Obama chuckled. ‘You mean the Chaos Emeralds?’
—Anonymous

Friday’s game was remarkable in that, if it were the only game you’d watched all season, you would likely come away with an understanding of the team as coherent as one brought about by season-long analysis. Not just because it’s the most recent data point, but because the strengths and weaknesses that have emerged across a chaotic season were on full display. And we think the way the team has weathered the tempest implies the strategy AJ Preller should be pursuing across the pivotal next three days. One way or the other, the fate of the team will turn Monday.

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Chaos

The Padres starting rotation has been in disarray since the ace of the staff left his fourth start of the season with a right forearm flexor strain. When their Plan B failed after Lucas Giolito proved incapable of providing major-league innings, and Griffin Canning struggled to pitch to even replacement level, we wrote:

The Padres are on to Plan C, hoping to soak up innings any way they can

It turns out the C stands for chaos as the Padres have indeed looked to creative solutions to cover missing innings, with two of the final five games before the trade deadline not having a named starter:

Dennis Lin wrote about the Padres decision to emulate the famous ‘Pitching Chaos’ strategy to fill starts given the depleted starting rotation. The 2024 Tigers famously made an unlikely postseason run when they were down to two starting pitchers by using a combination of openers and bulk relievers to fill starts, deciding who would pitch based on whichever arms emerged rested across the chaos of the previous games.

The Padres were featured on Apple TV’s Friday Night Baseball. The game fell on one of the vacated spots for the starting rotation, and the Padres asked Bradgley Rodriguez, Yuki Matsui, and German Marquez to emulate a Padres starter.

Rodriguez was tagged as opener and faced Luis Arraez to lead off the game. Arraez is healthy and back to performing at pre-Padres level. He hit the fourth pitch of the game well, but fell victim to one of the Padres’ major strengths:

The Padres have elite defense in the outfield with plus athletes at all three positions, and Petco’s penchant of keeping deep balls in the power alleys from leaving the park means the Padres regularly turn would-be home runs and extra base hits into outs which provide box-score invisible leverage swings that are part of the secret to how a team with the worst offense, and one of the worst starting rotations in baseball in the first half of the season managed to remain .500 at the break.

Bradgley Rodriguez’ contribution to the bullpen is also a major reason why enough wins were banked in the first half that the Padres are still in playoff pursuit two weeks into the second half.

Rodriguez showcased exactly how he can be an impact arm for years to come with his pitch sequencing and changeup command to the next two hitters of the night.

His first pitch to Heliot Ramos was a painted 100 MPH four-seam on the outer half that Ramos watched and timed up. He followed with a 99 MPH sinker up and in, and a changeup that again ran in on Ramos:

After buzzing Ramos’ tower in back to back pitches Rodriguez threw the pitch that’s made him effective against both right and left handed hitters.

Home plate is 17 inches wide. This changeup started well off the plate, but had 16 inches of arm-side break and ended up on the outer half of the plate. Ramos froze his swing decision as the pitch was sailing to the plate outside:

By the time it reached home plate Ramos was staring at a perfect strike:

The ability to throw the changeup for strikes against RHH will be one of the differentiators for Rodriguez. When RHH don’t pick up the changeup well, he can then attack multiple parts of the zone with velocity. On Friday Ramos wasn’t seeing Rodriguez well, and he reacted late on the next pitch, a 99.3 MPH four-seamer, for strike three.

The body language from Ramos suggests he was expecting another changeup to dive down and out of the strike zone:

Left handed hitters generally have an even tougher time picking up Bradgley’s changeup, and he uses it differently against lefties to induce bad swings.

Bradgley throws almost exclusively changeups, sinkers, and four-seamers to LHH, mixing his slider and cutter in to RHH ~14% of the time:

Bryce Eldridge was up next, and got dismantled by the inability to discern the changeup from the fastball:

The sequence to Eldridge was typical, and in fact was the identical CH-CH-SI-CH sequence he used to strike out Troy Johnston to help the Padres get out of a jam in his last outing on Tuesday:

You can see how early Johnston is on the first changeup, and after timing up the second changeup out of the zone, Johnston was late on the 98 MPH third pitch sinker. Bradgley then threw another changeup to the exact same spot with identical tunneling to the sinker and Johnston’s timing was out front for an uncompetitive swing-and-miss strike three:

You can see the identical tunneling of the 3rd and 4th pitch, and why this creates such a challenge for LHH who have a harder time detecting the changeup than RHH:

Bradgley Rodriguez is a developmental success story, and his ERA of 2.28 isn’t just smoke and mirrors. His WHIP is 1.14 and he’s struck out more than a batter per inning. When he’s pitched in the 7th-9th innings he’s held opponents to a .185/.254/.294 slash line good for a .548 OPS. On Friday he was advised he would only pitch one inning and he let it rip with all pitches he threw seeing an uptick in velocity compared to his season average:

The Padres have been forced to use him in long relief and as an opener to navigate the pitching chaos, but so long as he’s able to maintain command of his pitch shapes and locate his changeup, he has the stuff to be a knockout middle reliever. He’s best deployed as part of the bridge to the nastiest back end of the bullpen in the league.

The use of openers and bulk relievers to fill the missing starting rotation innings sounds like a worst case scenario, but the one advantage that comes from pitching chaos is eliminating the third-time-through the order penalty. And this is one of the areas in which Padres starting pitchers have been among the worst in the league.

Pitching chaos is absolutely a Plan C, but as Plan C’s go it’s one with at least some precedent for success. Still, addressing the starting pitching situation is unquestionably a focal point of the trade deadline strategy.

Emergent Properties

The Padres half of the 1st started with Fernando Tatis Jr. continuing to hit:

Since the start of the second half, and emerging long before that, Tatis has continued to find his form. Since the All-Star Break Tatis has logged the longest home run in MLB in 2026, and his first career five hit game:

It took Tatis 207 at bats to hit his first home run of 2026. In the 237 at bats he’s had since he’s slashed .305/.371/.488 and hit seven more home runs. You can never definitively say a player is ‘back’, but this is what you’d expect to see if he were.

Tatis would advance to third, and score on a hard hit line drive sac fly by Manny Machado:

Machado has been finding a return to form as well. It took until the last game of the first half to raise his batting average back to the Mendoza line. But he’s been crushing the ball in the second half:

He’s raised his season total to 23 home runs, and on Friday raised his OPS+ above 100. He also discussed the mechanical changes he’s been working through the the Apple TV crew which was shared later in the broadcast.

With the 1-0 lead the Padres would add on thanks to Luis Campusano who continues to rake since returning from the IL in early July:

Notably Campusano started at DH for the first time this season. In April we wrote about the trust the Padres had shown in Campusano’s defense behind the plate. Friday signaled that trust extends to Campusano’s ability at the plate as well.

It simply can’t be overstated how much a healthy Campusano, realizing the offensive potential that made him a prized prospect, would impact the Padres lineup. He looks healthy, and he’s corrected the mechanical changes that derailed his offensive development in 2024. His slash line sits at .306/.409/.510 with a .919 OPS after a productive night Friday.

The Padres would take the 2-0 lead into the 3rd when Jackson Merrill continued to contribute even though the ball wasn’t bouncing his way:

This ball was hit hard, and newly anointed defensive wizard Luis Arraez made a nimble turn that would’ve started an easy double play for the majority of hitters in the league. Jackson Merrill combines elite athleticism with a relentless hustle that let him beat out what seemed like a sure double play.

Campusano followed with his second hit of the game, Merrill’s speed allowed him to advance to third:

Xander Bogaerts followed. This is notable as Bogaerts was hitting 7th, the sixth straight game he’s batted 7th or lower. Xander Bogaerts has struggled at the plate, but much of the consternation around his play is misplaced contract anxiety. He’s been a league average shortstop this season. That may sound like ‘damning with faint praise’, but league average players are very good, a tier below all stars, and two tiers below the player Bogaerts was in Boston. And he’s been worth his contract this year. The problem has been that his struggles at the plate compound the team’s offensive woes when he’s inserted in the heart of the order. There he becomes a liability. At the bottom of the order his .629 OPS fits in with league averages. If he can return to the .720 OPS he put up in 2025, he becomes a plus bat at the bottom of the order. Dropping him in the order is something the Padres can afford with the emergence of Campusano and Ty France. And until Bogaerts gives indication of being in good form at the plate, the team is optimized with him hitting 7th or lower.

Bogaerts would ground to first base, and Rafael Devers caught the ball on the bag which created the opportunity for Jackson Merrill to impact the offense for a second time without getting a hit:

Willy Adames recognized that Devers’ catching the ball while tagging first meant the out at second was no longer a force play, and rushed to tag Campusano running down the basepath. But Merrill sprinted to home in time to score before the tag on Campusano completed the double play.

Merrill struggled at the plate worse than at any point in his career in the first half of the season, but he never stopped contributing to winning. He has elite makeup, and that was no small part of the Padres drafting him in the first round when many felt it was too high.

Merrill didn’t get a hit in this game, but he’s been in far better form since the second half started.

We wrote in the first half that swing path analysis from Baseball Savant suggested he’d made an approach change towards a pull oriented swing, and was clearly struggling with barrel control, fouling off a career high number of good pitches to hit and constantly facing worse count leverage as a result.

Early in the second half Merrill had an at bat that wouldn’t usually be noteworthy because it was off a position player. But the fact that he was able to perfect-perfect a 47 MPH eephus pitch and keep it fair suggested that barrel control hadn’t abandoned him completely:

This was the type of anodyne result a good hitter would be expected to achieve. But Merrill was not a good hitter in the first half precisely because he wasn’t doing the expected damage on good pitches to hit. Regardless of whether this home run was an indicator, he’s been squaring the ball up regularly in the second half:

There’s a lot of evidence that he’s found the mechanics to resurface the elite barrel control he showed through the minors and early in his major-league career. He’s cut his whiff rate and foul rate down in the second half and is putting the ball in play much more often:

Importantly, he’s converted the best pitches he’s seen into balls in play as well:

His numbers on pitches in the heart of the zone in the second half reflect that:

His expected wOBA is higher than his actual wOBA, he probably deserves to have numbers slightly higher than what he’s produced:

Since the start of the second half all three of the team’s most important hitters have looked more like themselves:

At various points through the season we wrote about the specific struggles Tatis, Machado, and Merrill seemed to be facing. A throughline in all of their struggles was identifiable mechanical or timing issues, none of which implied a permanent loss of form. There was never any reason to think the diminished versions were the new normal. But until you see a return to form, it’s hard to rule it out. There’s now convincing evidence of return to form for all three. No amount of evidence can provide certainty that they’ll be their usual selves going forward, but with three days before the deadline there is reason to think the Padres offense can be good enough to buoy a playoff run. Especially because the offseason addition of Ty France has added another major-league bat.

France came up in the 4th with two outs and runners on first and second. A double steal on a timing play from Tatis put runners on second and third:

France would work the count to 3-1, and when he got a pitch to hit, he lined a 108.7 MPH single to centerfield to plate two more runs. And the rout was on:

Ty France has had a very interesting career. He was the type of hitting prospect that had some GMs thinking he would eventually win a batting title. He never found that form, but he became a major league hitter by adding enough power to hold down a corner-infield position, and even made an all-star game in 2022. But he never developed the consistent 30+ home run power to be a perennial all star either, and in the absence of other another plus skill his career as a corner infielder started to wobble. Before 2025, Statcast named France the worst defensive first baseman in baseball and he took it to heart, vigorously working to improve his defense all season. Remarkably it paid off with winning the Gold Glove for the 2025 season. In 2026, despite playing a part time role early on, France leads MLB in Outs Above Average among first baseman. France is a relentless worker, and he’s transformed himself on the defensive side of the ball. It’s not unreasonable to think that a player capable of transforming himself on defense could also rehabilitate his career on offense. Maybe not to the level of a Silver Slugger, but he’s always had a credible major league bat with stretches of his career where he was plus offensively. A return to just that level of production, an above average bat, would be spectacular for the Padres fortunes. He’s played two thirds of a season in 2026 and is having the most consistent season of his career. He’ll likely surpass his career high in home runs this year. He played most of his career in Seattle in one of the few parks with a claim to be a tougher park to hit in than Petco. The evidence thus far is that his reemergence as a hitter is real. Even if he regressed to his ~.780-.800 OPS peak Seattle years that would help credibly hold down the heart of the order. France is a big reason the Padres are near the top of the league defensively. His signing has been a home run.

France has also honed an unusual hidden skill to help him reach base more frequently. For most of baseball history, getting hit by a pitch was mostly thought of as a pitching statistic. A function of wildness or command. That is part of it. But watching Ty France over the last several years raises an obvious oversight. You can see in his play that getting hit by a pitch is at least partially a hitter skill as well.

Ty France entered the season with 134 career hit by pitches in 3,587 plate appearances, a hit-by-pitch rate of 3.74%. On Thursday night he got hit by a pitch for the 10th time in 2026:

It turns out this was a milestone HBP. Looking at every player in major league history with at least 100 career hit by pitches, France moved past Tommy Tucker into sixth all-time in HBP%:

Craig Biggio’s modern record of 285 career hit by pitches came over 12,504 plate appearances, good for a 2.28% hit-by-pitch rate. France has been hit 64% more often when he steps into the batter’s box.

When you watch how France does it, you see that there is indeed a skill involved. Most hitters instinctively jump out of the way of pitches coming towards them, and in the process trade a base advancement for a ball. France does something totally different:

France flinches defensively as hitters do, but he’s very good at getting his critical hit boxes out of the way while moving an armored (by gear or by girth) part of his body into the path of the ball and taking the HBP. How a hitter reacts to a potential HBP is a trainable skill. Some hitters dodge, Ty France parries.

This is an artist at work:

A relentless effort to improve on all aspects of the game is an important part of remaining a major leaguer, and Friday provided another redemption arc of sorts. Jase Bowen was promoted from El Paso in June, and had an inauspicious debut. In his first major league plate appearance he had the misfortune of facing Aaron Nola, owner of one of the best knuckle curves in the league, and the book was out on Bowen after his first at bat:

Bowen would bat again in the 9th inning representing the Padres last hope in a one run game. He faced Jhoan Duran, the imposing closer known for his 98 MPH splitter and 100 MPH four-seamer. Instead Duran threw three straight sweepers. A pitch he throws 9% of the time:

A rookie made to look that bad can be sure that all over the league pitchers start practicing their shuuto’s.

Bowen has been on the field primarily because of his defensive contributions in left, but his long term place in the league will hinge upon his ability to pick up major league spin. That’s part of why his first home run Friday was so special:

This slider wasn’t in a great location to hit, but Bowen picked up the spin, tracked it as it dove out of the zone, and met it perfect-perfect.

Late in the broadcast Manny Machado’s ongoing swing mechanic optimization was discussed by the Apple TV crew. They were mid-discussion of some candid comments offered by Machado when he barreled a double off the right field wall:

Easy power to the opposite field has been one of the aspects that made Machado a special hitter. His performance since the latter half of June, paired with his disclosure that he did indeed make mechanical alterations with a private hitting coach in the offseason, paired with swing path analysis and his comments early in the season that he was working to return to his usual mechanics, capped off with his comments to the broadcast team about finding success, is as much evidence as you could hope for to generate a positive prospectus. The usual rules of uncertainty apply, but it appears far more likely that number 13 is still Manny Machado not Manny Washado.

Fingerprints

Though Jake Cronenworth didn’t play on Friday, his return to the lineup has lengthened it further. He’s put up a wOBA of .329 since coming off the IL, plenty good when combined with the contributions of the heart of the order. More importantly his addition to the infield depth has allowed the defense to optimize, with the Padres two-time platinum glove winner returning to right field. Though Cronenworth didn’t see action, his fingerprints were on the final play of the game when Fernando Tatis Jr. made an extremely hard catch look casual to secure the win:

The final pitch of the game notched German Marquez his first career save, a rare five inning save, and ensured an entire day of rest for the back of the bullpen. This is the best possible outcome a team can find when pursuing a pitching chaos strategy with a depleted rotation.

Balancing Act

The trade deadline is only three days away, and a coherent understanding of the Padres is finally emerging. The revelation is both comforting and sobering. Comforting because the offense has finally begun to resemble the one everyone imagined in March. Sobering because, at the same time, the rotation has revealed itself as the roster’s defining weakness with an uncertain outlook for improvement. The bullpen, and especially the defense, appear to be real strengths. But the bullpen is being taxed by pitching chaos, and while a structure with three points of contact can stay upright, if one of those points fails it will bring the structure down. Offense and Defense can always use upgrades, but the rickety structure most in need of relief is, ironically, the bullpen. The starting pitching has already collapsed, but Dennis Lin reported that Pivetta may not be far from a return and Musgrove may be back in August or early September. The Padres don’t want to bank on their return, but they may have no choice. Acquiring starting pitching at the trade deadline is likely to incur a prohibitive cost.

The Padres are balancing competing priorities. Any trade they make depletes an already modest prospect capital fund. And there are very few additions to be made without mortgaging the future. Bolstering one part of the team likely comes at the opportunity cost of bolstering another. The best balance of these tradeoffs is a strategy that provides maximum resilience against uncertainty, and raises the ceiling of performance in a short playoff series if they can survive through the regular season gauntlet.

The goal is not just to make the playoffs, but to have a chance to win playoff series. Adding reliable but unspectacular starting pitching by trade gives the team the best odds of surviving the remaining turns through the rotation to make the playoffs, but does almost nothing to raise the ceiling of the team once the non-contenders are culled and every playoff opponent will be high quality. Adding a potent bat to the left field platoon adds resilience to loss of form or injury to another spot in the lineup, and raises the odds of success in the playoffs incrementally, but likely forecloses on the possibility of impactful assets on the pitching side given the diminutive war chest. The bullpen is the one part of the team that has lived up to expectations, and it’s tempting to think the team could draw from a strength to address a weakness. Trade a Mason Miller or Adrian Morejon to fill the hole in the starting rotation and maybe even bring back some prospect capital to bolster the future. But the chaos strategy demonstrated that the team is already drawing from that strength to put together competitive games and keep the postseason hopes alive. The bullpen is a strength, but the chaos strategy is taxing it. The biggest unknown is whether Joe Musgrove and Nick Pivetta will return to provide major league quality innings this month. There’s at least some reason to think they will. If they do, it will lessen the impact of any middling starting arms added. If they do not, the bullpen will still be drawn on to cover games.

Solve For The Equilibrium

There’s only one trade strategy that provides the opportunity to both address the team’s biggest weakness, add resilience if that weakness isn’t bolstered by the return of Pivetta and Musgrove, and raises the ceiling in both the final 62 game gauntlet and the postseason. High end bullpen arms are an asset that provide enormous value through the combination of a raised playoff ceiling, resilience against direct bullpen use fatigue, resilience in the event Pivetta and Musgrove can’t return by offering more arms to absorb the chaos strategy, and typically does not cost generational prospect hauls, with Mason Miller being the exception. But Mason Miller is an exception. There is no position player in baseball who can guarantee his team is the best just because he’s on the field. When Mason Miller plays, the team that has him is the best team that inning. If the Toronto Blue Jays had matched the Padres’ offer for Miller they would be world champions12.

Final Countdown

Trying to predict AJ Preller’s next move is a fool’s errand, but we’ve done our best. We’d be shocked if the strategy at the deadline wasn’t some version of ‘Buy’. There’s enough indicators of emerging quality on the Padres to make that a reasonable direction to go. But this team has faced an immense amount of chaos in 2026, and is meeting it in kind. We feel there’s a single strategy that best balances the risks at present, the future value, and the specific weak points of this Padres team. But we won’t be mad if a different course is charted. And we won’t be surprised. A tireless, quixotic GM is endlessly interesting. And baseball is fun. Whatever the next three days hold our position will remain the same as it always has:

Keep the faith.

And go Padres.

The Padres reached the All-Star break 48-48, exactly .500. The first half included both an eight game win streak and, more recently, an eight game losing streak from June 27th through July 4th. They’re only 3.5 games behind the Marlins in the playoff race, hardly an insurmountable deficit. But it’s a more difficult task than it may seem. The Padres would need to play at a 96-win pace (39–27 over 66 games) for the rest of the season to match the Marlins current 87 win projection. It’s tempting to draw parallels to the 2024 season in which the Padres stood an even 50-50 after their first 100 games before surging to a 43-19 record in the second half to finish with a 93-69 record. But the two seasons are very different. And that matters because the trade deadline is less than three weeks away. Decisions have to be made. Decisions, we hope, that are made with a clear-eyed understanding of what can be expected of this year’s Padres team.

How did they get here?

It’s fair to say the Padres haven’t played like a .500 team. It hasn’t been a win-one, lose-one type of season. It’s been far more chaotic:

Courtesy: Darren Williams (@darenw)

A look under the hood suggests the recent performance regression is more indicative of the team’s quality than the .500 record. The Padres have scored 379 runs, dead last in baseball. They’ve allowed 422, which is a fairly good mark. But the -43 run differential is abysmal. It implies a Pythagorean record of 43-53, five games worse than their actual record.

Their offense produced a 90 wRC+ (10 percent below league average) after adjusting for park and league. Their starters had a 4.78 ERA and 4.61 FIP, suggesting the ERA has only been slightly worse than expected performance.

Their final turn at bat before the All-Star break offered a clean look at how they’ve maintained relevance despite immense areas of underperformance. Trailing the Blue Jays 4-3 in the bottom of the eighth on Sunday, the Padres managed yet another late inning rally, fueled by timely hitting, pressing the margins, and some luck going their way.

Xander Bogaerts led off with a jam shot infield single:

With Manny Machado at the plate, Bogaerts stole second:

Machado worked a full count and lined a single to center:

Gavin Sheets followed and hit a sharp groundball right at shortstop Andrés Jimenez for what looked like a sure double play ball:

Ernie Clement inexplicably didn’t cover second base, and the lapse turned Sheets’ grounder into a productive out.

The Padres then took the bold step of pinch running for Machado at second in a tied game in the 8th. Jase Bowen took a smart calculated risk, timing up Jeff Hoffman’s delivery perfectly and getting a great jump to steal third:

Alejandro Kirk did not attempt a throw on the play, Bowen’s jump may have been too good to attempt, though the third baseman appeared to be at the bag in time for a close play:

Whatever the reason, the uncontested stolen base would be consequential:

The second productive out of the inning scored the go ahead run. All year that’s been as big enough lead to win if they could carry it to the 9th. Mason Miller diced up the Blue Jays batters in the 9th on only eight pitches, ending the game with a ludicrous 0-2 slider that made one of the better hitters in baseball appear entirely overmatched:

An infield hit, two steals, one clean single, a lucky productive out ground ball, and a sac fly produced two runs. This sequence was a microcosm of the overperformance of the run differential. That was the first half compressed into one inning. The Padres are built well to take advantage of late leads, but have struggled massively to create consistent enough offense and early run prevention to maximize this advantage. Too often they’ve needed things to break their way to eke out late leads. This win was 12th this season in a game in which they trailed at some point in the 7th inning or later:

• April 9 vs. Colorado: trailed in both the 10th and 11th; won 7–3 in 12 innings

• April 15 vs. Seattle: trailed 6–2 entering the ninth; won 7–6

• April 23 at Colorado: trailed 8–4 after seven; won 10–8

• April 25 at Arizona: trailed 4–1 entering the seventh; won 6–4

• May 10 vs. St. Louis: trailed 2–0 entering the ninth; won 3–2 in 10

• May 13 at Milwaukee: trailed 1–0 entering the ninth; won 3–1

• June 6 vs. New York Mets: fell behind 2–1 in the seventh; won 3–2

• June 8 vs. Cincinnati: trailed 2–1 entering the seventh; won 6–2

• June 10 vs. Cincinnati: fell behind in the seventh and again in the eighth; won 5–4

• June 20 at Texas: trailed 3–1 entering the eighth; won 6–4 in 10

• June 23 vs. Atlanta: trailed 6–5 entering the seventh; won 7–6 in 10

• July 12 vs. Toronto: fell behind 4–3 in the eighth; won 5–4

That matches their total late inning comeback wins from 2025. They won 90 games in 2025, the 12 late comebacks representing 13.3% of their total victories. In 2026 their 12 late comebacks represent 25% of their 48 victories.

Timely hitting can win actual games, which are famously the only kind the standings count. It is simply difficult to carry that forward. As Sunday’s win showed it often requires factors that are out of the team’s direct control. Hoping for sustained good luck is not a plan. It’s very, very unlikely they can maintain even a .500 pace if they have to win a quarter of the games by overcoming late inning deficits.

The central question of the second half is not whether a .500 team can make the playoffs. Of course it can. It is whether the Padres can tilt the chaotic process that produced the .500 record to one which implies an ability not to just limp into the playoffs, but to then win sequential playoffs series. That’s a -very- tall order. And it demands sobriety. So let’s look at what really happened in the first half, and what a distilled prospectus suggests going forward.

Starting Rotation: Plan A

Plan A for the season was out the window by early April. The team lost its ace in what was already a rickety starting rotation when Nick Pivetta left his April 12 start after retiring all nine hitters he faced. He subsequently went on the injured list with a strained flexor tendon in his pitching arm and a highly uncertain return.

Nick Pivetta’s injury was the highest-leverage event of the first half because it did not merely remove one starting pitcher. It had second and third order effects that were a major part of the scuffling first half.

In his four starts Pivetta produced a career high 36.4% strikeout rate, while holding opposing hitters to a .539 OPS, and a career best 86.2 MPH average exit velocity, allowing no home runs, and pitching to a 1.23 FIP. He was missing bats at the level of a frontline starter when his elbow stopped cooperating. You could argue he was the Padres most important tentpole for a successful season.

We wrote about the likelihood the Padres could have absorbed such a loss with a tolerable impact to their season outlook if they could merely backfill Pivetta’s absence with replacement level1 production. This was Plan B, and the Padres expended resources signing Lucas Giolito, hoping that a patchwork of Matt Waldron and Giolito, along with the ramp up of Griffin Canning could cover Pivetta’s missing innings and produce somewhere near the minor league replacement level and league average, thus limiting the pain felt by the loss of Pivetta. Instead the team absorbed three months of replacement attempts that failed to produce replacement-level value.

Canning, Waldron, and Giolito combined to throw 111⅔ innings in which they allowed 79 earned runs, a 6.37 ERA, far below expected replacement level production. Canning finished the half with a 6.47 ERA. Waldron had a 7.52 ERA. Giolito had a 5.16 ERA with a 6.07 FIP and never pitched more than five innings in a start before hitting the IL June 23rd. This is fairly described as a catastrophic result.

The second order effect of Pivetta’s injury was a recurring tax on the bullpen. The failure of Plan B diminished the team’s biggest strength, its bullpen, in two ways:

• Short starts forced the bullpen to cover more early innings. Covering early innings constrained the team’s ability to hunt optimal matchups later in the game, and

• More innings to cover meant extra wear and tear on bullpen arms

Attrition has already started to hit the ranks of the bullpen with Jeremiah Estrada still out with no clear timetable for return, and the recent departure of Jason Adam with an injury that almost certainly means the end of his regular season. David Morgan is working his way back from an IL stint.

We can’t know the exact impact of the second order effects. But it’s unquestionably part of the first half struggle. Hard to quantify, even harder to miss.

Pivetta is likely to make a return sometime in August if for no other reason than it has major contractual implications, his 2027 $14 million salary becomes a club option if he is on the IL for over 130 straight days. There’s a non-zero possibility he could return in effective form some time in August. But it’s unlikely, and it shouldn’t be counted on when projecting the strength of the team down the stretch.

Plan C

Plan A and Plan B for the starting rotation failed spectacularly in the first half. The Padres are on to Plan C, hoping to soak up innings any way they can, including asking JP Sears to try to go three times through the order once every five games. Sears has been far worse as a Padre than he was with the A’s. Still, his floor is likely not worse than what Giolito produced. And there’s some reason to think that the innings they get from Waldron and Canning going forward will be better. Primarily because Canning and Waldron were so bad in the first half that it beggars belief this is the true talent level of the players.

Ceiling: Floor Raiser

Waldron has a track record suggesting he can perform at replacement level pitcher. He managed an effective outing in long relief, pitching three scoreless innings against Toronto on July 11. Notably, he threw 20 knuckleballs among 46 pitches, a 43.5 percent usage rate. Before that appearance, he had used the pitch only 24.7 percent of the time. Its velocity also rose slightly, from a season average of 80.5 mph to 81.2.

Waldron has a five pitch mix, but only one pitch that is likely to flummox opposing hitters with any regularity. And he’s been reluctant to throw the knuckleball as much as he probably should. But it’s not crazy to think that an opposing lineup seeing Waldron once, with a knuckleball-heavy approach, might have a hard time squaring him up right away.

Waldron’s track record and stuff suggest he’s not a credible multiple-times through-the-order starter. Waldron’s ceiling is as a floor raiser. A sometimes useful multi-inning reliever. Mucking up the timing of opposing hitters for a single look before the high-velo arms at the back of the bullpen can be brought in. That’s not a key cog in a deep playoff run, but it’s potentially a piece of the puzzle for limping in. Given the state of the rotation and bullpen, that is not a trivial discovery. If it’s real.

Canning’s Uncanny Luck

Canning deserves a more precise diagnosis than his ERA permits. He is a year out from the Achilles injury that ended his 2025 season with the Mets in which he’d pitched credibly as a number three starter.

In 2026 his stuff has been identical to 2025, and his arsenal has actually expanded with the addition of a sinker:

There are two factors that explain most, if not all, of the difference in on-field performance in 2026. Canning has never had the best control with a career BB/9 of 3.5. He pitched around this well enough to limit damage in 2025, but he’s walked batters more often, and allowed more total base traffic in 2026. He’s maintained his strikeout rate and his FIP is reflective of this. While it’s worse in 2026, it’s far lower than his 6.47 ERA:

His command struggles have come primarily from the inability to locate the changeup which is his second highest usage pitch after the four-seamer. He’s missed location with his sinker, but as a much lower usage pitch it hasn’t been the biggest source of his struggles:

The changeup is a very location dependent pitch and inability to locate it craters its effectiveness far more than stuff-dependent pitches. Unsurprisingly his changeup has produced terrible run value:

It’s not hard to believe that his command struggles could improve as he works all the way back to repeatable mechanics. It’s certainly not guaranteed. But there’s more to his horrendous first half than waning command.

There’s very good reason to think that Canning has had horrific sequencing luck. Here are his splits by base occupancy:

When there have been runners on base, opponents batting average on balls in play has been an unthinkable .435. With runners in scoring position opponents BABIP has been .412. It’s reasonable to think these are unsustainably high numbers that will regress positively to the mean. And not just because of how outlandishly high these numbers are. The underlying metrics suggest Canning has done a better job of foiling opposing hitters when runners are on base.

With the bases empty canning has allowed a hard hit rate of 49.5% with an average exit velocity of 91.2 MPH and an expected slugging of .421:

He’s probably gotten a little lucky in not allowing more damage in these at bats. But he’s actually held opposing hitters to a lower hard hit rate of 45.5% with runners on, and a lower expected slugging of .384, yet opposing hitters have slugged .516 with a BABIP of .435 in these at bats:

With runners in scoring position he’s held opposing hitters to an even lower hard hit rate at 38.9% and a similar expected slugging of .398, with a very good combination of low exit velocity at 88.4 MPH and low launch angle of 7 degrees. Yet opposing hitters have a BABIP of .412 in these at bats:

This is what bad sequencing luck looks like. 20% of the runs he allowed in the first half came from these six at bats:

With men on base, opponents hit the ball less hard. Their expected slugging percentage fell from .421 to .384. With runners in scoring position their average exit velocity and hard-hit rate fell further. But the on-field results moved in exactly the opposite direction. That shouldn’t continue, at least not at such an absurd frequency.

