres hit like this, they’re contenders.
And if the Padres are contenders, they need to add pitching.
Maybe only pitching. Earlier this week manager Craig Stammen was asked if he had a wishlist he’d send to general manager A.J. Preller ahead of the the looming Trade Deadline. His response was typical manager-speak.
“The 26 guys that we’ve got right here are exactly who I need and who we need to win it all,” Stammen said.
Here’s the thing: I’m starting to think he might be half right. This offense, with its stars hitting, looks like a completely viable offense. Maybe if you’re worried about Miguel Andujar’s wrist fracture, you add a bench bat. Or, I suppose, you could add one more bopper to fill the role left vacant when Ramón Laureano went down with injury.
But if the Padres were to do nothing offensively and allocate all of their resources to the pitching side of things? I think that’s a perfectly justifiable approach. This suddenly looks like a complete offense, with the appropriate roles carved out for each player.
And even though the overall numbers don’t look great right now …
“There are plenty of us on the team, our numbers on the board, it doesn’t look like we’re doing the best,” Merrill said recently. “That doesn’t show the last few weeks, month. We’re taking good at-bats to help each other.”
Look, offense is fickle. The Padres’ won’t mash for the rest of the season. But there are legitimate reasons to believe that this version is much closer to the reality of this offense than the version from the first 2 1/2 months.
Which makes Deadline shopping that much easier. There's a reason that the Padres have started to mash but are still treading water in the standings. The cracks in their rotation have started to show. Right now, they're filling the gaps with an all-hands-on-deck approach, using three bullpen games out of every five.
It’s a bold plan. It’s a smart plan. For now. But it can’t be the plan you think will carry you all the way to October. Or even all the way to late August/early September, when you hope to have a healthy Nick Pivetta and Joe Musgrove. It’s not sustainable.
The current plan should be viewed as a bridge to the Trade Deadline. It’s a way the Padres can stay afloat while Preller does his shopping. Come next week, ideally, there will be at least two new starters on this roster.
Then you’ve got a passable rotation -- with reinforcements on the way. You’ve got a lockdown bullpen that’ll shorten games in a major way.
And you've got the offense you thought you had all along.
Fernando Tatis Jr. notched his first career five-hit game on Tuesday night. Tony Gwynn is the Padres’ all-time leader with nine five-hit games. Who is the only other player with more than two such games?
A. Adrián González
B. Mark Loretta
C. Gene Richards
D. Dave Winfield
• The Padres promoted top prospect Ethan Salas to Triple-A El Paso, after a strong few months at Double-A San Antonio.
• Never a bad time for a five-game winning streak. But right now? The timing feels impeccable.
• Jeremiah Estrada is back from the IL, and the Padres designated Matt Waldron for assignment to clear space on the roster.
• A win's a win. There's no column in the standings for style points. And the Padres won ugly on Tuesday night.
• Before his walk-off sac fly, Xander Bogaerts found himself at the center of another controversy regarding a pitch below the strike zone on Tuesday.
The Padres are set for a crucial four-game series against the Giants at Petco Park. And tonight is bucket hat night.
The first 40,000 fans in attendance will receive a reversible bucket hat that flips between home and away. For tickets and more information about Padres giveaways, click here.
C. Gene Richards
Richards recorded three five-hit games with the Padres in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. Winfield and Loretta (along with Gwynn) are the only other Padres with at least two five-hit games.
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