“Unlucky” is not the same as “Good.” Canning still walked far too many hitters, allowed too many home runs and had a 4.72 FIP in the first half. The contact data argue that the scandalous 6.47 starting ERA overstated how poorly he pitched. They do not argue that he pitched well.

Canning’s first half profiled as a passable 4th or 5th starter who clustered some bad outcomes that probably will be filtered out as his luck normalizes. Similar to Waldron, that’s a pitcher who can help a team secure a playoff berth, but does not confer an advantage in a short series against good teams.

Sunk Cost

Giolito’s struggles have a straightforward explanation: his stuff in 2026 has been nowhere near what he showed in his resurgent season for the Red Sox last year. In 2025 Giolito’s four-seam fastball averaged 93.3 MPH. In 2026 it averaged 90.8 MPH, regularly dipping into the high 80’s. That is simply not major league quality. And it raises the unanswerable question of whether the Padres knew his stuff had fallen so far when he was signed as Plan B. It’s hard to imagine that he would have received a contract had he performed that way in a showcase for the team. Perhaps he was signed sight-unseen? We’ll probably never know. Unless he miraculously comes off the IL able to find his prior fastball velocity, he likely won’t improve in on-field performance. That prospect seems about as likely as the return of Pivetta: Non-zero.

Giolito should not be counted on to find his 2025 form. But if somehow rest on the IL is sufficient to rehabilitate Giolito’s fastball, it should be straight forward to assess whether he’s ready by looking at the radar gun. If the fastball velocity isn’t there, there’s no reason to expect him to be any more effective. And there’s sunk-cost risk to playing him just because he’s under contract: Although his first half performance was only slightly below replacement player level, starting pitchers throwing high 80’s fastballs in the modern game are capable of performing significantly worse.

Plan A and B for the Pivetta Problem were immediate failures. Plan C is a work in progress. If Sears, Canning, and Waldron can pitch to slightly better than replacement level across the second half, they may do their part to help the Padres squeak into the postseason. They can probably do that. But it won’t be enough on its own. Other things also need to go right.

Dull Cutter, Sharp Decline

Randy Vásquez’s season can be divided neatly into two parts. Through May 15, he had a 2.68 ERA across nine outings, with 8.1 strikeouts and only 2.3 walks per nine innings. Over his next eight appearances, his ERA ballooned to 7.75, his strikeout rate was cut in half, and he allowed 10 home runs in 33⅔ innings.

The cutter sits at the center of that decline, although the problem is more complicated than simply saying Vásquez lost his command.

FanGraphs’ Location+ model evaluates the quality of a pitch’s location while accounting for pitch type and count. It does not know the catcher’s target, so it is not a literal measure of whether Vásquez hit his intended spot. Still, it provides a useful indication of whether he is consistently putting the cutter in locations that tend to produce favorable outcomes. Through May 15, Vásquez’s cutter carried a Location+ of approximately 99, essentially league average. From May 20 through his final start before landing on the injured list, that figure fell to roughly 94. The Location+ model confirms that Vásquez’s cutters were located in less favorable spots, but can’t tell us if that was because of poor execution, or poor location decisions. This is where the eye test comes in. Watch the repeated missed execution on locating the cutter to right handers:

These cutters were all meant to be outer-half chase pitches, and leaked over the inner half becoming meatballs.

Against lefties Vasquez repeatedly left the cutter down in the zone when his intent was to hit the top of the zone:

After May 15th his cutter Stuff+ declined by a nearly identical amount as the Location+, from approximately 99 to 94. And it’s interesting to look at why. Through his first nine starts the cutter averaged 89.9 MPH with 3.2 inches of glove side break (cut). Across his final eight starts the velocity increased to 91.1 MPH and the cut decreased to 1.6 inches. That’s a much different pitch shape.

We wrote about the most notable year-over-year change we saw in Vásquez’s early outings: his greatly improved fastball velocity. It’s fair to wonder if Vásquez recent struggles might be related to continuing to push the bounds of fastball velocity. Adding velocity to the four-seam and sinker almost always improve the pitch shape and effectiveness. The cutter is also a fastball, but it is very different from the other two, and is a very hard pitch to execute. The grip is very important, as the pitcher has to generate velocity while also using intense downward pressure on the side of the ball as he snaps his fingers down the outside of the ball at the release point and creates the spin that gives the cutter its cut:

Here is the video of this perfectly executed cutter from April 9th against the Rockies:

In this game Vásquez threw 21 cutters averaging 89.7 MPH and a spin rate of 2826 RMP with 4.5 inches of cut. This particular cutter reached 2846 RPM and 5 inches of cut. You can see how delicate the shape of this pitch is. If the pitcher’s grip is too far behind the ball it will throw off the spin axis and the pitch shape will deteriorate even as the velocity incrementally increases from more of the arm’s momentum being transferred into the flight of the ball instead of rotation.

Since May 15th Vásquez’s cutter has been averaging 2684 RPM. He’s throwing the cutter hard, but losing spin and cutting action on the pitch. Throwing harder typically entails a tradeoff in fine motor control. This is stuff the Niebla pitching lab is undoubtedly working on as Vásquez readies to return to the rotation in the second half.

Vásquez was likely overperforming to some degree across his first nine starts when he was pitching like a number 2 starter, and at times like an ace. His true talent level lies somewhere between those dizzying heights and the below replacement level pitcher he became across his final eight appearances. It’s not out of the question he has a deep enough arsenal to credibly hold down the number 3 spot in a good rotation. Finding that form would move the needle for the Padres in both making the playoffs, and not getting steamrolled once they did.

Offensive Offense

The Padres offense had a horrid first half of the season. A series of unfortunate events cascaded across most of the first half, and reviewing them can add a better understanding of why the Padres have the league’s worst offense to date, and why it would be shocking if they ended the season performing as poorly.

The Stars Misalign

Early in the season the team’s two best hitters were replaced by imposters Manny Washado and Fernando Tatis Jr. Varsity. Thankfully they have since largely shed mechanical and timing issues and produced like the well above average hitters they are.

Tatis

Since the start of June Tatis’ swing length has shortened to 7.1 feet and he’s intercepting the ball at 31.3 inches from his center of mass on competitive swings, indicators of a much healthier swing path and timing combination. He’s slashed .291/.339/.449 across that span. That’s a lot closer to the all-star caliber hitter he’s expected to be.

The power is unquestionably still there:

Tatis’ issue has been with accessing that power. Being on time to the point of contact. Re-finding efficient swing mechanics. He still sits at only 5 home runs. But he’s made resounding progress.

Machado

Machado’s season is almost as strange as Tatis’. He entered July with a batting average below .190 and extremely flawed swing timing.

From March through June, Machado’s fastball swings had a 27.8 percent whiff rate and produced a competitive swing only 89.9 percent of the time. His swings missed their ideal contact point by an average of 0.8 inches. He made “perfect contact” on 23 percent of those swings, and had a flawed swing rate (meaning the swing was neither centered, lined up, nor on time) of 7%:

He was on record saying he’d made mechanical swing changes with a private hitting instructor and had recognized it was not working, and was actively trying to regain sound mechanics. There are many recent indicators he’s done just that. In the small July sample, the average miss distance on fastball swings fell to 0.4 inches. His perfect-contact rate rose to 41%, his whiff rate fell to 9.1 percent and every fastball swing graded as competitive. His flawed swing rate on these pitches dropped to 0:

It’s fair to question how much of the improvement can be attributed to Machado returning to the mechanics that had previously set him on a hall of fame trajectory, and how much is do to facing a normalized hitting environment. It’s almost certainly both. While it’s hard to quantify how much of the early season struggles were mechanically related, it’s not hard to quantify how adverse the hitting environment Machado languished through in the first half was. Mike Petriello summarized it thusly:

In July Machado has slashed .308/.413/.564 and has three home runs in 39 at bats. Twenty-two July fastball swings are not sufficient to declare his slump dead. But they are sufficient to show that the improved July results were accompanied by a measurable change in process.

Merrill

While Tatis and Machado have provided convincing evidence that better things are in store, Jackson Merrill still appears lost at sea. Merrill has always been a bit of a free swinger, and when he struggles its intuitive to assign a lot of the blame to this tendency getting worse. But that doesn’t seem to be what’s really ailing Merrill. Swing decisions and swing execution are related, but they are -not- the same thing. The Swing/Take profile allows us to separate the decision from what the swing ultimately produced. And the most revealing insight comes from looking at Merrill’s performance on pitches in the heart of the zone. The very best pitches to hit.

In 2025, Merrill generated +12 runs of value when he swung at pitches in the heart of the zone. Taking those pitches cost him four runs, leaving him with a net value of plus-eight. In 2026, the value of taking those pitches remained exactly the same: minus-four runs. The value of swinging at them fell from +12 to minus-eight, producing a net value of minus-12.

That is a 20-run reversal on the most hittable pitches. Those are the pitches a hitter is supposed to attack.

Merrill swung at 83.26% of heart-zone pitches in 2025 and 84.57% in 2026, well above the league average in both seasons. He continued making the correct swing decision. But in 2026 the swing stopped producing the expected result. And some of that is almost certainly rooted in approach changes he’s made.

Examining his batted ball profile shows that in 2026 he’s been a very different hitter from his rookie season. His pull% is noticeably higher:

And his pulled air% is a top 6% mark in the league:

Pulling the ball, especially pulling it in the air, has been an obsession of metric focused analysts because both measures correlate with hitting home runs in linear regression testing. Merrill has achieved an objectively elite pulled air % in 2026 but is slugging .350 and is on track to have his worst season at the plate.

There’s an adage called Goodhart’s law that states: when a measure becomes a target, people optimize for the metric rather than the underlying goal, making the metric less reliable. We can’t help but wonder whether Merrill has made approach changes based on the fashionable analytic dogma and optimized around pulling the ball in the air, and unintentionally disrupted his ability to make consistent flush contact in the process. A player’s approach at the plate is very hard to glean. Only he really knows what’s going on in his mind. But the change in batted ball profile is large enough to not seem random. And we can essentially rule out performance deterioration due to chasing more bad pitches. His chase rate is down year-over-year:

We can rule out being too passive, his swing% on pitches in the heart of the zone is the highest of his career:

Clues that it’s his ability to make flush contact emerge when we look a little closer. In 2026 when Merrill swings at pitches in the heart of the zone, he’s putting it in play at by far a career low rate. And that’s not due to swinging and missing, his whiff% in the heart of the zone is 15.31% in 2026, down from 16.39% a season ago. It’s because he’s fouling off almost 50% of the best pitches to hit, far above any prior season. Only 35.8% of the pitches he’s swung at in the heart of the zone have been put in play:

To think about it another way, compared to his rookie season, he’s putting 7.8% fewer balls in play when he swings at pitches in the heart of the zone. He’s swung at 307 pitches in the heart of the zone in 2026. That translates to ~24 swings (307 * 0.078 = 23.9) where instead of a ball put in play, Merrill simply incurs a foul ball.

In 2026 MLB hitters have an OPS of 1.372 on 3-1 counts. When the count goes to 3-2 that drops by 600 points:

When a player gets a pitch in the heart of the zone on 3-1 the disparity grows even wider. Foul ball rate is an almost entirely neglected facet of baseball analytics, but it shouldn’t be. Because it can indicate when a player is struggling to make flush contact even when he’s making good swing decisions. And we now have tools to dig a little further using Statcast’s bat tracking.

Bat tracking shows that Merrill’s bat path is indeed missing by farther than year’s past:

We can infer that this is due to a loss of precision in barrel control in some aspect of his swing mechanics or swing timing.

We can see that Merrill’s overall flawed swing % is stable, but his perfect contact % has dropped a bit from last season, confirming a loss of precision somewhere in the swing:

It doesn’t look like it’s a swing timing issue as Merrill’s On Time swing rate is at an all time high of 77%, but we can see that there is a very clear trend within his swing timing in 2026:

He’s early to point of contact more often, and late to the point of contact far less, than in year’s past. This is as close to a smoking gun as it gets when assessing whether a player has adopted a pull heavy approach.

Merrill has been on time to the point of contact 77% of the time in 2026, and that is an improvement over years prior. But contact that is early or late can still become good contact if the barrel is lined up with the ball:

And this is where Merrill’s struggles are primarily coming from. His ability to line up the barrel with the ball when he gets a good pitch to hit:

He’s struggling to make flush contact in the vertical plane more frequently than in the past, with a career worst 65% of his swings lined up. He’s swinging under the ball at a stable rate year over year, but 5% of his swings have been poorly lined up over the ball in 2026:

Only 65% of his swings on pitches in the heart of the zone lined up in the vertical plane, the lowest percentage of his career.

He’s been timed up, but not lined up, with far more frequency than in year’s past, and that why even in hitters’ counts on pitches in the heart of the zone, he’s frequently failed to turn the swing into damage:

Merrill’s Swing is measurably different in 2026, with career high bat speed, but his swing tilt axis has also been steeper:

This does not prove which part of the swing malfunctioned, just that it is shaped differently. You can speculate that a more violent swing could lead to a tradeoff in fine motor control and incremental loss of barrel precision. That a pull-conscious approach can subtly alter the geometry of the swing, changing where and how consistently the barrel meets the ball. Round after round of trading a ball in play for a foul ball may have led to deterioration of Merrill’s production through negative count leverage. You can speculate, but you can’t know. Only he can.

Merrill’s .219/.278/.350 line in the first half was good for a 76 wRC+. 24% below league average. Merrill is a much better hitter than this. Something has gone wrong. It seems to be a different issue than what either Tatis or Machado struggled with. But of the three, Merrill is at the most malleable stage of his developmental arc.

Ironically his strongest tool as a prospect was preternatural, instinctive, contact hitting. This is what allowed him to be a productive hitter despite never commanding the strike zone like Juan Soto does. And it’s the tool that’s abandoned him. Or vice versa. Merrill has the strongest likelihood of the three to return to the peak performance of his career. Over the long run. It’s highly uncertain that, even if he can pinpoint the problems in his approach and mechanics, he will find that form across the short window of the second half.

Godspeed Jackson.

The Padres do not need Machado and Tatis to become MVP candidates. But they do need both hitters to sustain above average offense across the second half. A 90 wRC+ offense doesn’t have the juice to carry three stars performing between league average and 24 percent below average. There are not enough Ty France sacrifice flies in the world. Thankfully, there are a few other sources of likely improvement across the rest of the season, primarily unwinding the domino effect.

Domino Effect

Luis Campusano was one of the few Padres who appeared capable of changing the offense when all three of its star players were deep in the suck. In 81 plate appearances, Campusano hit .300/.395/.571 with four home runs and a 168 wRC+. Then he fractured his left big toe after fouling a ball off his foot and went on the injured list on May 7. Since his return on July 4th he’s slashed .333/.478/.500 with a home run in 23 plate appearances.

His absence might have been manageable if Freddy Fermin had remained an ordinary version of Freddy Fermin. Instead, Fermin finished the half hitting .152/.252/.268, a 51 wRC+. Fermin repeatedly absorbed foul tips, including two shots off his mask in the same game in April. He entered the concussion protocol in June, returned, and subsequently went back on the injured list with a head contusion. We can’t know exactly when those blows began affecting his hitting. His offensive problems preceded the formal concussion diagnosis, so this is not a clean before-and-after split. But concussions are notoriously a clinical diagnosis dependent entirely on subjective symptom reporting from the player. It is reasonable to think that repeated head trauma has explanatory power.

Campusano’s return improves the second-half lineup, but it also clarifies how painful his absence was. The swing in OPS between the two players is ~.400, about the same gap between Aaron Judge and Rodolfo Duran. The Padres did not merely replace an excellent hitter with a weak one. They leaned heavily on a catcher whose apparent loss of skill was seen on both sides of the ball.

Outfield Opportunity Cost

Ramón Laureano’s season followed a different but related arc.

He opened the year as one of the hitters allowing the Padres to survive the slumps of their stars. In mid-April, Laureano was hitting .292 with a .921 OPS. He supplied power and credible corner-outfield defense.

Then his production collapsed. By the time he went on the injured list, his line had fallen to .203/.286/.374, a .660 OPS. He struck out in 31.6 percent of his plate appearances and finished with an 86 wRC+.

In real time, the falloff was difficult to explain. It is less mysterious now. Laureano had surgery on June 5 to repair a torn labrum in his right hip. The problem reportedly dated to 2021 and worsened during the Padres’ late-May trip to Washington. With an expected recovery of four to five months, the surgery will almost certainly end his regular season.

His absence mattered even after his bat stopped producing because it narrowed the defensive choices available elsewhere. Nick Castellanos is nearly unplayable in the field, but he became one of the outfield options when Laureano was lost.

A subsequent injury would put further leverage on the lack of outfield depth. Jake Cronenworth was struck in the jaw by a 97 mph fastball on April 18. He initially passed the concussion protocol and continued playing, but his eyes were no longer working together properly. He went 4-for-31 after the injury, fell to .144 and finally went on the injured list on May 5. He did not return until June 29.

When Cronenworth was lost, the Padres were not yet prepared to trust Sung-Mun Song as an everyday second baseman. Instead, Fernando Tatis Jr. moved to second base for a long stretch to cover Cronenworth’s absence. This incurred the outfield opportunity cost where Tatis is the reigning platinum glove award winner.

Tatis made 39 starts and played 331 innings at second base. He was playable at the position. That was never the question. The question was what the move did to the rest of the defense. Moving Tatis to second base converts right field from an elite defensive position into a liability. The Padres gave substantial corner-outfield time to Gavin Sheets, who has improved his game quite a bit:

But Sheets is not a plus defender. Bryce Johnson and Jase Bowen played adequate defense, but both were negative forces at the plate and dragged the floundering offense downward. Before his release Nick Castellanos amassed minus-4 outs above average in ~180 innings in the field, a breathtaking minus-32 pace across a full season. Samad Taylor finally emerged as a passable bat and defender for a few weeks before he too was injured.

The Domino effect on both offense and defense was profound.

But it’s finally, mostly, unwinding.

Cronenworth’s return and a greater willingness to play Song should allow Tatis to spend more time in right field. That should restore some of the run prevention lost in the chain reaction. Having Campusano and Cronenworth back in the lineup with a resurgent Machado and Tatis should push the offense back into league average, or better, territory across the second half. If Merrill can find True North, the offense might be dangerous…

The Dog Days Of June

The bullpen was the best functioning part of the first-half roster. It finished with a 3.68 ERA and 4.6 WAR. Mason Miller had a 0.91 ERA, a 0.53 FIP, a 48.3 percent strikeout rate and converted all 25 save opportunities. Adrian Morejon combined a 64 percent ground-ball rate with a 2.40 FIP. Bradgley Rodriguez emerged as a credible major league reliever.

That group is the primary reason a team with a minus-43 run differential reached the break at .500.

It is also diminished.

Jason Adam went on the injured list July 3 with a right shoulder strain. Although his 2.51 ERA looked familiar, his strikeout rate had fallen to 16.4 percent and his FIP had risen to 4.68. He had already posted a 5.11 ERA in June before the shoulder problem emerged.

Jeremiah Estrada had already missed time with elbow tendinitis and returned without his usual velocity. He later went back on the IL with knee inflammation and appeared only 21 times in the half. His first absence followed a decline from a 97.9 mph average fastball in 2025 to 95 mph early this season.

The bullpen can remain above average without Adam and Estrada. Miller and Morejon are elite. Rodriguez, Wandy Peralta and Yuki Matsui have supplied useful innings. Waldron may add length in his new role.

The more important question is whether it can remain above average while compensating for the rotation.

A reliever’s absence does not remove only his innings. It changes everyone else’s innings. Miller can record four outs occasionally, but using him before the 9th makes the 9th somebody else’s problem. Morejon can escape a seventh-inning crisis, but then he is unavailable when tomorrow’s starter reaches 90 pitches in the fourth. Middle relievers become setup men. The least trustworthy arm becomes unavoidable in every extra-inning game.

The bullpen should still be a strength in the second half. It should not be expected to continue concealing the rotation at the same level without either better starting innings or reinforcements.

Competitive Environment

The second half starts Friday against the Kansas City Royals. The Padres should have a more favorable competitive environment in the second half. The Padres first half strength of schedule was one of the tougher in the league:

Their second half strength of schedule projects to be the 4th easiest in baseball according to Fangraphs:

But this only translates to an opponent strength of schedule of .493. If the Padres true talent level is a .500 team, it won’t matter how easy their schedule is, they won’t make the pace to reach 87 wins by season’s end. If they’re closer to their pythagorean 43-53, it’s all the more bleak.

Is this 2024 again?

The comparison is irresistible. The 2024 Padres entered the All-Star break at 50-49, lost their first game afterward to fall to 50-50 and then played the best second-half baseball in the sport. They went 43-20 after the break and finished 93-69.

The similarity is real at the level of record only. Both teams reached July near .500. Both had endured significant injuries. Both possessed stars capable of changing the offense quickly. Both retained a front office willing to remodel the roster aggressively. The 2024 team demonstrated that mediocrity at the break is not a sentence.

But precedent is not projection.

The 2024 Padres had a better offensive foundation. The lineup featured major league hitters 1-9, including a triumphant rookie campaign from Jackson Merrill. Machado was moving toward a strong finish. Dylan Cease and Michael King supplied top-of-the-rotation innings. Joe Musgrove eventually returned. At the deadline, the Padres added Jason Adam, Tanner Scott and Martín Pérez to a roster whose underlying performance already suggested a contender.

The 2026 Padres have a 90 wRC+, a minus-43 run differential, a rotation vacancy that became several vacancies and a 12 percent playoff probability. Laureano is effectively gone for the season. Campusano and Cronenworth have returned, but Pivetta’s timetable remains uncertain. Adam and Estrada may return, but neither entered the break as a fully stable version of himself. Merrill is still lost at sea. Machado and Tatis are surging, but doubts still remain if either is truly ‘all the way back’.

There is narrative similarity to 2024. There is structural dissimilarity.

There is still a path. Machado’s timing improvement may be real. Tatis and Merrill could find peak form. Campusano restores an actual offensive threat at catcher. Cronenworth’s return can move Tatis back to right and improve the defense in two places. Canning’s bases-occupied results should not remain that extreme. Waldron may be more useful in relief. Adam and Estrada may heal. Pivetta may return. Preller may find another starter.

None of those propositions is absurd. The problem is how many variant outcomes must become true at once. And when so many outcomes have to go your way, even if each is individually likely, the probabilities compound that enough will go wrong to sink a longshot season.

That is the framing to take into the 2026 trade deadline.

Raising The Waterline

A central question across the critical next few weeks is whether the Padres’ ambitions have graduated beyond the ‘just happy to make the playoffs’ paradigm. That was undoubtedly the measure of a successful season for most of the Padres existence. Our entire lives really. But it feels like the waterline has been raised. Peter Seidler’s long term goal was a championship parade. In the short term, we were happy to limp into the playoffs. That doesn’t sound so satisfying now. And maximizing the chance to do so one more time in the present is in tension with the ambitions of the future.

A sober look at the 2026 Padres first half performance, and second half prospectus, illustrates a team with more questions than can possibly be answered across the next three weeks. AJ Preller will go into the trade deadline with irreconcilable uncertainty. And this demands a consideration of both sides of the ledger. There is considerable opportunity cost for buying at the deadline. And Preller seemed to indicate selling is now at least under consideration:

“We’re going to go into the process open-minded to see what’s there and see what can help our club,” Preller said. “We’re going to go in open-minded about whether it’s acquiring players or looking at it if we have to go another direction. All those things are on the table.”

The approach we would take is one of deep skepticism that a true contender will emerge from the chaotic 2026 first half. Not that it’s impossible. Just that it is unlikely. And we would manage present and future risk with that in mind. Buying at the deadline should carry a prerequisite: the value must blow you away. There’s no world in which Preller could acquire Tarik Skubal and Sandy Alcantara while preserving the blue chip prospects. But if there were, that would be a time to buy. If there are diamonds in the rough toiling in obscurity for an overlooked team with an overmatched GM that could provide similar value, that would be a time to buy. And that’s it. This is not the season to spend down the balance of blue chip capital for one last tilt at the windmill.

To believe this is the year to push all in is to believe without evidence. Faith is not a statistical forecast; it is an emotional commitment. Our hope is for a sober, disciplined trade deadline. But if we're wrong, if the believers are vindicated and this group proves stronger than the evidence suggests, nothing would make us happier.

Go Padres.

Two pitches from the homestand illustrated one of those margins perfectly.

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No Cost

The Padres won the first game of the homestand 1-0, beating the Braves on Manny Machado’s 14th home run of the season. But the final pitch of the game deserves its own analysis.

With runners on first and second, Mike Yastrzemski faced Mason Miller in an 0-2 count. Miller closed the door with a slider on the outer half of the plate for a clear strike three. But Yastrzemski challenged:

Yaztremski is not sitting in suspense here. He knows with near certainty that this was a strike. But he understood the leverage of the situation and the opportunity cost of challenging: the leverage was very high because strike three ended the game, and the opportunity cost was zero because to not challenge meant there was no game left to deploy the saved challenge. That is the easiest ABS decision in baseball. But it’s interesting to look at its component parts.

This was not a pitch Yastrzemski would likely challenge in a normal situation. The pitch was 3.72 inches from the edge of the strike zone. Pitches that far over the plate have accounted for only about 1% of batter challenges (51 out of 5,192 total challenges). But in that specific game state, it’s mathematically correct to challenge this pitch 100% of the time because of the leverage and opportunity cost tradeoffs.

In fact it was the third time already that the Padres had ended a game on a called third strike that yielded a desperate challenge on equally obvious strikes:

Yaz, Cole Young, and Brandon Nimmo are not alone. So far in the ABS era, when the batter has had a challenge remaining, every called third strike that would otherwise end the game has been challenged. In that one narrow scenario, the league has been perfectly efficient. Everyone understands that when the alternative is immediate defeat, even a nearly hopeless challenge is correct.

The problem is that the same kind of thinking has not carried over to other high-leverage states.

Sunday’s loss to the Dodgers provided the inverse case study.

Opportunity Cost

In the final game of the Dodgers series, the score was tied 1-1 in the top of the fifth. The Dodgers had the bases loaded with one out. Michael King faced Freddie Freeman in a 3-2 count.

King threw a pitch that was called ball four.

The walk forced in a run, gave the Dodgers a 2-1 lead, kept the bases loaded and one out in the inning. King and catcher Rodolfo Duran did not challenge.

It is easy to understand why Yastrzemski challenged a pitch that was almost certain to be confirmed. The game-ending leverage was intuitive. There was no future to save the challenge for.

But the Freeman pitch was actually the more strategically compelling challenge opportunity. The leverage was much higher on the pitch to Freeman, even though the game was literally on the line in Yastrzemski’s at bat. That’s not intuitive, and perhaps that’s why the Padres tandem let the moment slip by. But it’s easy to understand when breaking down the resulting game states.

If the ball four call stood, the Dodgers would score a run to take the lead, they would still have the bases loaded, and still had only one out. Their win probability would jump to roughly 75%, and the chance of the Padres escaping the inning without further runs scoring would fall to about 33%:

A successful challenge would have turned ball four into strike three. The game would have remained tied, there would have been two outs, and the Padres’ chance of escaping the inning without another run scoring would have been roughly doubled to ~67%:

The run swing between the two outcomes was ~1.8 expected runs. The win-probability swing was ~23.69 percentage points.

The point is, this was not a normal ball/strike call. This was a single taken pitch carrying more than one-fifth of a game in win probability. That’s much larger than most entire at bats. And it’s larger than the win probability swing of ~8% on the pitch that Mike Yazstremski, correctly, challenged without hesitation.

Game Theory Optimal

On a normal pitch, a player should usually challenge only when he is confident the umpire missed the call. But in this situation, high confidence is not the correct threshold. The correct question is not, “Am I sure this was a strike?” The correct question is, “Is there any real chance this pitch clipped the zone?”

The answer was yes.

As it turns out, the pitch to Freeman was a strike, which the Dodgers broadcast noted, incredulous that it wasn’t challenged:

But the process point matters more than the result. Because King and Duran could not be certain it was a strike or else they would have challenged. The process point that leads to the game theory optimal decision is recognizing that they should have challenged even if they believed the umpire was probably right. When the payoff is that large, a low-probability challenge can still be the correct play.

The friction in any ABS challenge is the opportunity cost: If the challenge fails, the team loses future challenge capacity. A player who is not confident in his view of the pitch has to weigh the chance of an immediate overturn against the possibility that the team may need that challenge later. Most of the time, that is a reasonable hesitation. But not always, and certainly not on Sunday.

To illustrate, let’s use the win-probability gain from a successful challenge Sunday of 23.69 percentage points, and make the cost of a failed challenge be the future value of the challenge the team might lose. In 2026 the average win probability added by an ABS challenge is 0.83% (43.18 net WPA across 5192 ABS challenges). The break-even point for this tradeoff is shockingly low:

(Breakeven %) * 23.69% = 0.83%

Breakeven % = 3.5%

A 3.5% chance of getting the call to Freeman overturned would yield roughly the same win probability added as the average ABS challenge in 2026. Even tripling that would mean a ~12% confidence would be expected to break even

This calculation is very back-of-the envelope. It will be a bit different if an alternate win probability framework were used, and can be more complex if more variables are accounted for. For example TapToChallenge.com uses a slightly different win probability database and estimates the swing in win probability on Freeman’s walk was closer to 21.2%. They also estimate opportunity cost based on the game state and remaining challenges, so in Sunday’s scenario the opportunity cost of the 5th inning challenge with two challenges remaining is estimated to be only 0.2% win probability. This leads to their estimate that the minimum probability of an overturn needed to breakeven is only 1.4%.

Put another way, if King and Duran felt there was at least a 1.4% chance that pitch would be overturned on ABS challenge, they should immediately challenge. King and Duran did not need to think the pitch was probably a strike. They only needed to think there was a plausible chance it was a strike.

This will never be intuitive, and there will never be enough time to do any of these calculations in the heat of the moment. On the final strike call of a game, intuition aligns perfectly with calculation, and players have internalized the appropriateness of spending a challenge on an unlikely overturn. But the teams that learn to do this in-game, when leverage reaches a threshold where it’s no longer necessary to have high confidence to initiate a challenge, will separate themselves from the pack. At least for awhile. So how can they do this?

The New ABS Skill Trees

When we wrote about ABS before the season started we noted that new skill trees were entering the game:

There are two skill trees teams must consider:

• Strike-zone acuity: The skill of the batter/catcher/pitcher in estimating if a pitch caught the strike zone, and

• Situational leverage awareness: Understanding when the expected value of a challenge justifies the attempt

Those are related skills, but they are not the same skill.

A player can be good at reading the zone but poor at identifying when a low-confidence challenge is still correct. A player can also be mediocre at reading the zone but still make good challenge decisions if he understands which game states demand aggression.

The Freeman pitch was a failure of the second skill more than the first.

King gave an excellent post-game interview in which he carefully walked through an impeccable analysis of the missed opportunity:

It went through my head to challenge it, but I wasn’t fully committed to it… and then I thought about it well later… even if I’m wrong the team’s probably not mad at me for challenging that one.

It’s likely that almost every player, in the same situation, is going to have the same untrained reaction in the moment: a sense that a challenge may be warranted, but friction to pulling the trigger because it’s a low confidence challenge, and that runs counter to the typical ABS challenge rubric. And they won’t have time to think it through. A player is given roughly two seconds to challenge a pitch, and this interval can fly by even on very obvious missed calls:

No one is doing expected-value math in that window. If there’s any extra cognitive strain due to a player being caught between minds, the moment will pass and the opportunity missed. This happened to King on Sunday. And that’s not a failing of the player. This is how the human mind works. Weighing tradeoffs, even in a shorthand sense, takes time. In order to make a low confidence challenge, you must be prepared to do so before the opportunity arises. But the answer cannot be a complicated algorithm.

The answer has to be a preloaded heuristic. Which has to come through training, and strategic game management.

Mode Switching

ABS strategy needs two modes. In normal spots, require conviction to challenge. The player needs to rely on his strike zone acuity and recognize when there is a high-confidence for overturn and act decisively. This will be the default mode for the vast majority of at bats.

But once in awhile there will be a moment where the leverage changes the calculus, and the optimal strategy is to take on more risk, challenge with lower confidence, because a jackpot is available. In these spots the player should challenge if an overturn is merely plausible. A game state where the difference between ball and strike dramatically changes the scoreboard, the inning, or the game’s win probability is worth gambling more for. Full count with the bases loaded is the cleanest example, because the pitch is not merely changing the count leverage, it is deciding between a walk that forces in a run, and a strikeout that records an out.

The Padres do not need every player memorizing a probability table. They need players to recognize a short list of automatic or near-automatic challenge states, for example:

For hitters: End-of-game called strike three, challenge remaining, always carries enough leverage to justify a low confidence challenge, even if it looked like an obvious strike.

For pitchers/catchers: Full count, bases loaded, close score, any close pitch carries enough leverage to justify a low confidence challenge.

Those are not difficult rules to install. They are the baseball equivalent of pre-snap or late-clock rules in other sports. A quarterback normally should not throw the ball into the ground, except when spiking it to stop the clock is correct. A basketball defender normally should not foul intentionally, except when the game situation demands an immediate foul. These situations demand awareness of the need to mode switch beforehand. And these strategies are built into the players’ strategic understanding of the game.

ABS challenges need the same kind of situational programming. But Baseball is more complicated. There are 288 base/out/count states before you start adding inning and score. That list isn’t going to fit on an arm band. But baseball is also a set piece game. There is time for communication and situational awareness before every pitch. While the dugout is banned from assisting with ABS challenge decisions in real time, there’s nothing stopping a team from relaying to the players on the field before a pitch that the game state has crossed the leverage threshold to switch to aggressive low-confidence challenge mode.

Michael King ultimately derived the correct solution to the missed challenge opportunity after the fact. This is unsurprising as he has a great intellect and a great baseball mind. But intellect is neutralized when a decision must be instantaneous. Well understood heuristics compress the work product of intellect into trained reflexes that can be deployed instantaneously.

Not Alone

It shouldn’t be surprising, if you’ve followed the leverage discussion, that the 13.77 leverage-index of the missed ABS opportunity on Sunday was the highest ever recorded:

There are few ABS game states that can exceed the leverage of a tied game with the bases loaded and a 3-2 count. Coincidentally the second highest leverage index non-challenge also occurred Sunday when the Cubs battery of Jordan Wicks and Carson Kelly left their ABS challenge unspent in an incredibly tense game state:

It’s nearly certain that if given enough time to consider their decision, Wicks and Kelly would arrive at the conclusion they should have instantly challenged even with low-confidence, similar to King. But the moment passed. Whether they forgot about the challenge, or didn’t realize that a low confidence challenge was worth the risk, they left win probability on the table with a decision they controlled.

CRY About It

We have metrics for almost everything in baseball, but we don't have a good way to quantify one simple question:

How much should a team regret not challenging a pitch?

There isn't a yardstick for missed challenge opportunities, but the intuition is straightforward: regret should be greatest when a challenge was both highly expected and highly consequential.

We can estimate that by multiplying a pitch's expected challenge probability (xChallenge%) by its Leverage Index.

Challenge Regret Yardstick (CRY) = xChallenge % * Leverage Index

When we calculate the CRY Index for the largest missed opportunities for ABS challenge we a see a reordering, but with a consistent presence on top:

In addition to being highly consequential with the highest leverage index for a missed ABS opportunity, Sunday’s pivotal call also was a fairly easy challenge to justify irrespective of leverage, with an expected challenge rate of 91.7% given its proximity to the strike zone.

For comparison, Mike Yastrzemski challenged a pitch with a very low expected challenge rate of 7.1%:

So had he forgone his challenge, Brave fans may have rightly recognized the strategic mistake, but would have relatively less CRY about.

A pitch with a high expected challenge probability but low leverage may be annoying to miss, but it probably is not costly. A pitch with high leverage but almost no plausible chance of being overturned may not create much regret either. The worst missed opportunities are the pitches that combine both: close enough to challenge and important enough to matter.

Getting It Right

Coincidentally, when Mike Yastryzemski made his doomed-but-correct challenge, Eli White was the runner on second base. In the beginning of May White found himself up to bat in an identical scenario to Freeman, tied game with the bases loaded and one out in the top of the 5th. White faced the King/Duran dilemma when the umpire called a pitch near the top of the zone strike three. White made a half turn to the dugout but then quickly tapped his helmet for review:

The pitch came in 0.58 inches out of the zone and the call was overturned for ball four. Driving in a run. Preserving the bases loaded, 1-out state.

When Manny Machado hit a 4th inning homerun Monday to give the Padres a 1-0 lead, the Padres win probability surged from 59.3% to 72.4%. When Eli White tapped his helmet in Colorado the Braves win probability surged from 59.0% to 75.0%. The identical surge happened to the Dodgers Sunday when King and Duran missed their opportunity to do the same.

There are limitless ways to win games. The best way is to have unlimited resources and pursue them all. There is, in reality, only one team playing that game. Everyone else needs to find no-roster-cost edges. All the small things.

ABS challenge game theory is a true source for teams to differentiate themselves. Because while strike zone acuity is a skill intrinsic to the player, leverage acuity is skill that is likely to reside outside the player. Players need to be trained in proper heuristic understanding of when to switch modes from cautious use of high-confidence challenges, to aggressive use of low-confidence challenges. Teams need to explore in-game signaling when leverage thresholds are crossed. These skills are not going to self organize. A team that can protocolize smart use of low-confidence challenges based on leverage awareness will have a leg up on the league. A first mover advantage anyway.

The Padres cannot fix their rotation with an ABS challenge. They cannot make struggling hitters productive by getting better at challenge math. The correct risk management strategy for ABS challenges adds zero MPH to Lucas Giolito’s fastball. But it can help get him out of trouble. It can incrementally shift the teams odds in the right direction.

That is all this is. And that is not nothing.

“Just say I suck… You don’t need to say, ‘Oh, this, this and this.’ No, it’s that my numbers suck.”

-Manny Machado

Manny Machado spoke candidly with Kevin Acee about his miserable season last week, and he offered some tangible insight into the struggles he’s had on the field. And he made no excuses. It’s easy to conflate explanations with excuses, but they are fundamentally different. An explanation tells you why something happened. An excuse tells you why someone should not be blamed for it. Machado is not asking for absolution; he’s not blaming anyone else. He’s searching for the causes of an unrecognizably poor performance at the plate this season. And we think there are, in fact, explanations that go beyond the simplistic, and anxiety-provoking, diagnosis that Manny Machado is becoming Manny Washado.

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Trapdoor Season

Machado’s 2026 line is not merely below his career standard. After an 0-3 day on Tuesday Machado has a slash line of .175/.255/.354, good for a .609 OPS and an unthinkable 72 wRC+. This is a result unmoored from his prior production. He’s only a season removed from posting a 123 wRC+, and he’s never come in lower than a 102 wRC+ in a full season. His previous low water mark came in his rookie year with a 97 wRC+. This isn’t the incremental drop in production that might be seen when a star player is aging out. This is a trapdoor season. The bottom fell out. And it’s fair to ask, why?

In Acee’s piece, the substance of what Machado revealed was significant: he made swing changes in the offseason, including work with Richard Schenck, known in hitting circles as “Teacherman.” Acee described Schenck’s general philosophy as emphasizing:

staying on the back leg, coiling up the body, letting the ball go as deep as possible and then unleashing a swing as fast as possible.

A swing philosophy can be a perfect fit for certain hitters, and a poor fit for others. It may simply be more difficult for some hitters to incorporate the mechanics at major-league game-speed. Schenck is most famous for working extensively with Aaron Judge, and those results speak for themselves. It’s likely he’s a wonderful hitting coach. Machado’s offseason work with Schenck is relevant, but not because this article needs to litigate the Teacherman hitting philosophy. The takeaway is that Machado tried to incorporate mechanical changes seeking improvement, but it simply hasn’t worked. Instead he’s struggled, and Machado has linked his offseason mechanical changes to his struggles in 2026, and is actively working to find his previous form.

Machado noted other factors including an abbreviated Spring Training may have played a role. Acee summarized thusly:

So, in short, his timing got messed up by the changes he made. Then he missed half of spring training while playing in the WBC.

By all accounts, he has worked feverishly since March to get back to his usual mechanics.

Nothing in Acee’s account reads as excuse making. The article displayed Machado genuinely looking for explanations, and emphatically denying that any explanation would excuse his on field performance. And coincidentally, the same week Acee’s article was published, Baseball Savant made public a set of swing timing metrics that for the first time ever allow us a granular way to evaluate how a hitter’s swing is meeting the baseball in time and space. And here we can test Machado’s intuitions about what may be wrong.

The Timing Microscope

Baseball Savant’s swing timing metrics provide an unprecedented look at the degree to which hitters are “On Time” with their swings, as well as several other measures describing the hitter’s quality of contact. A quick look at Machado’s swing timing on fastballs in 2026 shows some interesting findings.

Machado’s flawed swing percentage on fastballs has been 9%, a significant increase from a season ago. A flawed swing is one which is neither on time, lined up, or centered:

A spike in flawed swings screams mechanical issue. But interestingly, the data showed no change in overall On Time swing percentage with a stable 68% on time swing rate year-over-year. And this is where it’s helpful to visualize the swing data, because this metric can be a little misleading.

“On time” sounds binary, but it is not. Baseball Savant defines “On Time” as a 16-millisecond window encapsulating the eight milliseconds before, and eight milliseconds after perfectly timed contact. At major-league fastball velocity, that is not a trivial span. A swing near the early edge of that window and a swing near the late edge of that window both count as “on time.” But they are not the same swing, and they do not produce the same batted-ball geometry. Here is the density plot for Machado’s swings on fastballs (four-seam and sinker) in 2026 (teal) and in 2025 (orange):

The density plot format isn’t the most intuitive. It becomes more intuitive when you parse the data down to the outcome of interest; what has happened at the point of contact when Machado has been ‘On Time’ against fastballs in 2026?

Here it stands out more plainly. Even when he’s been on time with swings against the fastball in 2026, the point of contact has skewed to the late side of the 16 millisecond window considered “On Time”. This doesn’t look like much. The skew here is no more than a few milliseconds to the ‘late’ side of the on time window. But as we wrote when discussing Tatis’ similar struggles with swing timing, at 95 mph, a baseball travels roughly 1.67 inches per millisecond. Just a few milliseconds of swing timing can have profound impact on the contact geometry. The interesting thing is not merely whether Machado is technically “on time” more or less often than he was last year. The interesting thing is where inside the on-time window those swings are clustering. If his on-time swings against fastballs are disproportionately living on the later side of that band, he is not necessarily embarrassingly late. But he may be late enough to lose the perfect point of contact that turns a hard swing into the most desirable batted-ball outcomes.

Subtle timing changes like this can help explain why a season can go wrong without the hitter looking broken in the obvious ways. The swing-path framework explains why. Attack angle (the vertical direction of the sweet spot at impact) and attack direction (the horizontal pull/opposite-field direction of the sweet spot at impact) are tied to swing timing: earlier swings tend to produce more pull-side attack direction and higher attack angle, while later swings tend to move the other way. A deeper point of contact can move the attack direction toward the opposite field. It can reduce the launch conditions that create pull-side loft. It can turn a hard swing into contact that is much easier for the park and the defense to swallow.

So if Machado has identified that offseason mechanical changes may have inadvertently led to his swing timing going awry, why doesn’t he just decide to go back to his old mechanics?

Training Decisions

At the level of major league baseball, ‘swing decisions’ are not really decisions in the ordinary conscious sense. They are trained motor programs being accessed under severe time pressure. The motor-control literature on hitting in baseball has long treated the swing as a severely time-constrained action involving pre-programmed movement:

(H)itting involves using an open-loop, pre-programmed movement that is parameterized based on situational probabilities, advance cues from the pitcher’s delivery, and information early in the ball flight, which are used by an internal model to predict the future location of the ball

What we call a ‘swing decision’ is really a hitter accessing trained reflexes. That is why ‘just stop doing it’ is not a serious prescription for a hitter whose swing mechanics are out of sync. If Machado spent the offseason conditioning his body to get to the ball a certain way, he cannot simply choose different mechanics. His body is accessing what it has trained itself to do. And it’s not trivial to retrain that in season. It is not impossible. But it never happens overnight.

There’s at least one further variable with explanatory power: the pitching environment.

Speed Kills

The modern game has compressed the hitter’s decision window to a degree that makes small timing deviations catastrophic, because average pitch velocities have never been higher.

Tom Verducci recently framed Machado’s plight aptly. In Machado’s 2013 season, the average fastball he saw was 92.1 MPH. In 2026 it has been 95.5 MPH. Even more striking, Machado saw only 27 pitches at 98 MPH or harder in 2013, while in 2026 he’s already seen 106 such pitches (a 238 pitch pace).

Machado in fact leads MLB in total pitches seen at 98+ MPH (and there are some familiar faces on the leaderboard with him):

The Padres as a team have faced the most extreme fastball velocity in the league, seeing 709 pitches of 98 MPH+, almost 500 more than the lowest team in the league (Tigers have seen only 212):

That is the context in which Machado’s mechanical timing issue has to be understood. Velocity faced might not be the primary cause of a slump, but it can be a major amplifier of one. It narrows the margin for mechanical experimentation. It can be the difference between being technically “on time” and being perfectly squared up.

The pitching environment is likely to normalize with the outsized share of high velocity the Padres have faced being replaced by more typical opponent velocities as the season goes by. But it’s fair to question exactly how much this might improve Machado’s prospects unless the root mechanical cause is first addressed.

There’s a final factor, one that Machado did not invoke, but likely adds incremental explanatory power to Machado’s mystifying season: Petco Park

Park Factor

This is where the analysis veers dangerously close to excuse territory, because there is literally nothing a player can do about playing in their home park. But we raise this not to find excuses for Machado, but simply to help better understand the 2026 season generally.

The distinction between actual and expected contact outcomes is important when looking at park-factor. Petco has produced an above league average expected wOBA on contact which is calculated based on the exit velocity and launch angle of a ball in play. But Petco has produced disproportionately poor actual wOBA on contact. There are several reasons why otherwise favorable exit velocity and launch angles might not turn into the expected production in Petco, primarily deep power-alley dimensions, and atmospherics. Some combination of these factors has led to Petco Park being the most suppressive park in baseball when balls are hit into play, allowing a wOBA on contact park-factor of 88:

For reference, no park in MLB has had a wOBA on contact park-factor of less than 92 across the past three seasons (Globe Life Field).

The suppression of wOBA on contact in Petco this season is almost certainly due to the profound fly ball distance suppression, which has averaged -7.5 feet in 2026:

This is extreme flyball suppression even for Petco which hasn’t played worse than -3.9 feet of variable extra distance the past three seasons:

Park-factor does not explain why Machado’s swing has been off. It helps explain why the consequences have been so severe.

We can never say which specific hits might have been suppressed by the lost fly ball distance, but we can identify some good candidates. Here is a flyout to center field that Machado hit 104.3 MPH with a 31 degree launch angle:

Here’s a hit by Ben Rice to the same part of the outfield with nearly identical launch ballistics, but in Tropicana Field which has a variable added distance park-factor of +2.6 feet:

This ball travelled ~13 feet further than Machado’s flyout, a span roughly equal to the difference in the variable added distance on fly balls in Petco versus Tropicana Field (net +10.1 feet in Tropicana Field).

The difference between “badly underperforming” and “falling off a cliff” can be a handful of balls dying at the track, becoming near-miss contact instead of damage. And that’s all we’re talking about here. Petco’s role here is likely only marginal, helping to explain why Machado’s falloff has appeared so extreme. The bulk of the explanatory power is more likely within mechanical asynchrony and pitching environment. But it all adds up.

Time Is Undefeated

There is a haunting line in Moneyball about David Justice near the end of his career:

After he would hit a long fly ball, Justice would return to the A’s dugout and say, matter-of-factly, “That used to be out.”

Manny Machado is at a stage in his career where any prolonged slump is naturally going to raise concerns about whether his struggles are due to simply aging out. That time will come. Time is undefeated. There’s no way to prove it hasn’t already taken another victim. But it doesn’t seem likely that Manny Machado woke up at 33 and simply stopped being Manny Machado. Aging usually announces itself as erosion, a steadily downward slope. This season has not looked like a slope. It has looked like a cliff. And cliffs often imply a discrete change has been made.

The Baseball Savant swing timing tools allow a quantifiable confirmation that Machado’s intuition, that his swing timing has gone awry, is at least part of the explanation. Add an extreme velocity pitching environment that further constrains the flawed mechanical timing window and the slump gets worse. Layer on top of that the difficulty of retraining a swing in season, when the “decision” to swing is really the accessing of conditioned reflex, and the slump recovery is prolonged. Play half the games in a ballpark that has punished actual contact outcomes on a historical pace this season and the slump tips that final increment from underperformance into cratering. Put all these factors together and the shape of Machado’s season seems less mysterious. It doesn’t excuse anything. And it probably doesn’t explain everything. But it explains more than the lazy alternative:

That does not mean age is irrelevant. It means age is not the most satisfying explanation for this particular failure pattern. From what we can see, Machado’s struggles appear far more likely to be explained by the confluence of factors above. Timing is everything. And his swing timing has, demonstrably, been out of sync. It’s the first identification of something that can actually be improved on. And we’d wager that before the season is over, Machado’s wRC+ will again resemble that of a major-league third baseman. That’s not a terribly high bar, but with nearly half the season banked it’s exceedingly unlikely a typical Machado wRC+ is in reach. This will be Machado’s worst offensive season even if/when he returns to form.

The Question

The question looming over Machado’s season is not merely whether he can regain effective swing timing. The superseding question is whether he can find it soon enough that there is still a season to play for when he gets right. That’s something no one can know. And it depends on far more than Manny Machado alone. But time will tell. Until then all we can do is keep watching. And keep the faith.

Coincidentally this is exactly the bat speed increase Tatis has shown over his 2026 campaign, averaging 75.2 MPH, his highest recorded average bat speed since the metric started being tracked in 2023:

Increased bat speed was thought to be a bellwether of imminent slugging. Indeed, bat speed has become one of baseball’s most emphasized metrics. Bat speed correlates with slugging in aggregate data analysis:

Chart from TJStats

Teams across the league have spent years attempting to engineer it. Hitting labs evangelize it. Analysts celebrate it. The Padres, and Tatis, would appear to have bought in fully. Which is not unreasonable. But the payoff for increased bat speeds is still wanting. Tatis has cratered offensively, somehow slugging an unthinkable .278 through more than a quarter of the season. This is all the more puzzling because there are signs that Tatis’ improved bat speed is leading to batted ball outcomes that tend to align with slugging including having a hard hit rate in the league’s 97th percentile, an average exit velocity in the 81st percentile, and a barrel rate in the 71st percentile. But no slug, no home runs. It doesn’t seem to make any sense at first.

So a question we wanted to explore is whether there may have been some other subtle mechanical tradeoff that accompanied the improved bat speed, and whether there’s any reason to think that this tradeoff might explain why Tatis’ better bat speed has paradoxically wiped out his ability to slug. And there’s an obvious place to start this inquiry, which is where does the better bat speed come from?

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Long Swings and Long Balls

If you’ve played baseball for a long time you can probably guess what we’re about to say. It’s common when players press for more power for their swing to literally become longer. In fact longer swings generally do create faster bat speeds. You don’t need a trendline on this chart to understand there is a tight correlation:

Source: TJStats

So it’s fair to wonder if the increased bat speed Tatis has been producing might have come along with a longer swing length. And here we start to see something:

This doesn’t look like much, and is easy to glance past and dismiss. But it’s worth looking into the physics underlying a small change like this. Because the physics matter here.

A baseball swing is not merely about how fast the barrel moves. It is about when it arrives to the point of contact. At 95 mph, a fastball reaches home plate in a little over 400 milliseconds. Coaches constantly talk about “being on time.” Not because timing is one variable among many. Because timing is the variable that unlocks everything else. And this is where mere inches can become devastating.

Tatis’ swing length in 2026 has been about 1.2 inches longer on average compared to 2025, but we can get a little more insight by looking at his swing length broken down by zone.

In 2025, as you would expect, Tatis demolished pitches in the heart of the zone. Here is the detailed zone breakdown of his expected wOBA in 2025:

Across the heart of the zone Tatis had an excellent .389 wOBA in 2025, but has an abysmal .277 wOBA in 2026. It’s even stranger when you see that in 2026 he’s produced higher average exit velocities and bat speeds on pitches in these zones. But you start to see some interesting correlation when you look a little further:

In 2025 Zone 8 (the low middle region of the heart of the zone) was his most productive zone where he generated an unconscionable .623 expected wOBA in 2025. In 2026 Tatis has put 12 pitches in this zone in play, but has only a .447 expected wOBA. And it’s interesting to look at the differences in swing length broken down by zone from 2025-2026:

Again, the raw difference doesn’t immediately jump out. While Tatis’ swing on all pitches in the heart of the zone is only averaging 0.1 feet longer in 2026, in zone 8 you can see that there’s a stark difference in swing length, 7.3 feet in 2025 and 7.7 feet in 2026, a difference of almost 5 inches. His swing is also significantly longer on the inner half of the plate, and throughout almost all of the shadow zone1. And you can anticipate what this might mean in terms of bat speed generated, and average exit velocity. Indeed, in 2026 Tatis is achieving a significantly higher bat speed, exit velocity, and hard hit % on pitches in zone 8 with the longer swing path:

These findings tend to correlate with slugging and home runs. But a look at the rest of the collision geometry shows why this hasn’t turned into a transcendent wOBA on the field:

Tatis’ average launch angle in this zone has fallen off a cliff in 2026, as has his average attack angle at the point of contact, and he’s intercepting the ball about 1.1 inches deeper despite achieving the faster bat speed by the time the bat contacts the ball.

His numbers on all zones in the heart of the plate show the same year over year trend: harder hit, better bat speed, but deeper contact, oriented more to the opposite field, less loft, and a longer swing:

All of this makes sense if a longer swing path is responsible for the better bat speed, but is coming at the cost of being a few milliseconds late to the point of contact with the baseball. It’s not the only possibility, but it’s one worth exploring deeply because there is good reason to suspect this could explain both the batted ball profile Tatis is putting forth in games, and be nearly imperceptible in batting practice or indeed in the batter’s box. We’ll explain why with visuals and the math behind swing physics.

It’s helpful to be able to visualize swing length, and the changes in attack angle, attack direction, and bat speed that occur throughout a swing arc to understand how everything ties together.

First, swing length is literally the three-dimensional distance the bat travels through space from the start of the swing to the point of contact with the ball, or to the point of nearest contact with the ball in the case of a whiff. Statcast created this visualization tool demonstrating what’s being measured, and using two of the most extreme swings in baseball to illustrate the difference between a short and a long swing:

Here are the actual swings these images were generated from:

Arraez and Stanton represent the extremes of the short swing/low bat speed and long swing/high bat speed in MLB. Here’s the chart from above with these hitters identified:

When you watch the raw film slowed down, you can probably discern that Stanton’s swing is longer than Arraez’. But it’s not likely you’d guess it was more than twice as long. That’s something the human eye struggles to process.

And that matters for Tatis, because the hypothesis here is not that his swing has visibly broken down. It is that a swing only marginally longer may still alter timing enough to reshape the entire geometry of contact.

And this is relevant, because if a difference between a 9.7 foot swing and a 4.4 foot swing is even slightly subtle to visibly discern, imagine the degree of difficulty noticing if a swing is just a few inches longer. It’s likely that such a small change is imperceptible to the naked eye. Indeed, a hitter may not be able to perceive this himself. But technology can capture this, and Statcast does.

Even a slightly longer swing arc means the barrel must travel farther before intercepting the baseball. At Tatis’ bat speed, that additional swing length may translate into only a few milliseconds of added travel time. But a few milliseconds in hitting can still be meaningful. If a hitter with a longer swing wasn’t able to compensate for the marginally longer swing path he would be prone to contact deeper into the zone. Deeper contact naturally pushes batted balls toward the opposite field.

The ability to produce loft can also be dramatically affected by a few milliseconds difference in reaching the point of contact for another reason. The attack angle of the swing (the upward trajectory of the barrel through the contact zone) changes throughout the swing arc. Ideal attack angles for loft occur further out in front. The attack angle with deeper contact is flatter, or even negative earlier in the swing arc. Here is a motion capture video of a swing tracking ideal attack angle from Driveline Baseball (ideal attack angles denoted in green):

Courtesy: Tanner Stokey

When you look at Tatis’ swing data across all zones in 2026 and compare year over year trends you see a clear pattern. Deeper contact:

Leading to an attack direction more opposite-field oriented:

The question is whether a few extra inches of swing length could explain this change in the depth of contact. Could Tatis’ increased bat speed make up for the longer swing leading to the same total time from start of swing to contact? To answer that we’ll project that extra swing length onto the collision geometry of a swing. Let’s start with a look at the swing length differences in Tatis’ most productive zone from 2025 (gory back of the envelope math ahead):

time = distance / velocity​

Tatis’ swing length on juicy pitches in zone 8 in 2025 was 7.3 feet with a 75.1 MPH bat speed. His 2026 swing on those same pitches has been 7.7 feet with 77.5 MPH of bat speed.

Convert bat speed to feet per second:

• 75.1 mph ≈ 110.1 ft/sec

• 77.5 mph ≈ 113.7 ft/sec

Now divide swing length by bat speed:

• 2025: 7.3 ft ÷ 110.1 ft/sec = 66.3 milliseconds

• 2026: 7.7 ft ÷ 113.7 ft/sec = 67.7 milliseconds

So despite the dramatically higher bat speed in 2026, the substantially longer swing may still arrive roughly 1.4 milliseconds later to the contact point. But notably this calculation significantly underestimates the difference, because the bat speed is measured at the point of contact, but the swing starts at 0 MPH and accelerates up to that speed, only reaching peak speed near the contact zone:

Courtesy: Brandon Dim

A typical major league swing takes closer to 150 milliseconds from start to point of contact because it has to first accelerate, and so spends much of the swing arc at slower speeds than the bat speed measured at the point of contact. In reality, traversing the extra swing length may take significantly longer than an extra 1.4 milliseconds. Perhaps twice that, or more.

But let’s stick with 1.4 milliseconds to illustrate the point that even 1.4 milliseconds, though it sounds insignificant, is not.

At 95 mph, a baseball travels roughly 1.67 inches per millisecond. A delay of 1.4 milliseconds means the baseball itself has moved ~two inches deeper before contact occurs.

And because a baseball swing is rotational rather than linear, the consequences compound.

If the bat head is rotating around the hitter at approximately 1,590 degrees per second2 near contact, then every millisecond corresponds to roughly 1.59 degrees of change in attack direction.

That means a 1.4 millisecond delay translates into approximately 2.22 degrees of angular rotation.

To summarize, if a barrel is delayed in reaching the contact point by 1.4 milliseconds, the contact point will be ~1-2 inches deeper, and the angular rotation of the barrel will likely be 2-3 degrees less, meaning 2-3 degrees less pull-oriented in the case of a right handed hitter. If the true delay is more like 3-4 milliseconds that would mean about 5-7 degrees less angular rotation at the point of contact, and a 3-4 inch deeper point of contact. Here’s an exaggerated depiction to illustrate the point:

Adapted from: Powers and Yurko et al.

A long swing may still produce elite exit velocity because the bat itself is moving extraordinarily fast by the time it reaches the contact point, but the geometry of contact may still change for the worse if it is occurring deeper into the flight of the pitch because of the marginal milliseconds of delay to traverse the extra distance of swing length. When this happens the hitter loses the ideal out-front intercept point that converts the rotational force into lofted fly balls to the pull-side. Instead of a pulled fly ball at 28 degrees launch angle, the same swing may now produce a line drive to right-center at 12 degrees.

A hitter can possess the same athletic ability, create better bat speed, but get a completely different outcome if in the process swing timing is altered.

It’s important to note that none of this is visible to the naked eye. There is no obvious mechanical collapse when watching Tatis’ swing in 2026. It’s been impossible to precisely measure this until Statcast made bat tracking publicly available in 2024. But the technology is here. And that’s why this aspect of Tatis’ faster 2026 swing is worth examining.

Compensatory Mechanics

There are, theoretically, ways for a hitter to compensate for this kind of timing drift.

One possibility would be positioning. A hitter whose barrel is arriving slightly late could simply stand farther back in the batter’s box, buying additional milliseconds before the baseball reaches the contact zone. But there is a problem with that explanation for Tatis. He was already setting up extremely deep in the box in 2025.

And visually, he appears to be setting up almost identically in 2026. He really can’t stand any further back in the box.

The other possible compensation mechanism would be neurological rather than positional: Swing earlier. Make the swing decision a tiny fraction of a second sooner so the longer swing can still arrive on time.

And this raises a key question: is there actually any slack available inside the already absurdly compressed swing decision window against major league pitching?

It sounds so trivial to adjust a swing decision to be faster by a few milliseconds, an interval so small it’s almost beneath perception. The thing is, though, the human brain does not have the luxury of consciously calculating within that window. Elite hitting is fundamentally predictive. The swing ‘decision’ is really a reflex that occurs extraordinarily early, relying heavily on trained motor programs and anticipatory pattern recognition rather than deliberate cognition. And it happens in an extremely narrow time window. A 95 mph fastball reaches home plate in roughly 400 milliseconds. But that full 400 milliseconds is not truly available to the hitter. A substantial portion of that time is already “spoken for” by basic visual processing, pitch recognition, neural transmission, motor initiation, and the physical act of executing the swing itself. William Harris breaks down the sequence like this:

• The instant the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand, light bounces from the leather surface and races to the batter’s eye. There, it takes 75 milliseconds for the batter’s eye to form a picture and send it to the brain: 25 milliseconds for the retina to process incoming data, 20 milliseconds for that data to travel to the brain and 30 milliseconds for the brain to construct an image out of the information. As the ball travels toward the plate, additional images arrive in the brain every 25 milliseconds, like frames in a motion picture.

• The batter then has about 50 milliseconds for thinking. In this short time, his brain must analyze the pitch and select a suitable swing or decide that the pitch will land out of the strike zone.

• Next, the batter’s brain must send signals to the muscles of his legs, torso and arms. This manifests itself as electrochemical impulses originating in the cerebral cortex and then zipping along nerve fibers to the extremities. In all, it takes 25 milliseconds for the impulses to get from the brain to individual muscle fibers in the lower legs.

• A baseball swing requires a full 150 milliseconds to complete. This takes into account the time for muscles to contract, move their attached limbs and bring the bat around (70-80 MPH). If he’s 10 milliseconds too early or too late, he’ll miss the ball completely.

It’s impossible to be more precise here, but even if the estimates above are off by a few milliseconds, the general ballpark estimate for a swing decision to be made is around 50 milliseconds. It’s not at all trivial to shave off 3-5 milliseconds of that processing time.

While in theory, a hitter could compensate for a slightly longer swing by simply making swing decisions a few milliseconds earlier, it is fair to wonder if the available decision window is already compressed nearly to the edge of human physiological capability. It might work in batting practice, or against slower pitch speeds, but demanding an additional few milliseconds of earlier commitment may not be feasible at MLB game speed which already runs up against hard biological constraints on perception, cognition, and motor execution.

And that degree of difficulty would be ratcheted up as pitch velocity increases. Which is exactly what has happened to Tatis in 2026. The average pitch velocity he’s seen in 2026 has been a full MPH faster than in 2025, in keeping with leaguewide trends:

This is especially noticeable on fastballs. Average 4-seam and sinker velocity against him has increased from 94.6 mph in 2025 to 95.6 mph in 2026.

Every additional tick of velocity further compresses the already microscopic decision window. The baseball reaches the hitting zone sooner, leaving even less room to compensate for a slightly longer swing path through earlier recognition or earlier commitment.

And notably, the pitch types most affected by velocity compression are precisely the pitch types against which Tatis’ production has collapsed.

In 2025, Tatis feasted on fastballs. He produced a run value of +8 against four-seamers and an exceptional +13 against sinkers. In 2026, those numbers have cratered to -4 against four-seamers and -1 against sinkers.

That may not be coincidence. Statcast shows that the ball is travelling farther before he makes contact, with the Y-intercept dropping from 23.7 to 23.0 inches. His launch angle is down, and his attack direction is two degrees more opposite-field oriented.

The exit velocity, bat speed, and swing length are all higher. If the swing is arriving even marginally later while the baseball itself is also arriving faster, the compounded effect would be felt most acutely against fastballs. The hitter would appear perpetually just behind the pitch. Not dramatically late, not overmatched, but in precisely the way that transforms pulled airborne damage into opposite-field contact and hard outs:

What might explain why Tatis’ slump has seemed so strange is his swing doesn’t look broken. In fact he often looks almost right.

Correlation and Causation

As the old saying goes: correlation does not imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing, “look over there.” That’s all we’re doing, looking over there. There’s undoubtedly more to the puzzle of Fernando Tatis Jr’s upsidedown 2026. Nothing is monocausal, least of all something as complex as a major league hitter’s swing. A swing is a constantly adapting interaction between biomechanics, pitch recognition, confidence, timing, opponent quality, scouting adjustments, health, fatigue, and randomness. We’ve only examined a couple of these inputs here. And it is entirely possible that the implied timing loss we have discussed has absolutely nothing to do with Tatis’ slump. Maybe this is simply stochastic chaos compounded by unusually difficult opposing pitching. Perhaps positive regression is coming, and six weeks from now this entire article will read like a baroque attempt to explain away a garden variety slump. That possibility has to remain on the table. And honestly, it’s far and away the scenario we’d most like to see.

Rotation Reinforcement

The Padres opted to push back Randy Vasquez’ start by a day in order to slot in Griffin Canning earlier than expected. Canning had been scheduled to make one final minor league rehab start prior to joining the Padres rotation as he plays back into game shape after an achilles injury prematurely ended his strong 2025 season late last June. Canning signed a one-year contract in the offseason with a mutual option for 2027.

Canning had made five starts in AAA El Paso and as you’d expect pitching in the PCL the pitch shapes of his top three pitches were not quite at his 2025 quality. The 4-seam fastball averaged only 13.4 inches of iVB (ride), the changeup averaged only 12.2 inches of horizontal break (arm-side), and the slider showed only -3.4 iVB (drop), all key features of the pitches’ design. But his fastball velocity and breaking ball spin rates were all at or near what he’d achieved when healthy last season:

Graphics from TJStats (support TJ Stats here)

And that’s why there was good reason to think that Canning would recapture his 2025 stuff when returning to the sea-level confines of Petco. The one cause for concern was his ability to locate the slider, a pitch that is key to his ability to get right handed hitters (RHH) out in 2025, and which he demonstrated superb control with a 48.7% zone rate last season. Through his first four starts in AAA Canning had been struggling to locate the slider, and wasn’t getting much chase, but that seemed to be a point of emphasis in his final rehab start on April 28th when he threw the slider more than any other pitch, and got a superb 46.7% chase rate and 55.4% whiff rate on it. And perhaps that nudged the Padres to forgo his final planned rehab start and slot him in to pitch on Sunday.

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Canning reportedly had a large number of friends and family in the stands for his 2026 debut Sunday, and likely struggled with some early nerves. His first at bat was a four pitch walk to Sam Antonacci, all four-seamers:

He started Munetaka Murakami with a slider in the dirt and a changeup way outside that he didn’t grip well prompting Freddie Fermin to walk out to the mound to settle him down:

With the count 2-0, the league’s home run leader Murakami was undoubtedly hunting a fastball, Canning made his first real major league pitch sequence of the outing. He started with a 95.7 MPH four-seamer with a very good 18 inches of iVB that Murakami couldn’t catch up with. He followed with a another four-seamer off the plate bringing up another hitters’ count 3-1. With Murakami again geared up for the fastball he executed a 96.2 MPH four-seamer located on the outer edge of the top of the zone, and Murakami was a little late on it flying out harmlessly to left:

Canning’s four-seamer has a decent amount of arm-side break which helps it play up against LHH a bit.

Andrew Benintendi was up next, and Canning seemed to find his release point with zoned four-seamer for strike one followed by two nasty changeups that had Benintendi lunging and whiffing badly:

The White Sox cleanup hitter Colson Montgomery took really good at bats all day, and would draw a walk in a pretty good battle with Canning. And although Canning didn’t get the result he was after, you could see he was executing pitches. He started with a dotted four-seamer on the outer half for strike one. The second pitch was a four-seamer just off the inner half, but you can see this was the intended location, with Fermin setting up outside (probably trying to throw Montgomery off), but quickly shifting to the inner half of the plate as the pitch was delivered. He followed with back-to-back changeups, missing low on a competitive pitch with the first, and missing well outside on a pitch he gripped poorly to run the count to 3-1. The 3-1 pitch was the best of the at bat. In a classic fastball count he threw a perfect changeup that Montgomery was way out in front of, and swung over. The 3-2 offering was a four-seamer that was a few inches high and you could see Canning was disappointed in his execution of the pitch. Here’s the whole sequence:

Chase Meidroth was the first right handed hitter Canning faced, and unsurprisingly he showed him a different pitch mix. He started with two sliders, the second one going for a called strike. On 1-1 he threw a really interesting pitch. The broadcast had it as a changeup, but it wasn’t, it was a 94.4 MPH fastball with 20 inches of horizontal break and 2062 RPM. It was a sinker. And that’s interesting because it’s a pitch Canning just didn’t throw in any of his AAA starts. Or in 20251:

The pitch had the shape of the changeup, but the velocity and spin of the fastball. You can see on the closeup that this is not a changeup grip:

But it’s also not the four-seam fastball grip. Here’s the four-seam grip for comparison:

Notice the difference in seam orientation. This really was a sinker. Canning would throw another sinker to Meidroth in the 4th inning on a 2-2 count for a called strike three, and on this pitch you can really see how much it moves:

This pitch started out off the plate and tailed back in over the outer edge for strike three.

He would throw five of these sinkers in the outing averaging 93.6 MPH, 8.0 inches of iVB, and 17.9 inches of horizontal break. A drastic difference in pitch shape from the four-seamer. All five sinkers were either taken for strikes or hit weakly in play for outs:

On the day the sinker had a whiff rate of 0%, but an expected WOBA on contact of a paltry 0.137:

The sinker didn’t grade out as a stand-alone plus pitch, but it had a very different fastball shape than his four-seamer, and it got up on the handle of the bat inducing weak contact to Meidroth in the 1st to get out of a jam, and froze him in the 4th for the backwards K. It had the same effect when mixed in to Acuña. This is such an unusual finding, a pitch that there is no record of Canning throwing in the past year being used multiple times in his first big league outing with the Padres, and only being used as a tertiary pitch to play off the hitters’ expectation of four-seam movement. This has Niebla pitching lab fingerprints all over it.

Canning induced three straight groundouts in the 2nd for an easy 1-2-3 inning.

Canning’s one true mistake pitch came on the first pitch of the 3rd inning, a four-seamer that was grooved and didn’t have much on it:

This was a flat 92.9 MPH four-seamer with only 15 inches of iVB. You can learn a lot about a pitcher by how they respond after making a mistake. In an at bat that mirrored his first inning battle with Murakami, Canning fell behind Antonacci first 2-0, then 3-1, and in both counts executed excellent four-seam fastballs at the top of the zone to even the count. Here’s the 2-0 pitch, a 94.3 MPH four-seamer with 17 inches of iVB:

And here’s one of the best fastballs he threw all day, a 94.4 MPH four-seamer with an excellent 19 inches of iVB:

On 3-2 Canning showed what will be the key to his success:

The ability to locate the slider like this is what might make Canning a consistently better than league average starter. This slider froze Antonacci for strike three, but even had he swung, the location makes it very difficult for a hitter to do real damage with, as the next hitter would promptly demonstrate.

Andrew Benintendi got his second look at Canning, and put a very good swing on an almost identical slider:

Benintendi hit this about as well as he could given the location, 100.1 MPH off the bat to the opposite field with a nearly ideal 26 degree launch angle. But as has been the source of much consternation among Padres hitters, good contact to the opposite field power-allies often leads to outs. It’s just very hard to hit for power to the opposite field, and it’s hard to do much else with a pitch located so well.

Canning would really settle down after this, though he still had to pitch through some bad luck. To start the 4th he had another long battle with Colson Montgomery, he probably should have gotten the strike three call on the 3-2 pitch but Fermin had been set up low and reacted late when the pitch came in at the top of the zone. The ump was misled by the bad framing and Fermin also wasn’t able to determine if it was strike, not challenging despite having both ABS challenges available:

He would strike out Meidroth on the tailing sinker (above) for the first out of the inning, but Jared Kelenic would create the first major jam of the game with a seeing eye single through the right side of the infield putting runners on first and third with only one out. With runners at the corners Canning flashed a really competitive pickoff move:

This seems to be an organizational strength for the Padres pitching development as several of their right handers have very good pickoff moves (Randy Vasquez and Matt Waldron especially).

Canning would fall behind Tristan Peters 3-1 before executing back-to-back very sharp sliders that Peters couldn’t pick up:

In his final inning Don and Mud commented that Canning seemed to be getting better as the game went on. Usually when people say this it’s just one of those things people say. Like ‘dogs’ mouths are cleaner than humans’. It has no real foundation in reality. Just something people say. But in Canning’s case it was true, because what he found as the game went on was control. After the fluky groundball single to Kelenic, Canning would strike out every hitter he faced. And these outcomes weren’t fluky. Watch the final three at bats, and notice how competitive every pitch is. The strikes were in the quadrants of the zone, not the heart. And even when he missed the zone the pitches were close and forced tough swing decisions from the hitters:

Canning’s first outing was very encouraging precisely because nothing seemed like a huge outlier. He was successful when he executed pitches. He didn’t give up a ton of hard contact that found gloves. He got into trouble twice when he couldn’t execute and put runners on with free passes. He threw one truly uncompetitive meatball that was punished maximally. It was a highly believable outing.

He’s not going to pitch to a 1.80 ERA all season, but there was nothing from his first outing to suggest he can’t be a league-average starter, and there was reason to think he could regain the form that saw him pitch competently for the Mets as a mid-rotation starter a season ago. That’s what the Padres need. Nick Pivetta’s absence is weighing on the team as the patchwork starts from Matt Waldron have been untenable, far worse than replacement level so far. It would be shocking if Canning didn’t provide far more production than that.

It’s one start, and it’s very unwise to draw sweeping conclusions from such a small sample. But it was a truly fascinating first look at a former top prospect who seemed to be finally making good on his early-round draft pedigree before a freak injury cut his season short in 2025. His pitch mix is a classic four-seam, changeup, slider mix that he commanded very well a season ago. And it seems like the Padres are pushing him to expand that a bit. We don’t really have a good frame of reference for what Canning did with his sinker. It’s hard to recall another instance of a pitcher throwing a pitch in his first start with a team without having showcased it in spring training or the minors beforehand. And it seems like the latest example of the Padres pitching lab adding wrinkles to the arsenal of new arrivals that help incrementally increase the challenge opposing hitters face.

Though his first outing was very effective, there were moments where you could see how it might go wrong for Canning. He’s always had a bit of trouble with walks, and if that rears its head frequently, he’ll struggle to have clean innings. That’s really going to be the differentiator. But he’s a major leaguer, and he’ll raise the floor of competence in the starts he makes. Across a long season, for a team with a threadbare back of the rotation, that is exactly the reinforcement the Padres need.

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In the 7th inning the Cubs were leading 4-3 when Wandy Peralta was brought in to relieve David Morgan who had issued a leadoff walk to Seiya Suzuki. The first batter Peralta faced, Ian Happ, grounded out advancing Suzuki to second base. Peralta drilled the next hitter, Michael Busch, with a 96 mph sinker on the first pitch of the at bat putting runners at first and second:

Cubs catcher Carson Kelly followed with a feisty seven pitch at bat. Notably, six of the seven pitches Kelly saw were changeups, an unusual pitch sequence. On the final pitch of the at bat, a changeup, Kelly smashed a 102 mph ground ball that seemed destined for left-center field, but for the defensive heroics of Xander Bogaerts:

Busch was forced out at second and Suzuki held at third. The Cubs brought Alex Bregman off the bench to pinch hit, and on yet another changeup on the outside edge, Bregman flipped a soft single into right field, scoring Suzuki and moving Kelly to second base:

The struggling Pete Crow-Armstrong would come to the plate. After beginning the at bat with a poorly located slider, Peralta followed with a well-located changeup that dropped out of the zone, yet Pete Crow-Armstrong seemed unsurprised by it and fouled it off with his A-swing. Peralta’s third pitch was a changeup that leaked middle-middle, and Crow-Armstrong didn’t miss.

A middle-middle changeup is possibly the single worst pitch in baseball. It is essentially what coaches try to throw during batting practice. In some countries it’s considered a war crime. And it could be that’s all there is to it. A terrible location miss on a pitch a hitter recognized.

Still, there’s something familiar about this sequence. We don’t know. We feel like…

Two things can be true at once:

This changeup should be tried at The Hague. And Pete Crow-Armstrong also timed it like a Swiss watch. Like he was sitting changeup.

Watch the sequence to Carson Kelly again. The first pitch was a changeup, and importantly it was the first changeup Seiya Suzuki saw from Peralta while on second base:

Now watch the rest of the at bat with (some context clues added):

After staring down Peralta and seeing him throw that first changeup, Suzuki proceeded to bunny hop before each subsequent changeup, but not before the fastball.

This is probably nothing, players sometimes hop around to stay nimble before a play that could require breaking in either direction. Maybe that’s all it was.

Maybe not. Suzuki doesn’t actually do this all the time. Here’s Suzuki on second base the inning before when Kyle Hart was on the mound:

No hops.

New entries to the Baseball semaphore are created by finding anodyne movements a player can pass off as natural, but that are easily visible signals to a hitter in the peripheral visual fields. The bunny hop meets that criteria.

This proves nothing, it could all just be random. But re-watch Pete Crow-Armstrong’s at bat, with Carson Kelly now occupying second base after Suzuki scored:

Kelly stays earthbound on the first pitch slider and immediately checks the pitch type on the scoreboard. Just before the second pitch he bunny hops when he picks up the changeup tell, and checks the scoreboard again to confirm. He sees the tell and bunny hops before Peralta throws the final calamitous middle-middle changeup. Pete Crow-Armstrong stays back on it and detonates a three-run home run.

This was the only time Carson Kelly was on second all series. But he’d reached second base multiple times the week before in Philadelphia, and there are no signs of the jittery bunny hops:

This could all be coincidence, anything can be. Including the fact that Wandy Peralta was the pitcher we wrote about last season when it seemed like his former team, the Yankees, were relaying his pitches from second base, and Austin Wells stayed back on a changeup1 like he’d known the pitch was coming for years:

Peralta is a likely target for relaying tipped pitches, for a couple of reasons. He doesn’t have a huge pitch mix, rarely throwing anything other than changeup or sinker. And the changeup is one of the easiest pitches to inadvertently tip because the grip requires the pitcher to essentially engulf the ball with the entire hand.

Some pitchers have a tendency to let the glove flare outward as they press the ball into the glove and engulf it. Other times pitchers give it away by fidgeting for a changeup grip for an extra moment, compared to the subconscious grab-and-go tendency for a fastball.

It’s very hard to see the specific tells on a broadcast, but it’s much easier in person when situated on the field. Last August when Robert Suarez received a mound visit from Ruben Niebla, the Red Sox had Roman Anthony, who was on second base, run to the dugout to get a quick refresher on Suarez’ pitch tipping dossier:

The images were from a prior game as you can see by the different jersey Suarez is wearing on the tablet:

These are side-by-side images of Suarez taking his fastball grip on the left and changeup grip on the right. What you can see in this still is the flare of the glove widening on the changeup grip as Suarez’ entire hand engulfs the baseball. As a result more of the dorsal surface of his hand is visible past the slightly flared aperture of the glove.

This is a way that teams differentiate themselves from the rest of the league. And the Padres have had a bit of trouble with this.

In a different game last year they realized mid at-bat that Patrick Bailey was able to see Nick Pivettas pitch grip and was relaying the signs to the hitter. Jomboy did a nice breakdown:

German Marques acknowledged he was “tipping a couple pitches” in his first start of this season against the Giants. He would go on to say “I was working with Ruben in the bullpen to make sure I’m not tipping. I’ve been watching videos.” So it’s fair to say it’s a focus for the team when they’re aware they have an issue.

Wandy Peralta has never recreated the success he had in back-to-back-to-back stellar seasons with the New York Yankees before signing a four-year $16 million contract with the Padres in February 2024. Hitters seem to take comfortable at bats against him more frequently than you’d like. His stuff has fallen off slightly from his best year as a pro in 2023:

Graphics from the excellent TJStats (support TJ Stats here)

There’s a little less horizontal break on his changeup and sinker. His slider has a little less drop. But he was never a stuff pitcher. His success was predicated on deceiving the hitter with the fastball/changeup cat and mouse game. He often changes his delivery to the plate to throw the hitter’s timing off. He’s notorious for mixing in the quick-pitch at a random point in his outing. But none of that really works if the hitter knows what’s coming.

It’s not always the runners on base, or even the opposing team that picks something up. In a rather famous recent example, future hall of famer, Max Scherzer was tipping pitches while pitching for the Toronto Blue Jays against the Seattle Mariners in the 2025 ALCS. Scherzer’s own first baseman, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. took the highly unusual measure of yelling at his pitcher to stop positioning his glove a certain way because he was giving away his pitch grip. Indergaard has a good breakdown of the moment:

This is instructive because preventing pitch tipping can be a point of emphasis for everyone. If the opposing team has picked up on something, why haven’t you picked up on it too? And if an infielder, from their vantage, can see what’s coming, they need to relay their own signal:

Your eyes can deceive you; don’t trust them

The uncanny timing of the bunny hopping from two different players aligning with every changeup thrown by a pitcher who has struggled with tipping before could all just be coincidence. Stochastic mirage. The mind can trick itself into seeing things that aren’t there. Just Monday an incredible number of people looked at this image and saw a fair ball:

But there’s a chance it’s not nothing. And if it is something, it’s fixable. It’s worth looking in to.

The Pivetta Problem

Baseball is a really strange sport. Starting pitchers are very important, yet they play a little more than a half a game every 5-6 days. If a basketball team loses the best player from their 5-man starting rotation, their season is almost certainly sunk. But the loss of a starting pitcher in baseball is an implicitly more navigable problem because of the structure of the sport.

The Padres have left it vague when/if Pivetta might return, Craig Stammen noted Pivetta could be sidelined for “weeks and maybe months” after an MRI revealed a flexor strain in Pivetta’s pitching arm. Any healthy return before the season’s end improves the Padres outlook significantly, but for simplicity’s sake we’ll examine the worst case scenario that he simply doesn’t return in 2026.

You can approximate what a healthy Pivetta would have meant for Padres run prevention. FanGraphs’ most optimistic preseason projections had Pivetta throwing ~175 innings and a 3.80 ERA in 2026. That’s very good. Not quite his 2025 production, but probably more in line with his true talent level. Pivetta already banked 16 innings before going down, so a healthy version of the rest of his season represented roughly 160 innings with a 3.80 ERA. If we presume the worst case scenario, that Pivetta can’t make a healthy return in 2026, 160 innings of 3.80 ERA pitching is the loss the Padres have to cover to not miss a beat. There’s an even simpler way to state this: A healthy Pivetta was likely to give up ~68 runs across those 160 innings. League average starting pitching in 2025 was a 4.21 ERA, so a league average pitcher across 160 innings would give up about 75 runs. In 2025 the worst ERA for a qualified starting pitcher was 5.70 (Jake Irvin for the tanking Nationals), which equates to 101 runs across 160 innings. Using Fangraphs estimate that each change of ~9.7 runs1 equates to roughly one win, we can synthesize the above to create an impact analysis for the loss of Pivetta based on the quality of the players who stand in for the missing innings:

The team’s first attempt to fill in for Pivetta came Friday night when Matt Waldron took Pivetta’s slot in the rotation. Waldron was ineffective, giving up six runs in 3.2 innings, a result that can be fairly described as an outlier even for a worst case scenario. But presuming the quality of pitching the Padres get never gets much better than replacement level (~5.70 ERA), the expected impact on total wins would be 3-4 fewer across the remaining season. If they can get closer to league average production, that impact falls to ~1 fewer win (or less). The margin for making versus missing the playoffs often falls in the 2-3 win range. And on Wednesday they took a massive step toward mitigating their risk by bringing in a hired gun.

Hired Gun

Two days before Pivetta’s injury Lucas Giolito talked on the Baseball Isn’t Boring podcast about why he hasn’t signed with a team, noting he was waiting for a contract he felt was close to his value, and was surprised that he hadn’t been signed yet.

Based purely on production in 2025 this is understandable. Giolito had an outstanding bounce-back year in 2025 after missing all of 2024 with internal brace surgery to repair his UCL. He essentially had two seasons in one, as a left hamstring strain delayed his 2025 Red Sox debut until April 30, and he struggled early to play back into shape. He put up a 6.42 ERA over his first seven starts, but settled down to a 2.51 ERA over his final 19 outings. His best starts came in August when he twice completed eight innings including his most impressive outing of the season on August 26th against the Orioles when struck out eight, walked only one batter and gave up no runs. His final line on the season was 145 innings with a 3.41 ERA (118 ERA+) and 2.1 WAR. He played on a good team and won crucial games for the Red Sox as they battled for a playoff spot in the toughest division in the AL. And it’s fair to wonder why, at age 31, there wasn’t a multi-year contract waiting for him at the end of such a season.

Same But Different

Giolito has been a very big name since he was a senior in high school. He was expected to be one of the top picks in the 2012 MLB draft but slid to the 16th pick of the first round due to concerns about his right elbow, and indeed he had Tommy John surgery almost immediately after debuting in the Nationals rookie league. He would return from that injury to eventually become a very successful major leaguer for the Chicago White Sox, finishing 6th, 7th, and 11th in Cy Young voting from 2019-2021. But starting in 2022 he had a major drop in productivity. His ERA ballooned to 4.90, and he had a downtick in strikeout rate and uptick in walk rate, trends that would continue in 2023 when he also became very home run prone giving up a league leading 41 long balls.

He signed a 2-year contract with the Red Sox in 2024 but after reporting elbow soreness early in training camp he was found to have a partially torn UCL and Flexor tendon strain. He underwent season ending surgery March 12th, 2024, this time the more limited internal brace surgery to repair his UCL.

When you look under the hood there were some signs that his performance decline in 2022 and 2023 may have been due to playing through accumulated wear and tear. He was throwing the same pitches. But they looked very different. In 2022 he had a very sharp decline in his fastball spin rate and velocity, and the shape of the fastball changed noticeably:

A drop in velocity of 1.2 MPH on the four-seam fastball might not be a big deal for an ultra-high velocity pitcher, but Giolito’s fastball was never above average velocity. It played up because of the elite extension he’s able to achieve (Giolito is 6’6”) as well as very good ride with 19.1 inches of induced vertical break. The drop in velocity from slightly below league average to well below league average, combined with a flatter pitch plane, made the fastball a liability. The deterioration of fastball velocity and spin/shape coincided directly with a spike in his expected (and actual) ERA in 2022 and 2023. You can see how he ranked in MLB percentile for xERA, Fastball MPH, and Fastball Spin rate during his three stellar years from 2019-2021, followed by his rapid decline in productivity in 2022 and 2023:

The underlying pitch metrics really suggested his struggles in 2022 and 2023 were due in part to a decline in underlying stuff on the fastball. And that wasn’t the only clue he’d been struggling with physical ailment.

Giolito has always essentially been a three-pitch pitcher throwing the four-seam fastball, changeup, and slider, with only a rare curveball as a show-me pitch. He began to excel as a pitcher when he developed superb command of his changeup. From 2019-2012 he threw the changeup with an elite zone% of 55.3%. The ability to command the changeup so well allowed him to get whiffs in the strike zone, and buoyed his overall zone% to better than league average despite middling fastball control and below average control on his slider. But in 2022 his command suddenly dropped off a cliff:

And when you look at his pitch mix you can see a massive drop in his changeup zone % from 2021 to 2022 with little volatility in his other pitch locations:

By 2023 Giolito was pitching with a fastball and slider that had lost velocity and spin/shape, and a changeup he wasn’t commanding well. Lucas Giolito’s injuries, a flexor tendon strain alongside a partial UCL tear, are directly implicated in this type of pitch deterioration, particularly in the ability to command a changeup. UCL injuries tend to linger because the ligament has limited blood supply and rarely heals to full native strength without surgical intervention, leaving residual instability even when symptoms (like pain) are mild. That instability shifts the burden to the flexor-pronator mass, which acts as a dynamic stabilizer of the medial elbow and is also responsible for the late pronation and fine finger control required to execute a changeup. This is why it’s so common for investigations into flexor tendon strains to reveal a root cause of UCL damage. When the flexor-pronator mass is strained, pronation timing and finger pressure become inconsistent, and command predictably degrades.

Understanding the specifics behind Giolito’s decline is a good starting place to assess whether his resurgent 2025 was a true return to form, or smoke and mirrors. And there’s reason for optimism that at least some of the 2025 resurgence was indeed a return to form, even if the exceptional degree to which Gioloito achieved run prevention in 2025 may have been a bit of smoke and mirrors.

Return To Form

Starting with Giolito’s 2025 pitch metrics you can see he definitely regained some of his fastball velocity, spin and shape:

His fastball is still slightly below average from a pure stuff perspective, but it’s much closer to a league average pitch than it was prior to his injury repair. More encouraging is the return of his slider velocity and shape to essentially pre-injury level, and especially his return in 2025 to elite changeup control:

Giolito’s changeup is his primary weapon against left handed hitters (LHH). It’s a classic changeup that relies on having nearly identical delivery and arm speed (this was part of what made Trevor Hoffman’s changeup so great), as opposed to relying on sink/movement to induce weak contact (think Wandy Peralta). And Giolito does an exceptional job of hiding his grip and release from hitters giving them no clues to discern fastball from changeup. You can see these mechanics in this overlay of the of his fastball and changeup last season:

Courtesy @PitchingNinja

The delivery and arm speed is just identical. And though the pitches were tunneled tightly on the way to the plate:

They separate significantly by the time they reach the plate:

When Giolito can locate the changeup he can be very effective with it to hitters from both sides of the plate. You can really see the fastball-identical arm speed here:

This changeup looks just like a fastball outside when it comes out of the hand, but the changeup has about six more inches of arm-side break than the four-seamer, so on the way to the plate it breaks just over the outside corner.

When it’s executed perfectly to LHH it leads to some very bad swings:

Oneil Cruz is already finishing his swing as the ball is still crossing the plate:

Giolito’s slider was a plus pitch to RHH that gets good separation from his fastball plane:

Pitch shapes and stuff+ analysis gives important information about a pitcher’s arsenal. But it doesn’t capture crucial aspects to effective pitching like dynamic pitch selection, tunneling, deception, and makeup. For that you have to watch the games.

There’s one at bat from 2025 that probably still stands out to Red Sox fans, but is the most convincing evidence that Giolito really did regain the crucial motor skill needed to harness the changeup as a weapon. The final hitter he faced in his eight shutout innings on August 26th was an eleven pitch battle with Jeremiah Jackson. Giolito had thrown 93 pitches and was struggling with command having issued a four pitch walk to Jackson Holliday to put a runner on first with two outs. He spiked a four-seamer and lost a slider way up and out of the zone to fall behind 2-0. Needing a strike, and knowing it was a traditional fastball count, Giolito selected the changeup to find the zone:

The pitch froze Jackson, who was geared up for something else. On 2-1 Giolito spiked another slider. On 3-1 Giolito went back to the fastball to challenge Jackson. The 2-0 changeup may have been in Jackson’s mind as he was late on the high fastball.

Giolito followed up with another four-seamer that Jackson was still slightly late on, fouling it off, but looked to be getting the timing down. So Giolito went back to the changeup. Jackson was clearly geared up for a fastball and pulled the ball so far foul it almost went backwards.

At this point Giolito was consistently deceiving Jackson, and Jackson shortened his swing up considerably to contend with the fastball while staying back a little more. Giolito continued to challenge Jackson with three more fastballs located on the edges of the zone. Jackson, whose swing length had been 7.8 feet on a single off Giolito in the 6th inning, and 7.1 feet on the 3-1 foul ball, took three straight swings that averaged 6.4 feet in swing length fouling off all three fastballs:

Each fastball that Giolito threw was faster and higher spin than the one before:

This is what a pitcher emptying the tank looks like. He knows he’s facing the last hitter of the game. Jackson’s third swing was right on time but just beneath the 2300 RPM four-seamer and he fouled it off:

The final pitch of the outing was Giolito’s 104th. And after seeing Jackson had timed up one of his best fastballs of the night, Giolito changed it up:

You can get a good sense of how a pitcher attacks hitters by watching the games. Giolito challenged Jackson with the fastball only on the edges of the zone, and only attacked him in the heart of the zone with the changeup when he had reason to think Jackson was timed up for a fastball:

This approach requires command. And it looks like that part of his skillset is significantly improved post-surgery. Giolito’s stuff is not 100% back to what it was prior to surgery. But he’s back to being able to attack hitters the way that made him successful, and the lynchpin of that approach was the ability to command the changeup with extremely deceptive mechanics that perfectly mimic the fastball, and the ability to locate in the zone.

He was extremely successful in 2025, and the pitch metrics and game tape suggest that some of that was due to returning to form physically, albeit not quite to the heights he was when he was contending for a Cy Young.

Smoke and mirrors

The 3.41 ERA he put up last season isn’t likely his true talent level, there was probably some sequencing and batted ball luck in that pristine run prevention. His FIP was 4.17, closer to league average. And his strikeout rate was a mediocre 7.5 K/9 IP.

Surprisingly, Fenway was a very good park for Giolito’s batted ball profile in 2025. This may have suppressed some home runs compared to playing in a different home park last season:

Thankfully Petco had identical projections for Giolito’s profile.

Giolito’s 2025 chase % and whiff rates were also down compared to his pre-injury averages. And that’s something that can indicate batted ball luck was behind at least some of the sterling 3.41 ERA.

This part of the statistical profile is more suggestive of Giolito providing closer to league average production. But league average production in Pivetta’s stead would raise the floor of the Padres’ season tremendously.

The Unknown

Across MLB and broader athletic cohorts there have been studies of pitchers return from UCL surgery, and it’s widely understood that performance recovery typically lags simple return-to-play. Performance often dips in the first season back, with partial rebound in year two driven more by improved command, feel, and workload tolerance than by raw stuff gains; however, only a minority of pitchers have ever fully regained pre-injury performance even by years two to three. Older starters in particular have lower odds of complete recovery, and while velocity and pitch shape often normalize, outcomes (whiffs, contact quality) are less reliably restored. Giolito isn’t old per se. But at 31 he’s on the older side of the aging curve, and it’s wise to temper expectations about a return to all-star production. It’s not likely. But the Padres don’t need all-star production for his contributions to be very impactful. If he can merely produce near league average, his addition likely mitigates all but about 1 win’s worth of the run prevention lost when Pivetta went down.

Dan Szymborski’s ZIPS playoff probability shifted the Padres from 55% to 65% after the acquisition of Giolito. And that projection certainly has Giolito producing closer to league average than the All-Star level production from a season ago. If Giolito is anywhere between those two outcomes it will be a coup for the Padres.

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Lost Season

Campusano spent time on the major league roster in 2025, but it’s not accurate to say he was given a chance to make an impact. His longest stint with the club was from May 24th to June 16th, but in that time his role was severely limited. The Padres played with three catchers on the roster the entire stretch, and Campusano’s role on the team was break glass in case of emergency only. At one point Campusano got only a single at bat across a 13 day stretch from June 1st to June 13th, with the lone appearance coming in garbage time in a victory against the Dodgers who had Kike Hernandez clowning around on the mound during an 11-1 blowout. Campusano spent most of the season breaking offensive records in AAA, but without a clear role in the club’s future.

To start the 2026 season Campusano was given a vote of confidence as the team’s backup catcher, his role having been to spell starter Freddie Fermin every few days in the early part of the season. But Thursday night was different.

Trust

The Rockies had battled the Padres to a stand-still Thursday night with the score tied 1-1 entering the bottom of the 9th. With two outs, Ty France reached first base on a walk. Starting catcher Freddy Fermin was due up to bat, but the Padres opted to lift Fermin for pinch hitter Miguel Andujar in a situation where an extra base hit might win the game. While Andujar undoubtedly provided an incremental increase in the likelihood of a game winning extra-base hit, the most likely outcome was still that the game would enter extra innings, and lifting Fermin meant Luis Campusano would be trusted with finishing the game, doing so in ultra high leverage situations should the game move to extras. Indeed Andujar, although he hit the ball well, would fly out to right field sending the game into extras. And Campusano started the 10th inning behind the plate with the Rockies getting to start each inning with a runner in scoring position.

This was a move that would’ve been unthinkable in 2025 when Campusano barely saw the field in any capacity. Since the advent of the Manfred Man in extra innings, every mistake and imperfection is magnified because of the increased leverage on the game. This is usually the time when teams deploy defensive replacements, thereby reducing the chances of a defensive deficiency being fatal. The Padres electing to take a small incremental advantage on offense in exchange for Campusano replacing Fermin in extras implies a shifting attitude towards Campusano’s role with the team.

With baseball being baseball, a big moment found Campusano almost immediately in the top of the 10th. Jeremiah Estrada had been brought in to hold the line for the Padres. The first hitter for the Rockies was Jake McCarthy who elected to sacrifice bunt the Manfred man to third base. This is when catcher defense becomes magnified, because a wild pitch or passed ball leads to a run. And Campusano availed himself well when Estrada spiked a splitter on a 1-1 pitch to Brenton Doyle:

Campusano athletically smothered the errant splitter. This doesn’t really show up in the box score. This was one of those small, but significant moments.

Despite the solid defense, the Rockies would eventually score in the inning, and take a 2-1 lead into the bottom of the 10th.

With Campusano now in the game, he was the Manfred Man to start the bottom of the 10th. This is where Craig Stammen would have loved to have another catcher so he could pinch run for Campusano, one of the slower runners on the team. Jake Cronenworth led off the inning with a clear assignment… move the runner.

His attempted sacrifice bunt wasn’t executed well, a little too hard and towards the pitcher on the third base side of the infield. Campusano, running hard on contact, was thrown out easily at third base. The fault was not with Campusano. Even a faster runner like Bryce Johnson would have struggled to reach third base safely with the ball put in play as it was.

Fortunately, the Padres mounted a mini rally with Fernando Tatis Jr. hitting a single in the next at bat, and after a walk to Jackson Merrill, Manny Machado would hit a sac fly that tied the game 2-2.

The game would move into the 11th inning, when Campusano’s next small-big moment came on the second pitch of the inning. With the count 1-0 on former Padres catcher Brett Sullivan, Campusano challenged a call on a pitch on the inside corner that the umpire called a ball, which would have sent the count swinging heavily in the Rockies’ favor with the game very much in the balance:

Campusano judged correctly, the pitch just nicked the lower inside corner of the strike zone. Now the count was 1-1, instead of 2-0… This seems insignificant, but the change in count leverage from 2-0 to 1-1 meant a swing in win probability of 2% in the Padres favor. It’s counterintuitive, but this is very impactful. A 2% increase in win probability across a 162 game season is a difference of about 3 wins. Of course, a former Padre was at the plate, and Brett Sullivan put up one of the finest at bats of his career, fouling off multiple well located pitches from Estrada before finally catching up to a high 4-seam fastball and lining a double down the right field line to once again give the Rockies the lead.

Estrada would walk the next hitter putting runners on first and second. With the count 0-1 to TJ Rumfield, Estrada would throw another splitter in the dirt that Campusano expertly smothered once again:

Estrada would find the zone with his next two pitches and managed to strike out Rumfield on a splitter low in the zone. David Morgan was brought on in relief and faced Willi Castro. Morgan fell behind 2-1. On the fourth pitch of the at bat Morgan missed just inside with a sinker and Campusano again challenged the pitch:

In this case the challenge was unsuccessful, the pitch was found to be 1.4 inches off the inner half of the plate. But this was an excellent challenge nonetheless. The human brain is not capable of total precision on close pitches, and as we’ve written about there are certain instances where a challenge should be nearly automatic if it’s close, even if there is low confidence in an overturn. This was one of those instances. There is enormous leverage on a swing in the count from 2-1 to 3-1 vs 2-1 to 2-2. Here are the differences in batter’s outcomes on the two different counts in 2025:

Campusano’s challenge on a close pitch had the potential to swing the outcome of the at bat enormously. Additionally, the Padres were nearing the end of the game, and had three challenges. You can hear at the end of the clip above that it’s announced the Padres had two remaining challenges after the unsuccessful attempt. The umpire actually had to call time because the Rockies bench was questioning this after the ABS call:

But, in fact, the Padres did have three challenges because each team is awarded an additional challenge in extra innings even if they are not out of challenges when the ninth inning ends. A team should have a much lower confidence threshold to challenge calls if there is high leverage and they have multiple challenges remaining in extra innings. Thus far MLB catchers have had a challenge success rate of ~60%:

When faced with extra innings and a surplus of challenges remaining, catchers should be challenging high leverage pitch calls that are close even if their confidence is less than 60%. This was good process irrespective of the outcome.

David Morgan would dig very deep on 3-1 with an outstanding curveball that caught the zone for strike two. He would follow up with his best pitch of the night, another curveball that broke sharply under the swing of Castro for strike three, ending the Rockies threat:

In the bottom of the 11th with the Rockies clinging to a 3-2 lead, Gavin Sheets led off with a single to shallow left:

Xander Bogaerts, now in the role of the Manfred Man, was being waved in to score by third base coach Bob Henley, but he pulled up as he rounded third base. On replay, it was probably a wise move by Xander to hold at third base. Still, it meant the Padres were going to need another hitter to step up and get the run home.

Nick Castellanos was up next and continued to show that he retains the ability to turn on a pitch pulling a sharp line drive, but it was snared by Rockies third baseman Kyle Karros. Craig Stammen then made another aggressive move, bringing Ramon Laureano, who had been given an off day, in to pinch hit for Bryce Johnson. With runners at the corners and one out, Laureano took aggressive swings, but ultimately fell victim to an outstanding 1-2 changeup from Brennan Bernardino that vanished on the way to the plate:

Suddenly the Padres were down to their last out. Luis Campusano came up to bat as the Padres final hope. Campusano had not batted early in the game. But he came to the plate ready to hit in do or die time. Bernardino had started every at bat in the inning with a fastball. And indeed, Bernardino tried to get ahead of Campusano with a first pitch cutter. But Campusano ambushed it:

Campusano tied the game with a line drive double to left field. The Padres had their reprieve.

The Rockies would escape thanks to a fine defensive play from Karros in foul territory to the send the game to the fateful 12th inning.

The Rockies would start the 12th inning with yet another sacrifice bunt, once again from Jake McCarthy:

The Rockies now had the go ahead run on third, and Brenton Doyle was once again at the plate. The Padres elected to pitch to Doyle, and brought the entire infield in for perhaps the most fateful play of the game. Doyle sent a groundball up the middle against a drawn in Padres infield. With the runner on third breaking for home on contact, Jake Cronenworth fielded the ball cleanly and made the necessary perfect throw to Luis Campusano. Despite the stellar effort of Cronenworth, there was still plenty for Campusano to do. With the runner gunning in from third base, Campusano had one chance to get the tag down and prevent the run from scoring. He couldn’t have done it better:

This was absolutely perfect defense. Campusano positioned himself to receive the throw from Cronenworth with his glove already moving towards the runner, and executed an immaculate swipe tag to catch Castro on the hand:

As his glove made contact with the runner he brought his throwing hand down to secure the ball in the glove:

He popped up immediately to show the umpire the ball and stare down the runner at first preventing any attempt at a base advancement. Impeccable.

This was an incredible swing in win probability in the Padres favor. Before the play the Rockies had a 65.94% chance of plating at least one run in the inning:

After Cronenworth and Campusano’s defensive clinic the Rockies’ chance of plating a run in the inning dropped to 12.62%:

The Padres would finish the inning with the tie intact, and enter the bottom of the 12th with a chance to walk it off.

In the bottom of the 12th with Cronenworth occupying second base as the Manfred Man, Fernando Tatis Jr. Would execute the fourth sacrifice bunt of extra innings moving the winning run to third:

If you’re wondering why both the Rockies and the Padres kept sacrifice bunting, it’s because the play actually incrementally increases the chances of winning the game. Sacrifice bunting leads to less offense over the long run, but specifically sacrificing a runner from 2nd to 3rd base with no outs increases the chances of at least one run scoring from 62.04% by swinging away, to 65.94% by executing the sacrifice:

This isn’t to say Tatis’ move was the strategically correct one. The rest of the context really matters. When Jake McCarthy sacrificed the Manfred Man to third in the 10th and 12th innings, the context was a speedy but weak hitter prioritizing base advancement against a decent reliever. Tatis’ sacrifice represented one of the Padres best hitters giving up an out against one of the Rockies’ weakest relievers, Valente Bellozo who was the seventh Rockies pitcher in what had already been a bullpen game.

But what came next was remarkable, because while the Padres had happily taken the out after McCarthy’s 10th and 12th inning identical sacrifices and tried to pitch their way out of the rest of the inning, the Rockies reacted to Tatis’ sacrifice with the incredible decision to intentionally walk both Jackson Merrill and Manny Machado to load the bases:

Xander Bogaerts stood in against the sinkerballer Bellozo who was hoping to induce an inning ending double play to survive into further extra innings. But Bogaerts was ready. He spit on the first sinker down and out of the zone. On the second pitch of the at bat, he turned on another sinker that caught too much of the zone and hit an absolute no doubter, 108.3 MPH exit velocity rocket to the left field stands that he knew was gone right off the bat:

Don Orsillo was ready too, working in just about every catch phrase in his call of the epic walk off grand slam. Just after the ball landed in the stands the camera cut fittingly to a triumphant Campusano who had truly saved the game for the Padres:

This will rightly be remembered as a transcendent moment for Xander Bogaerts, and a tremendous win against the vexing Rockies who are much improved in 2026. But this was a very important game for what it signaled about Campusano’s development. It didn’t go unnoticed by the players either. Bogaerts mentioned Campusano twice during his immediate postgame interview:

The trust Craig Stammen placed on the shoulders of Luis Campusano, and how Campusano answered his manager’s call was a watershed moment. And Stammen commented after the game that Campusano’s impeccable defensive play was something he’d specifically been working on daily in fielding practice:

And there’s a sense that Campusano’s tantalizing offensive prowess may still materialize at the major league level:

While a player can’t firmly establish himself as a true major league catcher in a single game, a team can firmly establish that they’ve placed trust in a player with a single decision such as the Padres showed Campusano Thursday night. And trust is a prerequisite to a player reaching their potential.

Lineup Flexibility

Through 10 games the Padres have seen eight different lineup constructions:

As expected, Fernando Tatis Jr., Jackson Merrill, and Manny Machado have anchored the most coveted 1st, 2nd, and 4th spots in the order. Jake Cronenworth has seen two games batting leadoff against RHP, but has also had starts hitting 6th, 8th, and 9th against RHP. Cronenworth has batted no higher than 8th against LHP. Xander Bogaerts has hit 2nd four times, 5th five times, and interestingly batted 6th against Ranger Suarez in the finale in Boston, with Miguel Andujar slotting in 5th against the lefty.

The most interesting batted ball profile thus far is Fernando Tatis Jr. who has been in the league’s 99th percentile in hard hit rate at an astonishing 70.8% hard hit rate so far. And he’s been hitting the ball into the launch angle sweet-spot in the league’s 81st percentile:

But if you’ve watched the games so far you likely have the impression Tatis has not been performing to his career norms. And this is true, so far Tatis just hasn’t been as successful at the plate as he’s used to:

It’s tempting to chalk up this mismatch between quality of contact and batted ball outcomes to luck and small sample size theater. It’s true that Tatis has probably been a bit unlucky with his batted ball results. He’s recorded outs on several extremely well hit balls, including making outs on three of the four barrels (batted balls that have led to a minimum .500 batting average and 1.500 slugging percentage since Statcast was implemented) he’s hit this year:

But it’s unquestionably not just bad luck. Tatis’ struggle to turn high quality contact into on-field production has at least one partial explanatory variable that’s as astonishing as his hard hit rate. Tatis has yet to pull a single ball in the air:

This is the key physiologic explanation for Tatis’ declining home run rate:

This is obviously going to improve from 0%. Tatis has had only 44 plate appearances, and has taken only five swings in 2-0 or 3-1 counts, and on those swings he’s had two barrels, two fouls, and one infield single. But it’s slightly concerning to see that in all five swings he’s taken in these quintessential hitters’ counts his swing hasn’t been optimized for pulled-air contact:

These are counts in which it is impossible to strike out, and hence it is common for hitters to ‘cheat’ in these counts and try to get out ahead of a fastball in the zone to pull it in the air. All five of these swings came on fastballs, and yet every swing had an opposite field attack direction, and a Y-intercept less than 30 inches. Still, it’s five swings, and we know Tatis has light-tower power to the pull-side. He was doing this less than a month ago:

At this stage it seems wiser to focus more on the small sample of at bats rather than the clearly unsustainable 0% pulled air percentage, but we shouldn’t lose sight of it entirely. When you zoom out to the entire team there’s a related, if less extreme, profile:

The Padres are second to last in home runs in MLB, and they are last in average launch angle. There is some cause and effect there. But they’re nearer the middle of the pack in total barrels. The discrepancy is explained by being last in home runs per barrel, and this is at least partially some normal early season variance related both to playing in cold weather and park factors. You can see that some of these would certainly be home runs in different ballparks (Ty France and Campusano in Boston), or in warmer weather when the ball travels farther (Laureano and Castellanos were likely Petco’d):

The eye test is supported by the difference in actual vs expected numbers where the Padres have the biggest difference in actual wOBA vs expected wOBA and are near the league worst in actual SLG vs expected SLG:

Expected stats do capture some of the luck that’s involved in batted ball outcomes, and through this lens there’s a strong case to be made that the performance of the offense thus far isn’t indicative of its true talent level. But the extremely low average launch angle, and middling barrel rate are factors to pay attention to across the next stretch of the season. Because a team that doesn’t prioritize hitting for power most of the time is giving itself a competitive disadvantage.

It’s too early to make a definitive prognosis for the team’s offense, but given that it has faced top tier starting pitching, and clearly seems to have suffered some bad batted ball luck, we’d wager that the outlook for the offense still aligns with preseason projections of being at least league average when it’s all said and done.

Optimization

An offense’s intrinsic ability can be enhanced or diminished to a small degree by the way in which it is deployed. One of the diminishing effects cast upon the 2025 offense was extremely rigid lineup construction, with Luis Arraez being awarded the most important 2nd spot in the lineup in 130 games last season despite strong evidence that he’d suffered a loss of bat control and plate discipline, and this was never taken into account in lineup optimization, even when the Padres started the playoffs against two tough left handed starters. Arraez’ decline is no longer the Padres concern, he’s now doing statue takes on 3-1 counts for the Giants:

But his rigid deployment in a crucial spot in the batting order was emblematic of a 2025 philosophy that eschewed experimentation and innovation. And it’s an area that the 2026 team must improve on. Because the 2026 Padres don’t have limitless resources. They must deploy the talent they have as efficiently as possible to hope to compete in a division where the top spot is already spoken for by the most over-resourced team in professional sports.

The manager of a major league baseball team has multiple domains of responsibility, but the one which he has the most direct control over is the optimization of the lineup. And here Stammen has shown early on a willingness to experiment. Xander Bogaerts has struggled to repeat his sublime offensive production since moving from Boston to San Diego. He’s been a good player overall, and an above average bat for a shortstop. A winning player. But one who has little claim to taking a heart of the order lineup spot for the past two seasons. And he’s been moved down in the order accordingly. Ramon Laureano started the season hitting 7th, but has been moved progressively higher in the order through the first 10 games. Miguel Andujar was a fringe roster addition, but excels at hitting certain opposing pitcher archetypes, and was batted 3rd in Boston in a favorable matchup. Luis Campusano was in the managerial doghouse for all of 2025, but his bat has always been tantalizing, and he’s been allowed to get regular work through the early part of the season. Gavin Sheets seemed to get an opening day start in part as recognition of his significant contributions in 2025, but he’s been deployed in a platoon role since, which has created room to get more at bats for the right handers Andujar and Nick Castellanos from the bench. Moves like this aren’t always going to work, but they are going to accrue better information about what the players on the team are capable of in game action. The Padres aren’t going to be able to buy major upgrades on offense. They have to maximize the roster they have. And to maximize what they have they have to know what they have, and be willing to deploy talent in whatever configuration the game calls for.

The Other Side

Stammen has differentiated himself from his predecessors on the other side of the ball as well. Most notably he’s shown a willingness to use long relief as a tool to give his high leverage arms a reprieve. Kyle Hart has pitched two innings or more in each of his three appearances this season, including soaking up innings in short lived Walker Buehler and German Marquez starts.

Hart was not available for long relief during Marquez second start in the series opener in Pittsburgh. Marquez thankfully provided more length on Monday than in his first outing. He pitched out of major jams in the 2nd and 3rd and was ultimately able to complete five innings of shutout ball against the Pirates. With Hart not available Stammen asked Ron Marinaccio and David Morgan to pitch two innings each to close out the game. Stammen allowed Morgan to pitch out of trouble after he walked the first two batters he faced in the 8th, and none of the higher leverage arms were warming up when Morgan continued to struggle finding the zone in the 9th. But ultimately Morgan was up to the challenge and secured the Padres shutout win. The successful long relief outings gave the Padres high leverage arms a precious day of rest going into Tuesday’s matchup against Paul Skenes.

Despite Marquez’ better outcomes in his second appearance there was little indication that he’ll be capable of plus production from the 5th rotation spot. His stuff is only fringe major league quality, and he’ll be very dependent on control and sequencing to put together quality innings:

The Padres continue to have a back of the rotation vulnerability with both Walker Buehler and Marquez showing questionable starter quality, and uncertainty surrounding the ability of Griffin Canning, Joe Musgrove, and Matt Waldron to provide significant upgrades. The task before Stammen is how to navigate a 162 game season with these constraints. Letting the lower tier bullpen arms stretch for innings and pitch through trouble is a potentially incendiary strategy, but is one of the only conceivable strategies to get enough relief innings from the back of the bullpen on days four and five of the starting rotation to survive the season. To do so most effectively requires finding out what these pitchers are really capable of in game action.

The Innovator’s Dilemma

Attempts at innovation demand a tolerance for failure and a willingness to accept risk that may appear at first glance chaotic, or misguided. Even in cases where there is strong evidence that an innovative strategy is superior.

Monday’s game ended on a play that received immediate derision from Pirates and Padres fans alike. With two outs in the 9th inning and runner on first, the Pirates trailed 5-0 when Jake Mangum came up to face David Morgan. With the Pirates down by five, the best that a home run would do is cut the deficit to three runs. Mangum’s real job was to get on base. On an 0-1 count he decided to do this:

It’s normal to react to this play with derision, because the heuristic that bunting is inefficient is one of the most well ingrained mantras of the modern baseball orthodoxy. But bunting is not monolithic. And this was a good decision that failed because of execution. Jake Mangum is very fast, he has an 86th percentile sprint speed:

And this is the defensive alignment he saw in front of him, in an at bat where any extra bases beyond first were of diminishing marginal value:

Bunting for a base hit when the defense is in this alignment is one of the highest efficiency plays in baseball. You can’t read a player’s mind, but you can be certain that a hitter is bunting for a base hit when he does it with two outs. Here are the bunt attempts with two outs, and the resulting on-base percentages for the past five years:

Fast sprinters like Mangum can beat out bunt hits even when the defense isn’t aligned the way the Padres were. In fact, just one day before, Mangum had beat out a bunt single when the third baseman was crashing expecting the play:

But when defenses are aligned the way the Padres were, even slower runners have a nearly sure base hit if they can just drop the bunt down the third baseline, as Josh Naylor did Sunday:

And when a defensive alignment is extreme, bunting this way can be efficient even early in games when runs are at a premium, even when the hitter is amongst the most lumbering in the league, as Vinny Pasquantino had shown earlier on Monday afternoon:

Josh Naylor might be fleet for his size, but no such accusations can be made of the Pasquatch:

This is simply an inefficiency in baseball that persists because of the power of the 20+ year old Moneyball heuristic that teams should never bunt. Because it was true at the time of the first revelations when every team was over indexing on the inefficient uses of the bunt. Sacrifice bunting runners over. In 2025 the only team in the league still doing that with any regularity was the Padres. And for that reason Padres fans, and possibly management, may find any mention of bunting revolting. But the pendulum has swung far past the point of equilibrium. Smart bunting is the most efficient play in the modern game. On Monday night Mangum’s shortcoming was in execution, not decision making. But the derision he faced is the penalty for going against the orthodoxy and not succeeding. And the incentive to avoid such derision is at the heart of the innovator’s dilemma.

Baseball is a wildly complex game where very small marginal advantages can have compounding effects, and innovation doesn’t always have to come on the field of play. On Sunday Ranger Suarez appeared to try out an innovative piece of gamesmanship. Campusano took the first two pitches of the at bat for called strikes. After the second pitch Suarez took a couple steps towards home then meandered wide around the third base side of the mound slowly. Campusano saw Suarez pacing slowly around the mound and stood upright in the batters box with the bat in hand, but waited to take his stance until Suarez took the mound. When Suarez finally stepped up to toe the rubber there were only seven seconds left on the pitch clock. And at this point Campusano was called out on strike three for a pitch clock violation:

This isn’t a baseball play, but it’s correct by the new baseball rules which state:

• Batters must be in the box and alert to the pitcher by the 8-second mark or else be charged with an automatic strike.

Campusano having not taken his stance by the 8-second mark was a pitch clock violation. Suarez had executed another in the long pantheon of baseball trick plays. He risked a pitch clock violation himself by not leaving much time to get set on the mound and go into a windup. But the penalty he might have incurred was disproportionate to Campusano’s, and the risk was easily worth it.

While it wouldn’t be wrong to say that stretches of Craig Stammen’s first weeks at the helm of the Padres resembled the grace and sobriety of a booze cruise, experimentation and risk taking are necessary elements to innovation, and the one thing we can say thus far of the new skipper is he doesn’t appear to be the least bit afraid to make decisions that are hard to defend using traditional baseball wisdom. Time will tell whether that translates to meaningful innovation, or if the team will end up lost at sea.

Randy Vasquez

We wrote about the fascinating developments of the final month of Randy Vasquez’ 2025 season which saw him return from a stint in AAA with an almost unbelievable uptick in pitch velocity, adding 2 MPH to his fastball. His velo still seemed to be up during spring training. But it’s hard to believe a change is durable until it’s executed in regular season action. Which is why the first pitch of Vasquez’ 2026 was pretty gratifying:

This was a 96 MPH 4-seam fastball at 2500 RPM with 18 inches of iVB. This pitch came almost a year to the day since Vasquez’ first start of 2025 in which his 4-seamer averaged 92.9 MPH with ~2300 RPM and 15.9 inches of iVB that garnered zero whiffs in the outing:

The first pitch of 2026 was just a completely different fastball. And it’s not a stretch to say Kerry Carpenter looked a little overmatched in the next three pitches. After the 4-seamer Vasquez threw a sharp 3200 RPM curveball with 48 inches of drop and 15 inches of glove-side break at an elite 83.8 MPH, and Carpenter swung through. Vasquez repeated this sequence for a four pitch strikeout. Here’s the whole at bat:

Vasquez was always known as a high spin specialist who got by with below average velocity and fastball shape. Adding ticks of velo to the fastball makes it harder for hitters to sit back and look for spin, and will lead to more swings like this:

Gleyber Torres was the second batter of the game, and this was the first of three very fun battles with Vasquez on the evening. In this at bat Vasquez threw all three of his fastballs, starting with a 97.2 MPH 4-seamer with 17 inches of iVB, followed by a 90 MPH cutter with 28 inches of drop and 5 inches of break to the glove-side, followed by a 96.4 MPH sinker with 18 inches of arm-side horizontal break and 19 inches of drop. It’s interesting to see the three fastball movement profiles side by side:

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The fifth pitch of the at bat was Vasquez’ fastest pitch of the night, a sinker that reached a remarkable 97.8 MPH. Torres laid off a final 97 MPH sinker just below the zone to draw a walk. Here is the entire at bat:

The first at bat had ended with three straight 97 MPH sinkers breaking in towards Torres.

In their next matchup Vasquez would change the tempo. He opened with a cutter that looked out of the hand like it was headed down the heart of the plate, but broke down and away, and Torres swung over the top. Vasquez threw another cutter that was up and in followed by a curveball also up and in, both pitches backing Torres off the plate. The fourth pitch was a 90 MPH cutter that started inside and bent back towards the heart of the plate and Torres watched it into the glove for a called strike. Torres seemed to nod his head after this last one, maybe having honed in on the timing and movement of the cutter. With the count 2-2 Vasquez switched up and delivered a 4-seamer at 96 MPH that Torres was very late on, whiffing for strike three.

The 4-seam and cutter are both fastballs, and have a nearly identical release:

But these pitches have essentially opposite movement profiles. While Vasquez’ cutter breaks down and away from a right handed batter, the 4-seamer stays up due to the iVB, and has slight horizontal movement toward a right handed batter. And the 4-seamer is about 6 MPH faster. You can see not only is Torres late on the pitch, his bat path is below the 4-seamer that’s already in the lower half of the zone.

It really looked like Torres was hunting a different pitch.

In their final matchup Vasquez started with a sinker that broke in on Torres’ hands and was fouled off. Vasquez followed that with a cutter over the outer half of the plate for a called strike. On 0-2, with Torres having to protect the plate if a pitch was close, Vasquez threw Torres the first slider he’d seen:

The slider has the same directional movement profile of a cutter, breaking down and away from Torres, but it drops about 7 inches further than a cutter and is 3 MPH slower. You can see that out of the hand the slider looks like it’s heading right down the middle:

Right as Torres plants his foot and starts to swing the pitch is beginning to break

But unlike the half-dozen cutters Torres had seen earlier the slider dives a few inches further down and off the plate and Torres is barely able to get the tip of the bat on the ball and rolls over for a weak groundout.

The sinker Vazquez threw in this sixth inning matchup with Torres came in at only 93.2 MPH, and his peak velocity definitely waned as the game went by:

But he’d maintained good fastball velo until then, including a pair of strikeouts on the 4-seamer at 95 MPH in the 5th. This sequence to Matt Vierling was a similar cutter to 4-seamer one-two punch, and he dialed the velo to 95.4 MPH on his 71st pitch of the game for the K:

Vasquez finished the night with six shutout innings and eight strikeouts, and there’s no question that the improved fastball velocity was a big part of that. A year after he’d gotten zero whiffs on his 4-seamer to start 2025, Vasquez managed an elite 35.3% whiff rate on the 4-seamer in his 2026 debut:

Vasquez also threw six changeups that averaged a Michael King like 19.3 inches of arm-side break and graded out more than a standard deviation above the mean by stuff+. He also maintained the excellent 83.8 MPH average on his curveball that he showed on the second pitch of the game.

You don’t see the physical characteristics of a pitcher’s arsenal change this dramatically very often. After the game Craig Stammen suggested that the increased velocity was something the team had felt Vasquez was capable of, and that a hyperintense physical training regimen, including a weighted ball throwing program, was the provenance of Vasquez’ leveling up:

Randy Vasquez may not have the ceiling of an ace, but his starts are going to be appointment television. Because, given his established ability to throw seven pitches for strikes with elite spin, the addition of legitimate major league fastball velocity could plausibly turn Vasquez into a viable number three starter on a contending team. And that’s a prerequisite for the Padres to have hope of surviving the regular season into the playoffs.

Signaling Risk

This is where the good news about the starting rotation ends. And it’s the fourth and fifth spots in the starting rotation that are the biggest risks to the Padres ambitions this season. Walker Buehler and German Marquez both made starts against the Giants, and neither distinguished themselves either by stuff or by performance.

Walker Buehler

Walker Buehler has undergone almost the inverse of Randy Vasquez’s transition. Buehler was once a flame thrower but injuries have left him with a low 90’s fastball and he’s trying to reinvent himself as a wide pitch mix junk baller. He threw four innings against the Giants in the series opener, giving up three runs including a home run, striking out three and walking two. Nothing about the stuff on his pitches stands out:

The one thing that does stand out is he threw seven different pitch types. The hope with Buehler is that there are emergent properties from the combination of having so many different pitches, and above average release extension, that hitters can be kept off balance. Pitchers with this profile tend to need to have elite command in order to be successful, and that was not on display in Buehler’s first start. Nor was it in 2025.

Buehler was once a all-star with great stuff and command, and finished 4th in Cy Young voting as recently as 2021. But although he’s only 31, there are too many miles and too much injury residue. The stuff isn’t coming back. If he can command a seven pitch mix there’s a very good chance he could be an above replacement level fifth starter. That may sound like damning with faint praise, but an above replacement 5th starter would move the needle for a team that likely needs 90 wins to make the playoffs.

German Marquez

German Marquez had a disastrous start giving up four runs in three innings and never looking effective in his first outing. He simply could not command his knuckle curve, repeatedly missing in the zone, including leaving a hanging knuckle curve in the heart of the zone on the second pitch of the game giving up a home run to Willy Adames.

Marquez has spent his whole career in the pitching wasteland of Coors field, and a return to sea level was thought to be a tailwind for his pitch profile. But in his first game at Petco his stuff was down from 2025, his knuckle curve had less break and spin, and he threw eight fastballs that statcast had difficulty determining whether to label a sinker or 4-seamer because the pitches weren’t very distinct from one another. Marquez always had one of the lower release extensions in the league (the distance from the mound that the ball is released toward home plate), which means that what velocity he can produce plays down since the hitters have on average an extra foot of travel before the pitch reaches home plate compared to the rest of the league.

Marquez threw only 65 pitches in three innings giving up four runs before being removed. There was almost nothing encouraging about the performance. It was a very very short look however. He’ll get at least one more turn through the rotation this week:

Never Early

The bottom of the Padres rotation is not settled. Buehler and Marquez are likely to make multiple turns through the rotation, and there is a decent chance neither can credibly cover the fourth or fifth spot in the rotation. Griffin Canning and Joe Musgrove are still rehabbing with no clear timelines for return. They might eventually offer some rotation help. But the Padres can’t control that. In the meantime the games being played are significant. Playoff margins routinely come down to a game or two. And they all count the same. It’s never early in a baseball season.

Game 1

Nick Pivetta faced off against reigning back-to-back Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal. Pivetta started the season off with a strikeout of Kerry Carpenter on three perfectly executed pitches. The first pitch of the season was a 94.3 MPH 4-seam fastball with 21 inches of induced vertical break (iVB) at the top of the zone. This is the key pitch that led Pivetta to 6th in Cy Young voting in 2025. The iVB creates so much ride it’s extremely difficult for hitters to square up in the top of the zone, even when they’re sitting on it as it appeared Carpenter was. Carpenter would foul off two well located 4-seamers up and in before Pivetta buried him with a 2700 RPM curveball that dropped 61 inches on the way to the plate thanks to an absurd -18 inches of iVB.

Here is the curveball halfway to home plate, about the time a hitter needs to decide to swing:

Pivetta’s velocity and pitch shapes were elite, but more importantly, he located the pitches well. This is the game Pivetta plays with hitters: high fastballs at the top edge of the zone for fouls or swing throughs, and curveballs that start near the hitter’s eye level but dive to the bottom of the zone. 71% of his pitches in 2025 were the 4-seamer (48.5%) or curveball (22.4%). When he locates this pitch mix it’s a nightmare for hitters. This would change in the second at bat.

Gleyber Torres saw an inverted pitch mix with a curveball that Pivetta located well to start the at bat, but he missed wildly with his 4-seam on the second pitch. He would fire off three more 4-seamers that each inched closer to the zone, but each missed, and Torres didn’t offer at any drawing the walk:

Pivetta may have been overthrowing here. This was one of the highest velocity sequences of his outing:

Pivetta stuck with the 4-seamer to start Colt Keith and his first offering was again high, but it induced an excuse-me swing from Keith who likely was fooled by the iVB, but his weak flare dropped in for a single.

The Tigers’ most dangerous hitter Riley Greene came up with two on and one-out and Pivetta broke up the string of 4-seamers with two poorly located curves that didn’t tempt Greene. Pivetta fooled Greene with another curve on the 2-0 fastball count.

But on 2-1 Pivetta again missed badly with a 4-seamer a foot up and out of the zone. You can see Freddy Fermin tilt his head a little bit after the pitch, sometimes a sign the catcher wants the pitcher to settle down a little. Greene seemed to have also sensed Pivetta was struggling with command as he stared at a 3-1 cutter that Pivetta essentially threw right down the middle. On 3-2 Greene watched a curveball bounce for ball four, loading the bases, and sending Ruben Niebla to the mound for a visit:

Spencer Torkelson came to bat with the bases loaded, and this is where Pivetta’s outing unraveled. Pivetta’s command issues had been on display and Torkelson appeared to be locking in on one part of the zone, un-tempted by the first two 4-seamers just off the outer edge of the plate. Pivetta’s third 4-seamer sailed above the zone, and on 3-0 he had probably his wildest miss of the game with a 4-seamer nowhere near the zone walking in a run:

It’s interesting to look at the change in pitch velocity and spin during this at bat. To this point in the game Pivetta hadn’t thrown a single 4-seamer in the zone, and the velocity had been 94-95 MPH and ~2450 RPM. He started Torkelson with three straight 4-seamers under 94 MPH with noticeably less spin:

It’s possible he was trying to find his release point, aiming his pitches a little and moving away from max effort in the process. When the count reached 3-0, he went back to a max effort delivery and missed very high, a hallmark of overthrowing and failing to get on top of the ball. Impossible to say for sure.

With the bases still loaded and the Tigers leading 1-0, future rookie of the year Kevin McGonigle came up for his first major league at bat. Pitchers almost invariably follow up a four pitch walk with a concerted effort to throw a strike, and indeed Pivetta threw a cutter on the inner half of the zone that McGonigle ambushed and looped into right field on the first major league pitch he ever saw:

This was the second cutter Pivetta had thrown, the first was a 92.5 MPH, 2470 RPM offering to Riley Greene. The pitch to McGonigle was a 91.2 MPH, 2356 RPM offering. Again, we can’t get inside Pivetta’s head, but it was only the 20th pitch of the game, typically not a significant enough workload for fatigue to be setting in. Small down ticks in velocity and spin can be a result of a pitcher aiming rather than delivering at true max effort. We can’t know, but it’s a more benign possibility than fatigue so early in an outing...

Dillon Dingler would bat with the Tigers up 3-0 and runners on second and third. Pivetta spun a sweeper that was not poorly located but Dingler still hit it off the end of the bat and through the left side of the infield to drive in another run:

Pivetta seemed to settle down a little at this point and located his 4-seamer and curveball well to Parker Meadows, but with velos and spin rates still noticeably lower than the start of the inning:

Pivetta’s pitch shapes are so elite that he doesn’t need to blow hitters away with velocity, even at the slower speed and lower spin rates he still achieved over 19 inches of iVB on both 4-seamers and located them perfectly to have the intended effect.

The final batter of the first inning was the notoriously free swinging Javy Baez who had a typical at bat in which he saw only one strike but swung six times including at a sweeper that ended up in the opposite batter’s box:

It’s hard to know if Pivetta was still struggling with control, or purposefully staying out of the strike zone against the league’s most notoriously un-selective hitter. Freddy Fermin saved a run on a very nice block of a sweeper in the dirt mid-at bat which might imply the former. It also looked like the one pitch Pivetta threw in the zone to Baez was actually a location miss:

Pivetta would give up a hard hit single in a scoreless 2nd inning, the first truly hard hit ball of the game.

Pivetta would run into some bad luck in the 3rd. Spencer Torkelson led off with a weakly hit single. A 79.6 MPH exit velocity flare to center field:

Future All-star Kevin McGonigle would follow for his second major league at bat and battled back from an 0-2 count to square up a 4-seamer at the top of the zone for a 105.9 MPH double off the right field wall:

Parker Meadows followed with another weak flare to center that found grass despite a 66.5 MPH exit velocity plating two more runs:

Pivetta would finish the 3rd but his day was done after 69 pitches with six earned runs allowed.

Pivetta didn’t give up a ton of hard contact on the day and certainly got unlucky in the sequencing of several weakly hit balls, but the command issues were very real. When he located his pitches he was effective. The Tigers weren’t really squaring him up. Four of the base hits that led to the scoring had weak exit velocities of 66.5 MPH, 70.4 MPH, 79.9 MPH, and 89.9 MPH. The two hard hits that led to scoring had EVs of 97 MPH and 105.9 MPH, the latter being the only truly sublime contact the Tigers made against him. But the walks in the first inning were untenable, and were the product of poor command rather than the hitters’ plate discipline. On the day Pivetta had only a 21.2% strike-zone percentage for his 4-seamer, very uncharacteristic after averaging 55.4% a season ago.

The best case scenario here is if Pivetta was struggling with early season nerves. Too amped up. Overthrowing initially, and not able to locate effectively. Still, the changes in his pitch characteristics as the game went on are something to watch given Pivetta’s delayed start in spring training and the nebulous comments regarding ‘regular arm fatigue’.

The game was essentially out of reach after the 3rd. Tarik Skubal hadn’t given up six runs in a start since 2023 and looked in mid-season form. The Padres hitters weren’t totally overmatched, but managed to scrape across only one run against Skubal. There were some interesting things to see on offense, starting with the lineup:

Facing the lefty Skubal it makes sense that Cronenworth was dropped to the bottom of the order and Miguel Andujar was given the start at DH, but it was a bit odd to see Gavin Sheets starting at first base instead of Nick Castellanos whose entire value proposition rests on his ability to hit lefties. It was also interesting to keep Merrill in the 4th spot against possibly the best lefty in the league.

Fernando Tatis Jr led off, after mostly hitting lower in the order in the pre-season. Though he would be retired on a check swing roller, there were some encouraging signs:

His first swing against Skubal didn’t quite connect, but it was the swing characteristics on his first hack that were encouraging:

This is the swing that Tatis should be taking nearly every time when there are less than two strikes, and depending on the game situation, often even with two strikes. The bat speed is elite, and the attack angle is a fly ball oriented bat path. The pull-side attack direction and Y intercept of 33.7 inches (how far out in front of the plate the bat intercepts the ball) are optimized for power hitting. Tatis is fresh off the WBC in which he showed he still has light-tower power:

His swing characteristics had been trending away from the pull side/flyball orientation each of the past three seasons:

The Padres new hitting coach Steven Souza Jr. has emphasized the importance of improving the Padres ability to hit for power, and the best way to achieve that is for hitters with raw power to orient their swing paths towards pulling the ball in the air. Tatis hasn’t connected yet, but taking swings like this is the right process to maximize his talents. Tatis would hit the ball hard each of his next three at bats, but come away with only one hit on a 107.2 MPH line drive single to center in the 8th:

Xander Bogaerts saw the ball very well all day, including hitting the ball hard in all three at bats against Skubal:

His 2-4 final line belies how well he hit all day:

Manny Machado had a relatively quiet day but reached base twice on a walk and single.

Jackson Merrill had a rough first game with three strikeouts, and it’s fair to question the wisdom of hitting Merrill in the crucial 4th spot against the league’s top lefty. But the team clearly feels Merrill will develop into a true every day heart of the order hitter.

The most impressive swings came from Ramon Laureano who looks healthy after a freak hand injury ended his season just before the playoffs in 2025:

Laureano hit 7th. And while having power at the bottom of an order is a great luxury, it is likely only a matter of time before Laureano is hitting nearer the heart of the order.

With Pivetta’s early exit and the game out of reach the bullpen was called on to pitch long relief. The most interesting performance came from Bradgley Rodriguez who was electric. Rodriguez attacked right handed hitters with his outstanding 4-seam fastball that reached 98 MPH with 18 inches of iVB, and sinker that sat at 97 MPH with 16 inches of arm-side break. But the most interesting pitch was his changeup which he deployed to the lefties he faced. The most impressive sequence came against the heart of the Tigers order including back-to-back three pitch strikeouts to Colt Keith and Riley Greene, finishing both off with consecutive changeups:

If Rodriguez can command his changeup he may be the rare right handed reliever who can reliably get lefties out, and that is an incredibly valuable player in the modern game. Rodriguez is only 22, and it’s not wise to draw conclusions yet given his limited body of work. But you really couldn’t ask for a more encouraging first showing.

Game 2

Michael King took the mound in game two facing off against another formidable Tigers lefty Framber Valdez. We wrote about King’s pitch shapes in spring training. Although his velocities were right in line with 2025, the movement on his pitches, especially the horizontal break, had been slightly behind his 2025 season averages, including in his final spring start just over a week ago. One possible explanation for the decreased movement could have been the different atmospherics in the desert confines of Peoria, and indeed in King’s first start at Petco the break on his pitches was much closer to what he’d shown in 2025:

The Sinker and Changeup made up the bulk of his arsenal as expected, and both had about 2 inches more horizontal break than at any point during spring training, right back in line with his 2025 movement profile. King was also effective with his 4-seam fastball, using it sparingly but getting a 66% whiff rate and hitting 95.4 MPH on the gun:

The only hard hit King gave up all night came from future MVP Kevin McGonigle who had finished his first big league game with four hits, and nearly went yard in his first at bat Friday night:

King finished the night with five innings pitched, six strikeouts, three walks, and a HBP giving up one unearned run. If King remains healthy it’s very likely he will pitch like a top of the rotation starter. There’s no indication he’s lost any of his stuff after the long layoff last season.

King would leave with a 1-0 lead after facing the first batter of the 6th inning, Gleyber Torres who drew a walk on a 3-2 pitch after a tough at bat.

Adrian Morejon came in to relieve King, making his first appearance of the season. And Morejon showed something new. In 2025 Morejon averaged 97.7 MPH on his sinker and 96.5 MPH on his 4-seam fastball. His first sinker of the night to Jahmai Jones was 99.5 MPH. His first 4-seamer was 99.4 MPH. And he would dial up the velocity from there. Morejon ended up throwing the 13 fastest pitches of the night. He reached a max of 101.1 MPH with his sinker and 99.8 MPH with his 4-seamer:

Morejon looked overpowering in his first matchup against Jahmai Jones, freezing him with a slider, getting a whiff on a sinker near the top of the zone, and inducing a flailing swing at a 2-strike slider that bounced right to Manny Machado for what appeared to be a double play ball:

Machado’s error put two on with no outs and the Tigers best hitter Riley Greene at the plate. Morejon’s first pitch was an 89.2 MPH 2902 RPM slider that Greene bounced back to the mound for a 1-6-3 double play:

With a runner on third the 1-0 lead was intact and Spencer Torkelson was up. In a six pitch at bat Morejon threw nothing but heat, with every pitch over 99 MPH, including two over 100 MPH. But the Tigers uncanny good fortune continued. On the final pitch of the at bat Morejon threw an 80 grade sinker with a Michael King-like 18 inches of horizontal break that Torkelson hit weakly off the end of the bat, only an 82.2 MPH exit velocity. But it found grass just in front of Ramon Laureano in left and the game was tied:

The inning would come to a close when Luis Campusano threw out Torkelson trying to steal second. Campusano’s throw was truly excellent, to the first base side of the bag which is the shortest path for the ball to travel allowing for the tag to be applied sooner:

Impeccable.

Morejon would pitch the 7th and retire the side in order. The unearned run marred the outing somewhat, but Morejon’s performance was elite. No hitter looked comfortable.

In the bottom of the sixth with one out Jackson Merrill drew a tough walk off Framber Valdez in a six pitch at bat, and took second after an errant pickoff throw from the Tigers’ catcher Dingler. The Padres hitters were seeing Valdez for the third time and Miguel Andujar got off a good swing on a sinker and nearly hit it out to left field, but it was tracked down for the second out. Ramon Laureano, moved up to sixth in the order Friday, had been taking good swings all night but seemed to be really seeing Valdez well in his third at bat. He nearly doubled on a deep line drive to right field that fell just foul. He pulled the next pitch sharply foul down the third base line. After laying off a sinker up out of the zone, Laureano finally hit paydirt clubbing a double off the wall in right and giving the Padres a 2-1 lead:

Laureano had nearly homered off Valdez in his second at bat, a towering shot just hooking foul left of the Western Metal Supply building:

Laureano made great swing decisions in addition to punishing several balls both fair and foul the first two games of the season. There has been no sign of a fall off after a resurgent 2025.

The Padres would take the 2-1 lead into the 8th and Jeremiah Estrada was brought in to protect the lead. The inning played out eerily similar to the 1st inning of game 1. After striking out the first batter of the inning, Estrada completely lost command. He walked three straight hitters, missing badly both above and below the zone as he struggled to find his release point. The walks loaded the bases. The Tigers’ best non-McGonigle, Riley Greene, came up in a big moment. Estrada managed to jam Greene badly on a 4-seamer up and in, but the 57.3 MPH exit velocity squib trickled towards the empty part of the infield where no one could get to it in time:

The infield single tied the game and left the bases loaded.

To Estrada’s credit he found his poise and cut down Spencer Torkelson on four pitches with the bases still loaded to record the second out of the inning. The fourth pitch of the at bat was special, a 96.2 MPH 4-seam fastball with an unheard of 23 inches of iVB:

That was a laser beam. The pitch only dropped 7 inches on its way to home plate and had almost no horizontal break. An almost pure magnus spin heater that grazed the top of the strike zone. A perfect pitch.

This was Estrada’s worst outing of his Padres tenure, but it was entirely of his own doing. In the end he faced six hitters, struck out two, walked three, and gave up the squibbed infield single to Greene. And while his final pitch of the outing had elite shape, it’s notable that his fastball velocity averaged 96.2 MPH and topped out at 96.9 MPH after averaging 97.9 MPH last season. His slider and splitter velocities were also about 3 MPH below his 2025 averages:

It’s hard to know what to make of those numbers. Estrada struggled badly with control, and perhaps he took a little off his pitches just trying to be in the zone. Perhaps its just early in the season and he’s still building up. Regardless of stuff, though, no pitcher can survive throwing only 25% of their pitches for strikes. Estrada should be better than this going forward, but command and velocity are items to watch in his subsequent outings.

An interesting sequence followed Estrada’s departure with two outs and the bases loaded. Wandy Peralata was brought in to face future first ballot hall of famer Kevin McGonigle. Playing in his second game ever, McGonigle took the at bat like a 10 year veteran, fouling off six pitches and working a full count before finally breaking through:

The Tigers would push the lead to 5-2 and take the second game of the series.

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Game Theory

It’s worth lingering on the 8th inning for a little longer, because there was an important game theory consideration. The Padres elected not to use their bullpen unicorn, Mason Miller, at all during a very close game that the Padres were in position to win very late in the game. Craig Stammen would note that “We decided before the game that [multiple innings for Miller] was probably not an option.” This is a perfectly valid constraint to put on Miller’s usage early in the season. But it may have been more efficient to use Miller in the 8th even with the one inning constraint. Because after Jeremiah Estrada struck out the first batter then walked the next two, two things happened simultaneously:

• Estrada was eligible to be removed from the game having faced the three batter minimum, and

• The leverage index increased above the maximum possible leverage that a closer can face to start the 9th inning

The leverage index quantifies the swing in win probability based on the outcome of the current situation compared to the average swing across all situations. The leverage index with one out in the top of the 8th inning and runners on first and second with the home team leading by one run is 4.54, extremely high:

For comparison the highest leverage a closer starting the top of the 9th inning in a save situation can face is 2.16, still high but significantly lower leverage than the 8th inning situation above:

In holding Mason Miller back at that moment, the Padres made a quiet but consequential guarantee: If Miller pitched at all, he would be entering a lower-leverage environment than the one currently unfolding.

From a decision-theoretic perspective, bullpen usage is an allocation problem under uncertainty. Each pitcher represents a different distribution of outcomes, the best arm (closer) having the tightest distribution and highest probability of preserving win expectancy in volatile (high leverage) game states.

If the goal is to maximize the chance of winning, the objective should not be to “save” the best pitcher for a pre-determined inning. The objective should be to allocate the highest-skill resource to the highest-leverage node in the game tree.

At the moment Estrada issued the second walk, that node had arrived.

The Padres instead chose a pre-conceived strategy: reserve Miller for a future state (the 9th) that by definition carries a capped leverage ceiling (2.16). In doing so, they passed on a present state whose leverage had already exceeded that ceiling and hence they passed on an opportunity to harvest more win probability.

It’s also fair to say that the situational leverage was asymmetric:

• The downside of the current situation in the 8th (allowing the Tigers to tie or take the lead) is immediate

• The upside of waiting to deploy Miller in the 9th inning is contingent and may never materialize (which it didn’t)

Another way to say this is that the Padres were ironically reallocating Miller to a lower expected impact role, while leaving a higher-consequence moment to a lesser reliever.

This is more complicated of course because convention in baseball is extremely powerful, and unconventional decisions risk a manager getting pilloried by fans and press if the move doesn’t work out, since deviations from well established convention intuitively feel like strategic errors. It was also more difficult practically given the pace of the modern game with the pitch clock, limited mound visits, and a reported clamping down on "pitch com malfunctions”. The team may simply not have had the time to warm up Miller unless he started to warm up early in the eighth, and that may not be something the team wants to do. Still, it’s worth considering whether to have an override condition for pregame decisions if the opportunity for a crucial or unexpected win arises and the leverage of the situation implies a change in strategy.

These are certainly considerations on the margin, and that may seem like irrelevant minutiae, decision points that might only nudge the team’s win probability a few percentage points one way or the other. But when you look at the actual margins that separate teams at the end of the season, you see how slim these margins actually are. Here are the number of games, and the difference in winning percentage, that the Padres either made or missed the playoffs by for the past five seasons:

If a team can cobble together enough good decisions to tilt their odds to win by even 1-2%, that’s a potentially very meaningful difference in total wins across the entire 162 game season. If ever they have an opportunity to decide to pursue a strategy that increases their odds to win a game by even 5%, that is enormous across the span of 162 games.

This will inevitably sound like Monday morning quarterbacking, but the point is actually the exact opposite of exercising hindsight: this type of stochastic dynamic game optimization can be made prospectively. The game theory offers a clean mathematical rule that will lead to more wins over the long term:

If choosing between deploying a closer in the 9th inning vs the 8th inning, if the leverage in the 8th inning exceeds the maximum possible leverage of the start of the 9th inning, deploy the closer now.

This holds up even if the closer is on a one inning limit.

There is small likelihood this type of strategy will be pursued by the 2026 Padres. But it’s a decision point they control.

The Padres look to have a very deep bullpen, especially with Jason Adam making a minor league rehab start this week and his pitch shapes and velocity looking healthy:

Perhaps there was no opportunity to truly intervene in the unravelling of the 8th inning in game two Friday night. But there will undoubtedly be similar decision points, similar leverage swings, across many games this season. A deep enough bullpen can afford to have arms warming up, ready to quickly pivot if there are unexpected leverage swings. And pouncing on every opportunity to harvest slivers of win probability through optimized decision making is found money. Something the Padres could really use more of.

The first two games gave a good look at the top of the Padres rotation, and their lineup against lefty starters. Despite the two tough losses, baseball’s back in full swing, and this season looks as fascinating as the last.

We’ll cover the game three revelations, and more ABS game theory in Part 2.

Victor and Shildty had agreed to caddy for the Padres players who’d assembled a nine-man scramble to support a good cause that day.

“Fernando, Luis, Manny, you have the honor of opening the tournament.” Shildty belted.

Crone and Jackson, hearing the names at the top of the scramble headed to the range to get a few swings in before their round started.

“Hey Dylan, want to go to the driving range with us?” Crone asked

“Um, ya, but can I borrow your driver? I, uh, must’ve forgot my clubs.” Dylan answered, quietly slipping a frisbee back into his backpack.

“Hey Michael, you wanna join us?” Jackson asked. Michael yawned “I just flew in from New York last night, I’m gonna take a nap before the horn sounds.” Michael wandered off towards the bushes on the right side of the fairway.

Fernando stepped into the tee box with a driver in his hands, loose and dangerous, ready to launch a ball 300 yards into the bright afternoon sky.

Victor leaned close and whispered, “You don’t want the driver. You wanna hit it on a line. You need a line drive.”

He handed Fernando a baseball bat.

Fernando looked at the bat, then at the fairway, then back at Victor, and shrugged. As he was about to begin his back swing, Victor whispered:

“And you wanna stay inside the golf ball. Let the ball travel.”

Fernando stared at the stationary ball for a moment.

Victor nodded. “Good things happen when we stay inside the ball.”

Fernando pulled the bat back and swung. The ball left in a screaming line drive toward the right side of the fairway, clearing the rough and disappearing into the bushes beyond.

There was a loud yelp.

Branches shook. A dazed Michael wandered out holding his scapular nerve.

Luis came next. He took a one‑stroke penalty drop and set the ball back on the edge of the rough. The hole was still out of range, far off in the distance.

Shildty walked up with the bag of clubs, leaned toward Luis and whispered, “You want the putter, cuz?”

Luis smiled. He took the putter and lined up his shot. He stared at the ball, still as a waxen figurine. After several minutes the officials finally called a one stroke penalty, and Luis reanimated, and putted the ball from the rough onto the fairway, five yards ahead.

Shildty beamed.

Manny stepped in next and swung as hard as he could. He incurred stroke penalties on his first two whiffs, but on the third swing he crushed the ball 400 yards into the woods.

Yuli and Connor were sent after it. They pushed into the trees, calling back for awhile, but then the woods grew quiet.

“We might be lost Yuli.” Connor murmured.

Yuli nodded and handed Connor some tasty-looking berries from a nearby bush. They ate the berries and slipped into a cold sleep.

Ramon went in after them and found the missing ball sitting in the nest of a bellicose woodpecker. As he reached for it the bird pecked him in the scaphoid bone, ending his round.

Randy climbed the tree, hung upside down by one ankle, and hit a 7‑iron out of the nest that landed just on the edge of the fairway.

Crone followed with what looked, for one elegant second, like the prettiest swing of the tournament. But as he struck the ball everyone realized he was holding a right‑handed club. The ball dribbled weakly down the fairway.

It was Jackson’s spot in the scramble and he could finally see the pin in the distance. He had taken 300 practice swings on the driving range. He was here for it.

He started his backswing for the winning shot. But the club slipped from his badly blistered hands and flew out of his grip, striking Jason in the quad.

Jason collapsed onto the grass, writhing.

Freddy stepped in. He rolled a clever putt up the fairway to within a few yards of the green.

Now Xander looked around and realized he was somehow in position to salvage the score before the 10 stroke maximum automatically disqualified the team. It wouldn’t be easy, but it wasn’t out of reach.

He lined up his shot and began his swing.

Just then a baby bear wandered out of the woods.

The officials were utterly taken with the bear. They called timeout just as Xander struck the ball.

Xander’s shot landed soft and beautiful and settled within a few feet of the pin, setting up a putt that could save the team from disqualification. But the officials called Xander out for violating the timeout and endangering the baby bear. Xander tried to protest but was denied any possibility of review. Jose shouted at the officials and was banned from the after-party, and the tournament ended abruptly.

Craig awoke in a cold sweat. His heart thudding and the smell of cut grass still in his nose.

Then the world sorted itself out.

The tournament horn had not yet sounded. Victor and Shildty weren’t caddying, he was. And he was late!

He rushed to the country club and when he arrived he saw Michael giving Nick a high five. “His scapular nerve looks fine!”

Fernando was only just walking to the tee box.

Craig hurried across the grass and met Fernando at the tee.

Did all that stuff really happen? Craig thought to himself as he pressed a driver firmly into Fernando’s hands.

Doesn’t matter now.

“Let it rip, Nando” he said.

• The 2026 Padres appear built to perform well across a short playoff series, but

• They may be poorly suited to survive the 162 game regular season gauntlet

The Padres lineup, top end starting pitching, and bullpen stack up well with any team in the league. But survival through to the playoffs depends heavily on how they fare across 30+ trips through the starting rotation. And a team without a credible fourth and fifth starter is very unlikely to win enough games to survive no matter how good the best version of itself might be.

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Final Roster

As Jeff Sanders reported, the start of the Padres will include a significant amount of talent on the IL.

Right-handers Jason Adam (left quad), Griffin Canning (left Achilles), Bryan Hoeing (elbow), Joe Musgrove (elbow) and Matt Waldron (hemorrhoid surgery) will begin the season on the 15-day injured list, as will left-hander Yuki Matsui (left groin). Infielders Sung-Mun Song and Will Wagner, both nursing right oblique strains, will open the season on the 10-day injured list.

The Padres starting lineup is likely to look something like this:

That is a lineup with just enough offensive firepower and defensive chops to be competitive in a playoff race. Fernando Tatis Jr. and Jackson Merrill both have the potential to exceed their projections, and either doing so would meaningfully increase the chances that the Padres offense is good on the whole.

The trio of Gavin Sheets, Ramon Laureano, and Miguel Andujar are all projected by Fangraphs to regress from their 2025 performances, but all project to still be above average offensive contributors even if the regression is realized. Miguel Andujar is a former runner up for rookie of the year in 2018 when he hit 27 home runs with an .855 OPS for the New York Yankees. He’s never replicated his rookie year success, but he’s been a serviceable hitter against favorable platoon matchups his whole career. Ramon Laureano is harder to forecast as his 2025 breakout was a bit unexpected, and his season ended on a bizarre right hand fracture. Gavin Sheets appears to be the most likely of the trio to sustain his breakout performance from 2025 given his age and the lost development time he suffered with the moribund White Sox early in his career.

The bench is unusually high variance as well:

It appears Luis Campusano will be given a real chance to accrue playing time in 2026. He’s done everything a player can do at the AAA level. He’s even had briefs stints of success at the major league level. But he’s no longer a young prospect. It’s time to produce, or move on.

The team appears committed to finding out if Nick Castellanos can be a situationally effective hitter. Castellanos’ falloff in 2025 was multifactorial, but from a purely statistical standpoint, it was his sudden ineffectiveness against left handed pitching that accounts for the drop in production compared to years past:

He really didn’t fare much better against RHP in 2024, but maintained outstanding production against LHP boosting his overall productivity:

In fact his entire career has been built on feasting on left handed pitching:

If he can still be effective as a platoon bat, he’ll provide value. If he’s not able to hit LHP his career is over. It would be wise for the Padres to figure this out early in the season, because Castellanos does not provide credible defensive or baserunning value.

Ty France and Bryce Johnson provide legitimate multi-positional defensive depth and can take non-embarrassing major league at bats.

The lineup appears more likely to be good, than not, but with more variance than seasons past. On paper it’s a strength.

The Bullpen

Jason Adam, Griffin Canning, Matt Waldron, and Joe Musgrove will start the year on the IL. And while starting pitching is clearly the area of highest concern for the team, it’s Adam’s absence, and eventual return, that might impact the team’s late season fortunes the most.

Adam threw 19 pitches in spring training across two scoreless innings, but he’s rehabbing from a ruptured quad, and his stuff is not back to what it was in his stellar 2025. But despite his absence the Padres bullpen still looks strong:

A lot will hinge on whether David Morgan and Bradgley Rodriguez can harness their outstanding arm talent and become true, reliable, setup arms. Both can be overpowering at times. But neither has the pedigree of sustained success at the major league level in high leverage duty.

The 2025 playoffs were yet another data point demonstrating the outsized importance of dominant relief pitching, especially in playing platoon matchups to navigate opposing teams’ best hitters. Adrian Morejon established himself as one of the premier left handed relievers in the league last season, but the Padres have only Kyle Hart and Wandy Peralta behind him. It is here that Adam’s absence will be felt the most as Adam is the rare dominant right handed reliever who is just as effective against left handed hitters (more so, even):

Adam’s absence will create space for the Padres to get extended looks at what they have in Morgan and Rodriguez, and should Adam regain his 2025 form when fully healthy it’s not a stretch to think the 2026 Padres bullpen could be the most dominant they’ve ever had.

It’s also easy to imagine how the bullpen might sputter. If Morgan and Rodriguez cannot thrive in higher leverage roles, and if Adam’s athleticism is impaired longer term, the team will end up struggling to lock down wins. Especially given the starting pitching outlook.

Starting Pitching

The starting pitching is far and away the biggest question mark for the 2026 outlook. Every pitcher in the rotation has various sources of concern.

Nick Pivetta was a revelation in 2025, finishing 6th in Cy Young voting while setting a career high in innings pitched across 31 starts. His 2026 spring training included a delayed start for which he gave this ominous explanation:

I would just say just regular arm fatigue

Still, he pitched five shutout innings in his final outing March 20th and his pitch velocities and shapes were nearly identical to his 2025 campaign.

The hope is that Pivetta’s delayed start and nebulous comment were truly just anodyne pre-season workload management. It’s hard to be a Padres fan and not get a jump scare at any mention of ‘arm fatigue’ from a front end starter. But if you’re looking for evidence that Pivetta is ok, you couldn’t hope for much better than that of the underlying pitch metrics from his final preseason start.

Michael King starts the season as the unquestioned number two starter in the rotation. He made five starts this spring, and his pitch velocities are right in line with what he showed when healthy in 2025:

But his pitch shapes, even in his final start on March 19th, remain off from what he demonstrated in 2025. Especially the all important horizontal break on his sinker and changeup:

The front door sinker with its wildly deceptive horizontal break is the pitch that made Michael King famous:

Courtesy: @PitchingNinja

He was still able to be effective in spring training when his location was impeccable:

But he gave up nine home runs in his five starts, six of which came off of the sinker or changeup. It’s very early and perhaps he’s struggling to find command, especially of the notoriously difficult to locate changeup. But it’s hard to watch pitches like these and wonder if perhaps it’s just not moving the way he’s used to:

This last changeup had only 15 inches of horizontal break, and ended up right over the heart of the plate. There’s probably some location miss that factored in, but his 2025 offerings had 4.3 inches of additional arm-side run, and that was undoubtedly a factor.

You can see why just a few inches less arm-side run on the sinker may be a problem as well:

This was a good piece of hitting on a sinker that ran in off the plate to Christian Moore. But you can see on Baseball Savant’s 3D pitch reconstruction that if the sinker had even two more inches to the arm-side, as it did consistently during King’s 2025, Moore would almost certainly not have been able to barrel it up:

Spring training is held in the arid Sonoran desert, and the atmospherics will have some explanatory power for differences in pitch shapes. But this will be something to watch as King returns to Petco, and seeks to return to form.

The most intriguing member of the starting rotation in 2026 is its de facto number three starter Randy Vasquez. That’s because he sustained a change throughout spring training that he first showed at the end of 2025. Through August of last season Strandy was consistently throwing a low-90’s fastball with his 4-seamer and sinker both averaging 93 MPH, and only using each pitch ~20% of the time:

Being unable, or unwilling, to establish a fastball increases the level of difficulty in getting hitters out with off-speed and breaking pitches.

But late last year something started to change. Vasquez was optioned to AAA on August 16th, and when he returned September 6th, he looked like a different pitcher, at least by the pitch metrics. From his return to the Padres September 6th, and through the final five appearances of the season, Vasquez showed legitimate major league fastball velocity with a significant uptick in usage:

In about three weeks he added two MPH to his heater.

In his final appearance of the season September 28th his average fastball velocity was ~97 MPH, a ~4 MPH bump, and he upped his fastball usage to 68%:

At the time this was just something of a late season oddity. But his performance in spring training showed that the change was durable:

Through five starts in spring training Randy Vasquez maintained an average 4-seam and sinker velocity above 95.4 MPH, more than a 2 MPH increase from his averages before his fateful mid-season tune-up in AAA last year. It’s hard to think of a similar mid-season performance improvement.

Perhaps more than any pitcher we’ve ever analyzed, Vasquez’ success has been difficult to understand. His outcomes have exceeded what models predicted based on his underlying stuff throughout his career. Some of that was attributed to his large pitch mix that keeps hitters guessing. But voices in the organization have always highlighted that he’s a fierce competitor. Not prone to lapses in concentration, always fielding his position aggressively, and never giving in to the pressures of high leverage moments. Finding ways to be successful that just aren’t inputs to quantitative models. These latter points are non-falsifiable statements. Impossible to verify. But there are clues that suggest something like that is part of his makeup. In spring training Vasquez dialed up the average velocity on his 4-seamer to 96 MPH in two-strike counts:

He topped 96.5 MPH nine different times in two strike counts. He wasn’t just using the fastball to set up his offspeed/breaking pitches:

That’s just heat.

Randy Vasquez still isn’t a ‘flame thrower’, but it’s much easier to become a number three starter with major league fastball. And nothing he did this spring suggested his late 2025 velocity improvements were a flash in the pan.

Vasquez is being counted on to pitch as a number three starter for a team with playoff aspirations. A year ago that would’ve seemed laughable. It’s now at least plausible.

Questions Unanswered

It’s fair to say that we’ve left the very biggest question marks on the team unexplored: who will take hold of the fourth and fifth spots in the rotation? This is undoubtedly the team’s most glaring weakness as the season starts. But the thing is, that will hardly matter if the Padres top three starters aren’t up to the task that’s been handed to them. The Padres will pitch all three of Pivetta, King, and Vasquez in the opening series that starts today.

The long winter is over.

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Last Call?

In the final game of the Padres 2025 postseason, they entered the 9th inning down by three runs against the Cubs. Although Cubs reliever Brad Keller had labored through a 20 pitch 8th inning, their bullpen had already burned five arms earlier in the game, and Keller was asked to stretch for another inning to close out the series.

Jackson Merrill led off, and with the count 1-1, catcher Carson Kelly called for a changeup low and away:

But Keller, running on fumes, missed catastrophically with location, leaving the changeup over the inner half of the plate:

Merrill didn’t miss:

A bullpen with options might have treated this as a sentinel event and pulled Keller before further calamity ensued. But every arm the Cubs had was overtaxed, and Keller was asked to soldier on.

Xander Bogaerts was up next with no outs and the tying run on deck. Keller ran the count full, throwing three uncompetitive pitches with two strikes just catching the edge of the plate:

The sliding doors moment came on 3-2, with Keller still struggling badly with control, a pitch roughly a baseball’s width below the zone was called strike three. Perhaps the last call to ever so meaningfully impact a 9th inning at bat in an elimination game without the possibility of a challenge:

This at-bat was dissected immediately through the lens of the forthcoming ABS system. Some suggested the broadcast strike zone box was misleading. But a definitive evaluation showed that indeed the 2026 ABS system would have overturned this call:

Instead of a runner on first with no outs, the Padres had one out and the bases empty. Keller then fully unraveled, hitting Ryan O’Hearn and Bryce Johnson after very uncompetitive pitches out of the zone:

Keller’s meltdown forced the Cubs’ hand and they brought in a gassed Andrew Kittredge who had just enough left to induce a grounder from Jake Cronenworth, out by inches at first, and a hard-hit fly ball from Freddy Fermin that died in the windy Chicago night to end the Padres season.

Sage observers will correctly note that the missed call to Bogaerts can’t be presumed to have made the difference in the game. A correctly called ball does not guarantee two HBPs and a bases-loaded, no outs situation for Cronenworth. That’s a timeline we’ll never see. But we don’t have to know how these particular events would have unfolded to estimate the impact such a call has on win probability generally.

Bogaerts’ called strike created a base/out state of one out and bases empty. In the 9th inning, down by two runs, teams only have a win probability of 2.5% and a run expectancy for the inning of 0.26 runs.

But a correct call would have left a runner on first with no outs, a base/out state that increases the trailing team’s chance to come back to win to 12.1% with a run expectancy of 0.87 runs:

The point here isn’t to air a grievance. The Padres’ season didn’t come down to a bad call (or at least we can’t know that it did). The point is how profoundly impactful a single missed call can be. Here is the net result of the strike call made in the 2025 true timeline, and that of the 2026 hypothetical in which ABS correctly overturns the missed call:

The single missed call subtracted nearly 10% win probability. Projected across 162 games, that is a difference of 16 wins. It changed the run expectancy by 0.61 runs. That’s almost 100 runs across an entire season.

Of course, Bogaerts’ at-bat came in particularly high leverage, and not every game will have a pivotal moment like that.

But some will.

And in 2026 teams will get two of these challenges per game. Plus they retain each challenge that is successful…

The ABS challenge system isn’t just a measure to improve the integrity of ball/strike calls, it’s a strategic asset teams need to be thinking about very seriously. It’s impactful enough that it will swing a few games a year for every team. The best organizations will covet these challenges as a source of competitive differentiation. And they will identify that the addition of ABS has added a new skill to evaluate.

Skill Trees

Statcast has an ABS dashboard, and interestingly the El Paso Chihuahuas’ hitters led the minors in 2025 in successful ABS challenges, avoiding 21 strikeouts and earning 16 walks for their efforts across 185 challenges. It’s hard to know if this implies an organizational emphasis. But it’s unquestionably a new skill for the modern major leaguer.

There are two skill trees teams must consider:

• Strike-zone acuity: The skill of the batter/catcher/pitcher1 in estimating if a pitch caught the strike zone, and

• Situational leverage awareness: Understanding when the expected value of a challenge justifies the attempt

The first point is intuitive, the league will learn which players demonstrate true strike-zone acuity. The second point is less intuitive, but likely more impactful. The first week of spring training provided a very good look at what the Padres brass should be focused on.

Close Calls

Luis Campusano made the first ABS challenge for the 2026 Padres on the first day of Spring Training:

This was a strike by perhaps a millimeter:

It’s hard to believe that this was an extremely high confidence challenge. Maybe it was. More importantly, though, even if Campusano believed strongly in the challenge, it was clearly a far less impactful challenge than the hypothetical Xander Bogaerts example.

Campusano’s challenge came in the bottom of the 2nd in a 0-0 game with two outs and a runner on first, with the count 1-0 after the missed call. Campusano’s successful challenge shifted the count to 0-1 with no change in the base/out state. Here is the impact this challenge had on the Padres win probability and run expectancy allowed:

Regardless of Campusano’s confidence in his challenge, the maximum impact it would have on the team’s win probability is only 1.8%, and less than a tenth of a run saved. This is an important strategic implication. The expected value of a challenge changes drastically depending on game context. This isn’t to say Campusano’s challenge was a bad one; it’s Spring Training, the stakes are low and experiential knowledge is valuable. But was it a game theory optimal use of an ABS challenge? We can approach that question using expected value.

High Confidence, Low Value

There’s gory math in the footnotes2 for the sickos, but we’ll use a very simple expected value calculation for Campusano’s decision to challenge that illustrates the high confidence strategy. Say Campusano had a 75% confidence that the umpire had missed the call despite how close it was. Correctly overturning the missed call would yield the 1.8% increase in win probability to the Padres. The expected value of Campusano’s decision to challenge would be:

EV = (75%) * 1.8% = 1.35%

Before the ABS verdict is rendered Campusano should expect that his decision to challenge will increase the Padres win probability by 1.35%. That’s good. A nightly increase in win probability of 1.35% can accrue two extra wins across a season. But we can really start to learn the game theory optimal (GTO) ABS strategy by comparing Campusano’s decision to a nearly identical pitch challenge that arose later in the week.

Low Confidence, High Value

A challenge by Ty France during Wednesday’s Spring Training matchup against the Angels showed another angle of the GTO ABS strategy: There will be instances when it is strategically superior to challenge a call with low confidence in an overturn when there is high leverage on a close outcome.

With two outs in the bottom of the 6th the Padres were up 2-1 with the bases loaded, and France took a 1-2 pitch for a called strike three, ending the inning. But the pitch was close and France challenged:

This was another incredibly close challenge. It was ruled a ball by less than 0.1 inches:

Again, it’s hard to believe this was a high confidence challenge by France, the call was overturned by a sliver of daylight similar to Campusano’s challenge. But a key difference is that there was massive leverage on this call. In this instance the overturned call meant that instead of a rally killing, inning ending strikeout with zero runs scored, France got to see another pitch with the bases loaded. Here is the impact France’s challenge had on the Padres win probability and run expectancy:

The impact of the potential overturn in France’s at bat carried almost three times the swing in win probability (5.3% vs 1.8%), and ten times the swing in run expectancy (0.7 vs 0.07) as the potential overturn in Campusano’s challenge. On very similar close strike calls.

The implication here is that France could have far less confidence in an overturn, and still have higher expected value from his decision than Campusano. If France had been only 30% confident that the umpire had missed the call, but recognized the higher leverage of the situation, he could have intuited that he should still challenge:

EV = (30%) * 5.3% = 1.59%

For Campusano’s challenge to yield the same 1.59% expected value he would need to have 88% confidence in an overturn on an identically close pitch. It’s hard to imagine that the skill gap in strike-zone acuity between players will be this wide. More importantly, players’ true talent level at discerning missed ball/strike calls won’t be known for some time. And until it is more clearly understood, it’s highest yield for teams to focus on instilling situational heuristics. Campusano’s decision to challenge was acceptable if he had high confidence in the call being overturned, but France’s decision was close to a no-brainer, even low confidence in an overturn still carried similar expected value.

As it turned out, the Padres capitalized on France’s successful challenge and reaped a huge swing in win probability.

They ended the inning up 4-1 instead of 2-1, their win probability stretched to 91.7%, an 18.5% swing. But if you’ve followed so far you can understand why France’s decision was a good one even before it worked out so splendidly.

Skill Building

There is certainly skill building players can be doing right now. ABS will be customized to a player’s dimensions, and every hitter should be memorizing their height-based vertical bands. But it’s simply going to take time for repetitions to accrue and players’ true strike-zone acuity talent levels to emerge. No such time is required for the game theory to be analyzed. While it’s unrealistic to expect players to be doing Bayesian mathematics during a game, they don’t have to. Much like the NFL instills heuristics into its players on use of timeouts, when to automatically attempt a play on fourth down etc. Teams can be instilling ABS heuristics right now. Certain situations already can be inferred to be very low threshold for challenge (late in game, two strikes, two outs, bases loaded), and very high threshold to challenge (early in game, bases empty etc.). Getting very good at utilizing ABS challenges, very quickly, should be an imperative for a team whose hopes of competing rely heavily on the marginal decisions they make. Decisions they control.

Sliding Doors

In the bottom of the 9th inning in game seven of the World Series in Toronto, the Blue Jays and Dodgers were tied 4-4 with two on and one out. Yoshinobu Yamamoto was brought in to relieve Blake Snell, and hit Alejandro Kirk on the second pitch to load the bases. This started a sliding doors moment that will haunt Blue Jays fans the rest of their lives. The Dodgers made two defensive changes immediately. They moved the infield in, and they substituted Tommy Edman for Andy Pages in center field. Andy Pages was in the midst of having the worst offensive performance of any hitter with at least 50 at bats in the postseason in baseball history (a record he would later secure). But the Dodgers didn’t hesitate to bring in the stronger outfield arm with extreme fly ball hitter Daulton Varsho coming to the plate. Varsho had the second highest fly ball rate in baseball behind Cal Raleigh this season. A sacrifice fly would win the game. The game context meant the incremental upgrade in arm strength Pages offered had to be elevated above any other consideration.

For the Blue Jays scoring the runner from third meant winning the World Series. With only one out the run could score without needing a hit; either a fly ball or a ground ball could be good enough. Isaiah Kiner-Falefa (IKF) was on third having pinch run for the hobbled Bo Bichette earlier in the inning. And here, the Blue Jays elevated something above maximizing their chances at winning:

IKF took an extremely conservative lead off of third.

Runners are sometimes told to stray no further from the bag than the third baseman, but you can see that IKF is much closer to third than Max Muncy. Statcast showed IKF was only 7.8 feet from third base while Muncy was 15.2 feet from the bag.

As the pitch to Varsho was delivered IKF took an even more conservative secondary lead, moving only one foot closer to home. He was 8.9 feet off third as the pitch was hit into play:

It mattered:

Miguel Rojas stumbled backward as he fielded the ball and could get nothing on the throw. Will Smith stretched to try to meet the slow throw, and in the process his foot momentarily came off the plate:

Had Smith made a clean catch IKF would have been out by ~four feet. But Smith’s lunge and momentary disengagement with the plate meant that IKF was ultimately out by a much slimmer margin:

This is the exact moment Smith’s cleat re-engages home plate:

It was devastatingly clear on replay that IKF taking a slightly more reasonable lead would have won the game, and the World Series, for the Blue Jays.

If IKF had touched home plate when Smith’s cleat was still disengaged the Blue Jays would be champions:

In the end the margin was inches.

IKF told reporters after the game he’d been coached to take a very conservative lead.

They told us to stay close to the base. They don’t want us to get doubled off in that situation with a hard line drive.

Many current and former players voiced the opinion that IKF’s extremely conservative lead was the correct play:

Merrifield and Turner, and the other major leaguers that chimed in are correct that IKF’s lead was playing it by the book. Baseball is an orthodoxy with sacred wisdom passed down generation after generation, and this is exactly what coaches say to do in this situation. The number one rule as a runner on base with the bases loaded and less than two outs is you cannot get doubled up on a line drive. The problem with this rule is that it’s wrong. The number one rule of every play of every game is to maximize the expected value of your decisions.

In little league or high school you don’t have the tools to do better than heuristics, rules of thumb that describe the direction of a shift in strategy but don’t include the fine tuning that separates playing it by the book from truly playing to win.

In the major leagues you have those tools. One team in game seven was using them to get every advantage possible. When Alejandro Kirk’s hit-by-pitch was confirmed on replay loading the bases, the substitution of Pages was instantaneous. The Dodgers understood the situation, and the hitter at the plate. Look at the positioning of the Dodgers defense:

Here is the batted ball profile for line drives and ground balls for Varsho in 2025:

The Dodgers infielders are aligned perfectly with Varsho’s tendencies. He almost never hits grounders or line drives to the left side. In fact he hasn’t lined out to the third baseman all year. The defenders are aligned to maximize the expected value of their positioning. This is something the Dodgers obsess over. They don’t know what the next play is going to be, but they know which plays are most likely. First they positioned the infield by the book; they moved the infielders in. But then they fine tuned the alignment to the specific hitter at the plate. They played to win.

The Blue Jays and IKF didn’t. They played to avoid risk.

Tom Tango mapped every instance since 2023 of a runner on third base with the bases loaded in a tie game in the 8th inning or later. The four pitches while IKF was on third are mapped in red:

His lead was roughly two feet less than the average runner with a similarly positioned third baseman, a strategy that could only be explained by extreme risk aversion. But the wrong kind of risk aversion. Perhaps chastened by the way game six had ended, with Addison Barger being doubled off second after making an aggressive baserunning play, the Blue Jays let the pendulum swing to the opposite extreme. They elevated avoiding the risk of a very unlikely play above maximizing their chances to win. They chose a path with lower expected value. And it was the wrong decision even before it ended up mattering.

The Default State

The Dodgers pitched Shohei Ohtani, Tyler Glasnow, Blake Snell, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto in game seven. Four perennial Cy Young candidates. They are the only team in baseball that can do that. The Dodgers have a monopoly on acquiring the best players. If they want to sign Kyle Tucker and Kyle Schwarber this offseason they will. They can’t be beaten through talent acquisition. This is the default state of the league.

But baseball is not a deterministic sport. The NBA stood almost no chance when the 2016-17 Warriors added the best player in the league to a roster that went 73-9 the year before, but the Blue Jays team with two of its three best hitters playing injured just took the Dodgers to seven games, and smarter decision making would have seen them crowned champions. That’s the nature of baseball. The margin between the best teams in the league is slimmer. Surmountable.

A team can monopolize any single player, and hoard as much talent as their roster and IL spots can hold. But they can’t control the decisions their opponents make. They can only hope teams continue to blunder on the margins as the Blue Jays did when it mattered most.

Not Alone

There is no credible case to be made that the 2025 Padres maximized the expected value of the on-field decisions they made. 2025 will always be remembered as the season bunts were fetishized and batting titles were prized above winning. The Blue Jays proved they’re not alone in elevating priorities above winning. The two teams strayed from the path in very different ways. The Padres insisting on suboptimal lineup construction and old-timey offensive strategies was a willful act. The Blue Jays blunder was more insidious. They, and the many players rushing to defend IKF’s risk aversion, believed that their calculus was correct. They overlooked the fact that following philosophical rules of thumb is the opposite of calculation. In 2025 the availability of more sophisticated tools requires a different approach to winning. Fine tuning strategy beyond heuristics. Using contextual information in real time to sop up the inches that decide games. And abandoning ancient bromides.

In the end what separated the champions from the contenders wasn’t just the gap in talent, for in the season’s most critical moment that gap had been closed. But a breech remained in the understanding of expected value. Understanding the modern game.

The Default State will still be in place in 2026. The question is not whether the 2026 Dodgers will continue to outspend every other team in the league. The question is whether they will continue to out-think them. And in this matter every team in the league controls its own fate.

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That changes in the postseason. Suddenly, the rationing is over. And though 162 games seems like enough to have tested every permutation, a bizarre truth stands out about the 2025 Padres: not once did they field their best possible version. Until now.

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The Offense

A shocking amount of the 2025 season was spent with the offense out of sync. Jackson Merrill suffered three separate IL stints, Xander Bogaerts missed a month with a fracture, Jake Cronenworth missed nearly 30 games. Fernando Tatis Jr, Luis Arraez, and Manny Machado all suffered through the worst slumps of their careers. Gavin Sheets emerged as the season went on, but entered as an unproven entity, only earning trust as an everyday player in the waning months. The best version of the Padres undoubtedly includes the presence of each member of this cohort. But they only took the field together a total of 72 games. Far less than half the season. The team fared a decent 40-32 when they all played:

But in many of these games the lineup included Martin Maldonado, Yuli Gurriel, Oscar Gonzalez, Trenton Brooks, Tyler Wade, Jayson Heyward and other wayward players who will be spectators in October.

Ryan O’Hearn and Freddy Fermin were late additions and will assume a spot in the best version of the lineup in the playoffs. But there were only four games all season in which all nine of the best hitters took the field together:

This is not much to go by. But you don’t need a large sample to understand that O’Hearn and Fermin are superior hitters to those that they replaced. And across the final weeks of the season Jackson Merrill, Fernando Tatis Jr, and Xander Bogaerts showed no signs of any lingering effects of the injuries that marred earlier parts of their seasons.

Bogaerts’ final home run of the regular season Saturday was not a typical home run.

This ball had a 110.1 MPH exit velocity and a 31 degree launch angle. This was the first time he’s hit a flyball >110 mph with >30 LA since 2022. Not many hitters ever hit a ball that well. Fresh off the IL there were questions about how his swing might be affected mechanically by lingering pain from the fracture in his front/plant foot. It’s impossible to hit a ball that well with impaired mechanics. He’ll be wearing a guard over his left foot, but he put any questions about his mechanics to rest with one swing.

Jackson Merrill had a torrid start to the season with a 1.046 OPS in March/April before a hamstring injury caused him to miss a full month of games, followed by the cascading IL stints for a concussion and ankle injury which kept the offense from ever firing on all cylinders.

John Gennaro published a fascinating look at Merrill’s injury-plagued season on Section 1904 (available to subscribers only, but worth every penny) in which he noted that in games when Merrill was not either playing with an injury that would soon land him on the IL, or essentially playing rehab games at the major league level when coming off the IL, he looked very much like his 2024 self:

Merrill has finally found a prolonged stretch of good health. And it’s probably not coincidence that across the final month of the season he put up a .946 OPS with a slash line of .275/.320/.626, and a return of the all-fields power he showed during his precocious rookie campaign:

Gennaro published an equally interesting look at the season of Fernando Tatis Jr., asking Is 2025 the best season of Tatis’ career? (no subscription required). Despite the offensive struggles Tatis has weathered, Gennaro notes Tatis has had a marvelous season in several ways:

The article was published September 15th, but the final two weeks of the season offered an interesting coda to Gennaro’s query. The only thing keeping 2025 from clearly being Tatis’ best season was the decreased power production that marked much of the season. In late August Eno Sarris and Dennis Lin had traced some of Tatis’ power outage to his swing path, specifically that he had spent the season allowing pitches to travel further before making contact than in years past. Statcast tracks this tendency with the stat Y-Intercept.

The Y-intercept is how far out in front of the plate the point of contact with a pitch is. This is important for power hitting because bat speed increases as the bat head travels through the swing path, and becomes more oriented for pull and loft the further out front the point of contact is. Making contact out in front of the plate is unquestionably the best approach for hitting home runs, with the ideal Y-intercept being close to 36 inches. Here is the average swing path Tatis had from opening day until Gennaro’s article was published:

Tatis had been letting the ball travel further than the average hitter all season, and had a lower attack angle and opposite field attack direction as a result. And it’s fascinating to look at the changes in his swing path after the article making the case he was having the best season of his career even without the power from previous seasons:

The dramatic changes in swing path across the final two weeks were accompanied by a vintage Tatis slash line of .324/.378/.588 with three home runs.

An at-bat from the final series of the season, on the last night for the Padres City Connect jerseys, is worth highlighting. Because the swings Tatis took were a clear departure from those that were the focus of Sarris and Lin’s examination. Facing Zac Gallen with the bases loaded Tatis took four swings in one at-bat that were clearly pull oriented and an attempt to meet the ball out in front of the plate. And Tatis stuck with this approach even when the count reached two strikes:

You can see how far out in front of the plate the the point of contact is:

Tatis would take this swing the very next night:

This ball was not only pulled, but hit 109.6 MPH with a 37 degree launch angle. This will be a home run no matter the park, no matter the altitude, no matter the weather conditions.

Tatis’s swing path and point of contact across the last week of the season is simply remarkable:

This is a transformation. This is a swing path nearly perfect to maximize power.

Tatis’ season at the plate has been the focus of much concern, and was likely affected early on by playing through injury. His early season swing path showed that in fact, for much of the season, he was a different hitter than years past. But the final weeks showed something different. Something familiar.

Tatis’ season has a bit of symmetry with Merrill’s: an incandescent start with a 1.011 OPS in March/April followed by months marked by diminished power production and slumps. But he finished strong with a .900 OPS and a slash line of .293/.352/.549 in September.

Despite the aggregate season statistics suggesting the 2025 Padres offense is a weak point, a closer look at the team it is likely to field this week suggests that one should keep an open mind. Still, it’s fair to say the team was able to achieve 90 wins and a playoff berth despite the tentpole stars being out of sync much of the way. And the other side of the ball is where the Padres have shown consistent strength all season long.

The Pitching

The Padres starting pitching in the playoffs will revolve around Nick Pivetta, Dylan Cease, and Michael King, with Yu Darvish likely to be the late man in the rotation. And while during the regular season starters are asked to provide length to spare the bullpen too much mileage, the rules are inverted in the playoffs. The Padres bullpen will be taking more innings across the sudden death short series.

The Padres first half was buoyed by incredible production from the four horsemen: Jason Adam, Jeremiah Estrada, Adrian Morejon, and Robert Suarez.

Jason Adam will not be playing in the postseason due to a season-ending quad rupture September 1st. But as transcendent as his season was (65 appearances, 1.93 ERA), the Padres were uniquely suited to endure such a loss, the reins of the vacated mount passing seamlessly into Mason Miller’s hand. A one-of-one:

Video Courtesy: @PitchingNinja

Adam’s loss was enormous, but it’s reasonable to think that with Miller the team still has four horsemen. The pacing of the 162 game season demands a smart rationing of resources, and as such there were very few instances in which the Padres asked for appearances from four of their horsemen in the same game. Only nine times all season. But the results are interesting:

It’s not a surprise that all nine games in which the Padres pressed the full weight of their bullpen advantage came after the trade deadline when they briefly expanded their ranks to five. But it’s notable that the final month of the season, after the terrible loss of Adam, is when the team pressed its advantage the most.

There’s always noise within a small sample. But it’s a mistake to think there is no signal here. The Padres bullpen is a point of differentiation. The small sample was a necessary byproduct of the incredibly long season, but the season isn’t long anymore. It’s terrifyingly short. There won’t be any rationing. They’ll be playing as though there is no tomorrow. Because there isn’t.

The Padres will be pitching only their best starters, primarily Pivetta, King, and Cease. But they will be managed differently. Dylan Cease’s struggles successive times through the order have been the biggest contributor to what looks like a down season. Michael King is still playing back into form after missing most of the season with injury and threw only 49 pitches in his final outing of the season. But neither will have to go 6+ innings or three times through the order. The bullpen will be called on, and it’s interesting to look at how the team fared this season when one of Pivetta, Cease, and King started a game in which at least three of the four horsemen pitched in relief:

If the Padres can win 13 more games they will be world champions.

The Best Version

There were only six games all season in which one of the Padres three top starting pitchers, three or more of the four horsemen, and all of Tatis, Machado, Merrill, Bogaerts, Cronenworth, Arraez, and Sheets all took the field together:

The two losses were at home against the Angels on May 12th when the Padres led 5-3 entering the 9th, but Robert Suarez had a rare bad outing blowing the save followed by Alek Jacob letting the Angels run up the score. In the June 9th loss the Padres battled the Dodgers to a standstill through nine innings but with Jason Adam unavailable having pitched the two prior games, they had only Wandy Peralta still available and he gave up two runs in the top of the 10th letting the Dodgers pull ahead. The chain broke at the weakest link.

The six games in which the Padres put out the best version of the lineup with one of their best starting pitchers, and used three or more of their best bullpen arms included four wins, and two losses in which the Padres were favored to win entering the 9th inning.

Yet To Come

While the six games above likely represent the strongest combination of players the Padres put on the field during the regular season, all six games came before the trade deadline. Ryan O’Hearn and Freddy Fermin will be taking the at-bats that were occupied by the wayward AAAA cohort in those games. Jason Adam’s role has been filled by Mason Miller, and it’s not a knock on Adam to say that Miller is likely the superior player. And this implies that, despite the longest regular season in all of professional sports, at no point in 2025 have the Padres played a game in which the very best version of the team was on the field. These are the players likely to see action in game 1 of the Wild Card series Tuesday against the Cubs in Chicago:

If they all play, it will be the first time the Padres have used all of their best available players in a single game in 2025. And that is reason to hope that for the 2025 Padres, the best is yet to come.

Wild Card

The playoffs are structurally different than the regular season, and teams will structure themselves differently as a result. And this limits the regular season’s predictive power of the upper bound of the very best version of a team. Indeed, the very best version of a team may not have even seen the field until the postseason is underway. But baseball is a stochastic sport. And no matter how good the best version of a team is, victory can never be guaranteed. In this way baseball shares common ancestry with poker or blackjack. To some degree, no matter the skill of the players, their fate depends on fortune. In the playoffs every team is a wild card. They have to believe they can win a game they can’t fully control. They have to keep the faith.

Keep the faith.

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In September the Padres offense has been noticeably different than in months past. Or maybe not so noticeably since their reputation remains unchanged. But September has seen the offense more closely resemble modern offenses:

In September the team has put up its highest home run rate, strikeout rate, and slugging percentage of any month this year. It’s not a mystery why their home run production is up. Of the 21 home runs they’ve hit, 14 have come from a trio that had yet to find top form at the same time all season:

The reasons why the tentpole stars had been out of sync with one another is difficult to pin down. But it hardly matters. The Padres fortunes will depend on their stars performing when it matters most. Whether these swings carry forward:

The Padres have quietly slipped into the top 10 in home run rate in September.

But there’s another, more familiar, statistic the Padres continue to lead the league in for September:

Bunts and Home Runs are downstream of swing decisions, the decision to pursue the former precludes the latter. This decision is one of the few things a hitter truly controls as he enters the batters box.

The current received wisdom is the decision to pursue the bunt is playing small ball, an amorphous term, but one we define as sacrificing some run-expectancy for another outcome of interest. But that isn’t always true. Bunting and swinging for home runs are complementary strategies in run-maximizing if used correctly. Two innings, against teams that couldn’t be more different, displayed how the team can use swing decisions intelligently to break games open. Against a regular season foe, or those likely to be seen in October.

Regular Season

Sunday’s game against the Rockies saw a noticeably different lineup than at any point in the season:

Manny Machado and Luis Arraez got much needed days off. And the resulting lineup looked quite different. The insertion of Jackson Merrill into the second spot resembled modern lineup construction, but the defensive specialists at the bottom of the order left it looking a bit lean overall. That’s why it’s so interesting to look at how the 1st inning unfolded.

Fernando Tatis Jr.

Tatis started the game doing something he’s done at a career high rate this season: getting on base.

Though Tatis’ season hasn’t featured as much power as we’re used to, that’s begun to change recently. And it’s because of swings just like this.

Although this was a ground ball single, the swing was designed for damage:

You can see what the swing path was set up to do had the contact been a bit more flush:

Tatis, a notorious tinkerer, has changed his stance and swing shapes dramatically as the season has gone by. But his approach at the plate has been very different as well. He’s set a career high by a wide mark in walk rate, and a career low in strikeout rate. But his home run rate has suffered:

Eno Sarris distilled his thoughts on Tatis’ swing in a recent article with Dennis Lin, noting that one of the biggest differences as the season has gone on is how far Tatis is letting the ball travel (a stat captured by the Y-intercept stat on baseball savant, the distance from home plate toward the pitcher’s mound where a batter tends to make contact with the ball). As the bat travels through its path it gains bat speed, and becomes more optimized for loft, and of course the attack direction becomes more pull oriented the further out in front a hitter is. Here is the Y-intercept on the swing above:

Indeed, you can see significant changes in the Y-intercept through the season:

There are tradeoffs for trying to ambush pitches out front, primarily more whiffs/strikeouts. That is an acceptable tradeoff for more power (up to a point). But more importantly, this swing decision was so good because it came on a pitch in the strike zone with less than two strikes. Swinging and missing carries no harsher penalty than taking the pitch would. It’s impossible to strike out. A hitter gifted with power as prodigious as Tatis’ should be trying to get to pulled air power in these counts every time.

Tatis has been a different hitter in September than his rest-of-season averages, and it’s probably not a coincidence that as his approach has shifted to hitting the ball further out front his profile has started to more closely resemble his prior seasons:

He remains the team’s table setter and it’s interesting to compare how the September profile contrasts to the rest of his season:

The Padres need slugging in the playoffs, and last season Tatis was the biggest contributor to the Padres offense in October which put up the second highest home run rate in the playoffs:

It’s tantalizing to consider Tatis finding that delicate pH balance: hunting pull-side power with count leverage, and switching modes to walk/on-base machine when the count isn’t going his way. Though he only singled to lead off the game, the swing had the potential to do more, and that’s what he could control. Tatis’ at bats will be appointment television in the handful of games before October.

What happened next was an even more interesting swing decision.

Jackson Merrill

The second spot in the order has become the most important spot in the eyes of many. The second spot nets nearly as many plate appearances as the leadoff spot with a significantly higher percentage of at bats coming with runners on base:

The second spot is also the least likely spot in the order to lead off an inning:

These observations have led most teams to slot their best sluggers into the second spot in the order to take advantage of the additional base traffic and high at bat totals. The Padres had opted for a different tack all season with Luis Arraez resembling a more traditional bat-control number two hitter, and willing participant in small-ball. But with Arraez out of the lineup Sunday it was Jackson Merrill that batted second. The move made the Padres resemble most modern lineups with a power bat in each of the first six spots in the order. Which is why it was genuinely funny to see Merrill do this in his first at bat:

We’ve discussed the Padres’ use of small-ball, especially the use of the dreaded 1st inning sacrifice bunt to move a runner from first to second. The Padres have attempted this play 8 times in 2025, leading the league. At first this looks like a 9th attempt. But it wasn’t, not exactly. There was a key difference. Watch again how this play unfolds:

The third baseman was playing very deep, and shaded to the shortstop side:

Marquez had to scramble for the ball because of the Rockies’ defensive alignment. He knows if the ball gets past him there was no one to field it. And he couldn’t make the play.

The third baseman was beyond a crucial, measurable threshold:

When the third baseman plays deeper than 120 feet the result of bunt attempts for base hits are staggering.

A quick explainer: One of the intractable difficulties in estimating the success rate of a bunt for a base hit is that the hitter’s intent is not in the box score. With any runners on an unsuccessful attempt will be recorded as a sacrifice bunt, and you can never know if it was just a straight sacrifice or an attempt at a hit. But there are two situations in which it is certain a hitter is bunting for a base hit rather than a sacrifice:

• When the bases are empty, or

• When there are two outs

Although these were not the exact base/out conditions during Merrill’s at bat, they are a useful cohort to extract the expected value of bunting for a base hit with the specific defensive alignment in front of Merrill.

When Merrill bunted, the third baseman was 121 feet from home plate. Merrill is also left handed which makes bunting into the empty space on the left side of the infield a bit easier. Here is the cumulative performance of left handed batters bunting with no runners on for the past five seasons, stratified by third baseman starting distance from home plate:

The league as a whole bats .481 on all bunt attempts with the bases empty. One might imagine these results come from speedy players skewing the results. But it isn’t just speed. There are four players in the past five years who’ve attempted double digit bunts with the bases empty, and an average third baseman starting distance more than 140 feet from home plate, they’re not exactly track stars:

Some hitters both recognize this inefficiency, and are willing to take the easy bases when the defense offers them.

And that’s one of the keys to Merrill’s bunt: the defense gave him the opening. He couldn’t control that. But once the terrain in front of him changed, there was an opportunity he could control. To take the right club out of the bag.

Merrill’s swing (bunt) decision was a bigger play than it seems at first, too. It provided more run expectancy than a bases empty double with one out, or a triple with two outs.

This was not small-ball. There is no tradeoff for more total runs. This is simply a run-maximizing strategy. Lumping it together with run-sacrificing small-ball strategies creates a confusing taxonomy. The dynamics of this play are the mirror image of the sacrifice bunt; the defense was the one conceding outs. In the modern game a more sensible taxonomy of swing decisions is whether the decision is run-maximizing, or run-sacrificing.

Although this was yet another instance of the Padres two hitter dropping a bunt, it was not a run-sacrificing strategy because of the opportunity the defense presented. And that probably does have something to do with putting a power bat in that spot. The same opportunity just hasn’t been there when Luis Arraez has bunted in the same 1st inning situations:

Defenses game plan very differently for Arraez. And that’s something to consider in short series when decisions made along the margins might separate evenly matched teams.

Bunting has become a rare and scorned play over the last 25 years. And with good reason, for certain bunt decisions. But bunting for base hits, especially when the defense is conceding it, has become underutilized:

There is overwhelming evidence that major league baseball has thrown the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to the use of the bunt. Banning all bunting was a strategy that could get teams ahead of the pack when the league wasn’t using information properly. But that wisdom has grown creaky over 25 years, clinging to it too steadfastly can drag a team down today. It’s time to update.

Tatis and Merrill set up a potential big inning through swing decisions that couldn’t be more different, but each was suited to the terrain the player saw before them. The next swing decision continued that trend

The Table Is Set

In the 1st inning offensive strategy should revolve around run-maximizing. Because the team does not know how many runs will be needed to win the game. Taking the easy bases defenses concede avoids outs and sets the table. But once runners are on the best way to run maximize is to hit for power.

Ramon Laureano understands this. He worked a 1-0 count and took this swing:

Laureano wasn’t able to execute. He can’t fully control that. A hitter’s execution is a factor of his underlying skill, the execution from the opposing pitcher, and the stochastic undercurrents of a game in which the very best players still fail most of the time. But he controlled what he could: a powerful swing in favorable count leverage:

Specifically a swing optimized for launch to the pull side, the best way to hit for power. It won’t work every time. But it will never work if a hitter doesn’t make the right swing decision. This wasn’t a time to bunt. The table was already set. It was time to clear it. The outcome wasn’t good, but the underlying process was:

The next swing decision was perhaps the most interesting of the day.

Ball Fore

Gavin Sheets was next up, batting cleanup. He faced the same situation as Laureano: runners already on base adding scoring leverage to extra-base hits. Sheets worked the count to 3-0. And here Sheets made the only swing decision that might be more controversial than a bunt:

The automatic take on 3-0 is one of the most deeply ingrained parts of the baseball orthodoxy across all levels of play. And it might be the strategically correct decision in little league because kids are just not very good hitters. But as you escalate up the ranks of organized baseball it becomes more important to factor in the quality of the hitter when making swing/take decisions. Major League hitters are capable of hitting home runs. Here are the league wide results of swings on 3-0 counts since 2021:

75 home runs in 606 plate appearances is a 12.3% home run rate. For reference in 2001 Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs in 664 plate appearances, a 10.99% home run rate.

This is avant-garde in the baseball orthodoxy. But it shouldn’t be, for the right hitters, when the situation calls for it.

Both Sheets and Laureano understood the assignment. They are capable of hitting for power, and there were runners on. They both took very competitive swings oriented for pulled air power:

They didn’t execute. But that’s something they can only influence, not fully control. They controlled what they could. They reached for the driver.

Ryan O’Hearn

With two outs and a runner in scoring position the Rockies didn’t give O’Hearn much to hit:

O’Hearn saw one strike on the outer half of the plate, and didn’t expand the zone, choosing to take three pitches in the shadow zone. Sometimes the best swing decision is the one you didn’t make. He drew the walk to load the bases.

Jake Cronenworth

With two outs and the bases loaded in a tied game in the 1st inning this is the defensive alignment Cronenworth saw:

You can see him survey the left side of the field for a moment before locking in to the pitcher:

If you’ve read this far you can probably guess what he saw.

The third baseman is 129 feet from home plate and shaded to the shortstop. This is also one of the two situations we mentioned above where a sacrifice bunt is not possible, because there are two outs. Every bunt with two outs is for a base hit1. Since 2021, left handed batters who bunted with two outs in an inning hit safely in 187 of 360 attempts (.519 BA). Here’s how they did when the third baseman was more than 120 feet from home plate:

Although there were still runners on base putting leverage on extra-base hits, there were now two outs. And Cronenworth, though a capable hitter, has a far lower extra-base hit rate (6.5%) than Sheets (9.5%) or Laureano (10.9%). You can use Cronenworth’s season statistics to project the likelihood of the different possible outcomes of swinging away, and the historical outcomes of trying to bunt for a base hit with the third baseman so far back to project how the at bat might unfold depending on Cronenworth’s swing decision:

The defensive alignment gave Cronenworth the opportunity to tilt the odds of a successful at bat with a decision he controlled. And this time he executed perfectly:

The updated 2025 run-expectancy for a team with the bases loaded and two outs is 0.96 runs:

This is overwhelmingly populated by at bats in which the hitter swung away (bunts comprise 9 of the 9708 plate appearances with bases loaded and two outs since 2021 league wide). This is the expected value of a swing.

Calculating the expected value of a Cronenworth bunt is simple. There is a 59.3% chance of successfully plating a run and keeping the base/out state the same (meaning an intact 0.96 run-expectancy for the ongoing rally after the successful bunt already scored a run). There is a 40.7% chance of an unsuccessful bunt leading to 0 runs.

0.593 * (1 + 0.96) + (0.407 * 0) = 1.16

The run expectancy for a bunt is 0.20 runs higher2 than for swinging away. This is the exact decrease in run expectancy a team incurs with the dreaded sacrifice bunt of a runner first to second:

This is not small ball. This is playing for the big inning.

This was as unorthodox an inning of baseball as you will see. This is what maximizing expected value using game context looks like. It’s different for every hitter based on what they can do well. You don’t necessarily want Gavin Sheets trying to bunt even when presented with the same opportunity Cronenworth saw, both because he is a much better power hitter, and because…

This is how a team can maximize its chances to win. Not by being married to any specific ideology, playing only small-ball or only for the long ball. Playing smart is something a player directly controls, if he has a team culture that permits self-directed situational decision making.

That culture can cut both ways. At times, the Padres indulging in the small-ball bunting of an extinct era has made them look like dinosaurs—too primitive to be dangerous in today’s game. But add a little modern cunning, and suddenly you’re staring at the raptors in Jurassic Park, figuring out how to turn door handles.

Degree Of Difficulty: Playoffs

It’s one thing to outwit the listless Rockies. But on Wednesday the Padres faced an extremely talented team fighting for its life.

Tied 2-2 in the top of the 5th Jake Cronenworth led off with a hit-by-pitch. Elias Diaz was up next. Diaz had grounded into a double play in his last at bat. The Padres opted to have him sacrifice bunt Cronenworth to second base:

This is considered one of the least efficient plays in baseball. And it’s fair to question whether it was a good idea. But it also virtually assured that as the lineup turned over to Fernando Tatis he’d have a runner in scoring position, with a good chance he’d be pitched around to get to Luis Arraez. That’s exactly what the Mets did, showing Tatis only one off-speed pitch in the zone:

Tatis walked to put runners on first and second for Arraez, who has grounded into 11 double plays this season.

Arraez is a mercurial player. He does a lot of things most players don’t do. For better or worse, one thing he always does is survey the opposing defensive alignment before stepping to the plate:

This is what he saw:

All season when Luis Arraez has laid down bunts the third baseman has been nearly even with the bag. Wednesday he saw something different:

This wasn’t a typical Arraez sac bunt. It wasn’t a sacrifice at all. It was reading the terrain and taking the right club out of the bag.

The run-expectancy change was more than that of a leadoff double:

The run-expectancy matrix by virtue of the way it is calculated implicitly assumes a league average hitter is at the plate. But it wasn’t a league average hitter coming to the plate now with the bases loaded:

Smart, dynamic baseball plays irrespective of opponent. It works in the regular season. It works in the postseason. It can be a differentiator.

An Article Of Faith

Baseball is a probabilistic battleground where talent and decision making tilt odds, but cannot ensure victory. Certainty is outside the reach of mortal design. It rests in the hands of the baseball gods. Maximizing the expected value of a play is the most agency a player, or team, can hope to exercise. Seizing the opportunities that present themselves. Getting the decisions on the margins right. All but one team will fail. Belief that your team will be the sole survivor is always irrational. Always an article of faith.

Keep the faith.

Coors Field is the most extreme ballpark in baseball. It has some of the deepest dimensions, but is one of the most home run heavy parks in baseball year after year due to the extreme altitude and low air density permitting fly balls to travel much further than any park in baseball:

The lesser known aspect of Coors is the dramatic effect it has on pitch speeds and shapes.

Books like The Physics of Baseball, and later studies by the University of Illinois articulated the theoretical effects of pitching at altitude, but it wasn’t until the wide availability of Statcast that the effects could be quantified in major league games. And with this data the outline of an optimal arsenal for finding success in Coors has started to take shape. In a blog post in February a data analytics firm summarized the relevant considerations when designing a pitch arsenal for success in Coors:

1. The thinner air reduces the Magnus effect, meaning movement induced by spin will be lessened.

2. Reduced Air Density (~82% of sea level) creates less drag on the way to the plate, leading to more retained velocity as a pitch crosses the plate.

   1. At sea level a pitch will typically lose ~10% of its release velocity by the time it crosses the plate, while the thinner air in Coors leads to ~8% loss in velocity, or about 1-2 miles per hour.

3. Gyro spin (spin aligned around the flight path of the ball) is not heavily affected by altitude

You can apply these observations to specific pitch types:

1. Four-Seam Fastball

   1. Will lose lift (decrease in induced vertical break) due to reduced Magnus force. A pure four-seam fastball will drop ~4 inches more than at sea level.

   2. Elite high-spin fastballs (Pivetta, Cease, Jeremiah Estrada) become less effective, especially those aimed at the top of the zone.

   3. Low-spin, high-velocity fastballs can actually gain effectiveness because they retain more velocity due to less drag and less magnus effect on the way to the plate.

2. Sinkers

   1. Loses arm-side run and ride, causing the pitch to flatten out.

   2. Low-spin, high-velocity may play up.

3. Cutters

   1. Less reliant on Magnus force for movement, spin axis/tilt induced movement less affected by altitude.

   2. Benefit from retained velocity.

4. Curveballs

   1. Break is reduced significantly due to the decrease Magnus force.

      1. Pitches will “hang” more, making them easier to hit.

5. Changeups

   1. Changeups that rely on horizontal movement (Wandy Peralta) will suffer more than those that rely on deception (Robert Suarez)

6. Sliders/Sweepers

   1. Less affected than curveballs because more of their movement comes from gyro-spin/tilt

   2. Thrown faster than curveballs and may benefit more from retained velocity

Coors quite literally prevents pitchers from executing the same game plan that makes them successful in other venues. And that’s why it was anxiety provoking to see Nick Pivetta and Dylan Cease were slated to start the first and third games of the series (to say nothing of Randy Vasquez being asked to spot start). But each of them achieved success, indeed the most success any Padres starters have recently. Randy Vasquez’s success continues to amaze, and defy explanation. But in Pivetta and Cease’s case there’s likely some explanatory power in choices they made.

Pitch Selection

If you had to choose the pitcher most likely to have spectacularly bad results at Coors, you might choose Nick Pivetta, who relies on the extreme induced vertical break (iVB) on his four-seamer, and pairs it with a steep 12-6 curve. Pivetta’s four-seamer averages a superb 20 inches of induced vertical break on the season, generating a ton of whiffs as the fastball ride induces swings underneath the ball’s trajectory. But in Coors he is only able to achieve 15 inches of iVB, meaning fastballs aimed toward the top of the zone are apt to drop into the heart of the zone, and the ball’s flight path is much truer to the trajectory the hitter’s brain senses out of the hand:

And this has been a major problem for Pivetta in the past. Heading into Friday’s game, Pivetta had struggled more in Coors Field than any other ballpark:

And it’s interesting to look at the pitch mix from his first start in Coors May 11th, an outing in which he gave up six earned runs in only four innings:

Of the 42 fastballs he threw, 40 were the especially ineffective four-seam fastball. He only threw one sinker and one cutter to mix things up. He threw an even split of fastballs and breaking balls. This was a very similar pitch mix to his season averages:

In May he was trying to execute his usual pitch mix, and was shelled. There was not much evidence of a Coors specific game plan. As we wrote at the time, the very first pitch of that game was a four-seamer that ended up several inches below the top of the zone:

Friday’s start was his first trip back to Coors since that disastrous outing, and there was a stark difference in his pitch mix Friday night:

He threw 25 cutters, and ~63% fastballs overall. It was the most cutters he’s thrown in a game since 2022. And the choice of cutter over sinker likely has to do with the cutters’ ability to retain shape slightly better due to getting less of its movement from pure Magnus force.

When he threw breaking pitches he threw sweepers/sliders twice as often as the curveball. He combined for only 48 four-seam fastballs and curveballs, a usage of only 48.5%, the first time he’s had a combined usage of less than 61% this season:

It’s not a coincidence. This is a game plan. And it was adjusted for Coors.

You can see how the pitch mix evolved successive times through the order.

The first time through was almost exclusively a mix of fastballs, with heavy use of the cutter, and the only two sinkers he threw all night. The second time through he started to mix in more breaking balls, but threw 14 sweepers/sliders (the more effective breaking pitches in Coors) to only four curveballs. He only dared to throw multiple curveballs to Warming Bernabel who has been exceptionally good against sliders in his short career. The third time through he constantly mixed all his pitches, with only two hitters seeing the same pitch type back-to-back, including three straight curveballs to Bernabel who rolled over the third one for a groundball double play to end the outing.

Pivetta turned in—far and away—his best outing ever in Coors, completing six innings with only 2 earned runs. And it’s not a stretch to think that was in part because of a different pitch mix than he has thrown at any other point this season. He was controlling the one thing he could, pitching to the park he was in rather than relying on what has made him successful throughout the season in other venues. In 2024 the cutter was his worst pitch, one of the worst in baseball by run value. It’s been more effective in 2025, but his four-seamer has been one of the single best pitches in baseball with a +16 run value. Trading four-seamers for cutters is a foolish proposition, except when the environment is certain to stilt the effectiveness of the four-seamer to a much higher degree than the cutter, and the benefit of increasing the difficulty of the guessing game for the hitter might be the only path to success:

This was one of only two sinkers Pivetta threw all night, and the horizontal break got in on Jordan Beck’s hands, sawing him off despite having been sitting first pitch fastball.

It was even more interesting to see the changes to Dylan Cease’s arsenal in game 3. Coors also profiles very poorly for Cease’s usual success formula of a high ride four-seam fastball and slider combination. We wrote about Cease’s struggles in the first half of the season coming in part from comically high reliance on the four-seamer/slider combination which had reached 88.2% usage going into the all-star break:

Cease came out of the break with a major shift in his arsenal, initially reincorporating the knuckle curve, and subsequently increasing his use of the sinker:

At first, watching Cease pitch on Sunday looked like a reversion to his pre all-star break 2-pitch mix, with almost exclusively fastballs and sliders. But on deeper inspection it was actually a much more interesting pitch mix:

The key here is the use of the sweeper. He set a career high throwing the sweeper 17 times, and reaching double digit usage for the first time since 2021:

And there’s a good physiologic reason for this. Recalling the Coors Field effects above, within Cease’s arsenal the knuckle curve is the pitch most likely to be ineffective at altitude. While the four-seam fastball loses ride, it benefits from retained velocity which helps a pitcher with elite velo like Cease maintain effectiveness. The sweeper shows better ability to maintain shape because of the larger contribution from gyro/tilt which is unaffected by altitude. The curve simply loses the break that makes it effective without any favorable tradeoffs. And when you look at Cease’s three breaking ball shapes you see a very interesting juxtaposition in how they played at Coors Sunday:

The slider essentially retains its shape. But the altitude destroys the vertical break of the knuckle curve and brings its total vertical break much closer to the sweeper. At sea level the knuckle curve gets plenty of separation (56 inches drop) from the vertical plane of the slider and the sweeper (31 and 47 inches drop at sea level, respectively). At altitude that vertical separation is cut in half as the knuckle curve achieves 8 inches less drop compared to sea level due to the lower Magnus effect. The sweeper suffers a far less-harsh penalty due to how its break is created (gyro spin/tilt) and the end result is the sweeper gets nearly as much vertical separation from the slider as the knuckle curve, but has the advantage of separation on the horizontal plane. The sweeper is thrown harder as well, which can increase its effectiveness compared to the knuckle curve. The sweeper is simply the better choice to give the hitter a different look on a breaking ball at altitude. And effectively Cease replaced the knuckle curve usage with the sweeper.

Cease also gave hitters many more looks at the sinker. While both the four-seamer and sinker lost a lot of the movement characteristics that make them effective pitches, the slight difference in horizontal break made it a bit more difficult for hitters to square the pitches up. Cease worked in the sinker early and often throughout his outing:

Though it wasn’t as obvious as other outings, on Sunday Cease ultimately threw four pitches with at least 10% usage. Creating a more difficult guessing game for the hitter is one of the keys to maintaining effectiveness multiple times through the order. This, too, was clearly game planned. And Cease managed to pitch five innings giving up only 1 earned run.

Cease and Pivetta both made drastic changes to pitch mixes, both upping the usage of of one of their least used pitches, and specifically a pitch that was more likely to retain shape at altitude (Pivetta’s cutter, Cease’s sweeper). This is very smart game planning, and in Pivetta’s case, something that wasn’t seen in the team’s first trip to Coors Field.

Accounting for the atmospherics of the ballpark when game planning is one of the things the team can control. It’s true that there’s no perfect way to pitch in Coors, it’s picking from nothing but bad options. But it looks like the Padres put real effort into getting to the choice that is least-wrong.

Matching Pitcher To Park

There’s another side to consider. While Pivetta and Cease were pitching in their scheduled spots in the rotation, Randy Vasquez was a spot starter. The team decided to have him throw from among the available arms. Strandy has certainly earned a chance to make another start. But the team may need more than one spot starter down the stretch. If they do it will likely be JP Sears. The thought is enough to cause some (us) to break into cold sweats. But it might be necessary. And if it is, one locus of control the team might have is how it sequences its spot starts. Who takes a game on the road vs at home. That sounds trivial, but it might not be.

Vasquez does not have extreme home/road splits:

Neither does JP Sears:

But Sears does have a certain type of split. He seems to pitch much better in ballparks that suppress fly ball distance and home runs. It’s probably true that all pitchers are better in these parks. But Sears is an an extreme fly ball pitcher, meaning the performance volatility for Sears in a pitchers park vs a home run heavy park will be much higher than that of an average pitcher. As extreme as Coors Field is for hitters, Petco is nearly as extreme for certain pitchers. Those like Nick Pivetta. Pitchers that struggle with giving up home runs due to high fly ball rates. Sears is one of the most extreme in this regard. And in parks similar to Petco, Sears has pitched surprisingly well in his career.

Here is the bottom of the league’s ballparks for added fly ball distance:

Petco is consistently one of the most fly ball suppressing parks in the league, one of only five ballparks to be ranked in the top 10 in fly ball suppression each of the last three years:

Here is how Sears has pitched in the top flyball suppressing parks of 2025 across his career:

126 innings is still a small sample, only two-thirds of a season or so. And the sample sizes don’t get any larger when you narrow the criteria, but here’s how he’s pitched in the ballparks that have been in the top 10 of flyball suppression each of the last three years:

There’s more to home run prevention than just flyball suppression, park dimensions matter a great deal. And even after Nestor Cortes’ extended batting practice sessions (he’s given up 5.3% of the total home runs in Petco in just two starts) Petco Park is still a top 10 home run suppressing park in 2025, the second time in three years. And, there’s more to offense than just hitting home runs. Petco Park is also ranked 6th in overall offense suppression. Here’s how Sears has pitched in the parks with the lowest overall park factors the past three years:

It turns out Petco is the only park in baseball to be bottom 10 in flyball distance each of the last three years, bottom 10 in home run park factor two of the last three years, and bottom 10 in overall park factor over the past three years. The Padres are going to play games at three of these parks across the final 19 games (Petco, against the Mets in New York where Sears has never pitched, and against the White Sox in Chicago). If even one of those games needs to be covered by JP Sears, there’s reason to think he may be significantly more effective in Petco than on the road. This is not a projection that Sears will be good in Petco. It’s more a projection that he has a chance to not be as bad in Petco. If the team has the option to sequence a spot start at Petco or on the road, the nudge should be to Petco. Because a few feet of flyball distance suppression, a wall just a few feet further, or both, can matter a lot.

Heck, even a few inches can matter:

We’ll be back for part 4.

But the winds have shifted. The Padres are reckoning with the loss of Jason Adam, Michael King’s purgatory, Dylan Cease’s battles with an unquiet mind, and the misadventures of Sears and Cortes. The notion that this is still a team poised to win with the exact same formula starts to falter. A diminished ability to protect small leads puts a higher premium on scoring runs. And on the offensive side, the (regular) season-ending injury to Xander Bogaerts is a brutal headwind to the team’s pursuit of run maximization. These developments are reasons to look into the marginal aspects of the game the team directly controls.

The easiest way to increase total offense is to dial back the usage of the sacrifice bunt (especially the Padres league leading tendency to give up outs early in the game). But this is a diminutive change with only 22 games remaining. The best way to score the most runs is to hit for power. For much of the season the Padres just didn’t have many hitters capable of this. But that’s changed since the trade deadline. Yet there’s a strong case to be made that the lineup has not been optimized despite having the players to do so.

Lineup Optimization

It’s helpful to look at the number of at-bats different spots in the order are expected to have across the final stretch of the season to estimate the impact that lineup optimization might have. It’s easy to map this out using the average plate appearances per game of each spot in the order:

With 22 games left, the number of plate appearances from hitting low in the order versus hitting high in the order can represent multiple games worth of at-bats for the individual hitter. A team in search of more offense needs to consider who to award those surplus at-bats to.

The Padres leader in home-run rate by a wide margin is Ramon Laureano with a 5.3% home run rate on the season, and 5.6% since joining the Padres. Laureano has taken 125 plate appearances across 31 games since joining the Padres. He’s batted 5th, 6th, or 7th for 26 of those 31 games:

This might not seem like much, but it’s likely he would have accrued significantly more plate appearances batting higher in the order over that span. This too, is easy to map out:

For each of the top spots in the order, Laureano would have accumulated more than two full games worth of individual at-bats across the past 31 games:

And it’s trivial to estimate the number of additional home runs expected over that span with each of the changes:

The addition of Laureano as well as slugger Ryan O’Hearn (3.4% home run rate) certainly bolstered the team’s scoring output, as they’ve averaged 4.74 runs/game since the trade deadline (the Phillies have the 10th best offense in the league with 4.75 runs/game). But it’s likely that some run scoring output was left on the table in the way that the Padres lineup has been deployed thus far.

Ryan O’Hearn has started only 21 games and amassed 103 plate appearances since joining the Padres. And the arrival of Laureano and O’Hearn seemed to relegate the team’s second-most successful slugger to a part-time role. Gavin Sheets has the second highest home run rate at 3.9% on the season. Yet he’s started only 16 games since the trade deadline, with only 65 plate appearances across that span.

We can project the expected additional home runs that would have been hit over that same span had O’Hearn and Sheets started over that span in various spots in the order:

If O’Hearn and Sheets had started every game since the deadline the team would likely have ~3-4 additional home runs. That’s only a handful of total extra runs across 31 games. But the Padres lost five games by one run, and a total of nine by three runs or less across that stretch. The change is marginal, but close games are decided on the margins as a rule.

That’s in the past, but the same projection can be used for the final 22 games as a way to visualize the opportunity cost of benching any of the three across the remaining games:

There is some oversimplification here as matchups will vary night-to-night. Against certain elite left-handed starters it’s reasonable to bring one of O’Hearn or Sheets off the bench. But even accepting that, they seem to have been underutilized to this point. Again, this optimization is in the margins. The difference is likely to be only a handful of runs total across the remaining games. But it’s something the team can directly control. And every game still counts until the postseason berth is locked in.

Crowded At The Top

Part of the reason for the underutilization of the team’s power hitters is that the Padres lineup is crowded, especially at the top. Fernando Tatis Jr and Manny Machado have held the leadoff and 3rd spot in the order the vast majority of the season, and when in form provide plenty of value in these coveted spots. With Xander Bogaerts injured, there’s little argument that 4th and 5th spots should be occupied by one of Laureano, O’Hearn, or Sheets for the rest of the season. The question is how the Padres might add all three. And it’s clearly the 2nd spot in the order that the Padres should consider adjusting.

2nd Best

The Padres have accrued the fourth lowest OPS from the 2nd spot in all of MLB, and have by far the least home runs from the position in the league:

Of the 630 plate appearances from the 2nd spot, 533 have come from Luis Arraez. Some of the decision to hit Arraez 2nd night after night surely has to do with maintaining consistency and chemistry in the clubhouse. But it’s also likely that decision was made with a particular team identity in mind. One in which many early innings would start with Tatis getting on, and a hit from Arraez would set up easy RBI opportunities for the heart of the order. There was a time not long ago when this was a viable strategy. Indeed, in 2024 the Padres scored the 6th most runs in the 1st inning in all of baseball:

It’s been very different in 2025 with the Padres near the bottom of the league in scratching across early runs:

When the Padres acquired Arraez they got a superb hitter with every qualification to occupy a coveted spot high in the order. And in March/April/May of 2024 Arraez put up exactly the numbers the Padres had expected when they acquired him with a slash line of .342 /.380 /.413 /.793, not far off the .354/.393/.469/.861 slash line he’d put up in 2023, and right in-line with the career .327/.380/.425/.805 hitter he’d been across the first five years of his career. Awarding that hitter the surplus at-bats from hitting atop the order is a smart decision. Arraez has not been that hitter in 2025.

The prevailing theory about Arraez’s struggles is that he has entered a contact rate death spiral, expanding the zone and swinging at bad pitches. This has driven criticism of the other side of his pitch selection, the tendency to watch pitches right down the middle to start at-bats. The Statue take:

The impression one gets is that he’s leaned too far into his own hype and become a free swinger, and pitchers are baiting him to chase. The implied solution to his struggles is to be more selective, look for pitches in the heart of the zone, and lay off bad pitches to hit.

The reason this theory has not had much purchase in our mind is that this narrative simply isn’t supported by the data. Here are Arraez’s batted ball outcomes on pitches in the heart of the zone in 2025:

He has an OPS of .626 on pitches in the heart of the zone. And this can’t simply be chalked up to evolving defensive positioning, or playing in a suboptimal park. The bat speed has deteriorated and the hard-hit rate is drastically worse than prior seasons. Here is the location of every pitch Arraez has put into play in the heart of the zone:

These are the very best pitches to hit. The ones he’s watching on the statue takes. League-wide hitters slash .353 / .349 / .618 with a .967 OPS on pitches in the heart of the zone. He’s been right there with the rest of the league in seasons past. But in 2025 he just hasn’t been.

Meanwhile he’s been more productive when swinging at balls in the chase zone:

These are the pitches the league struggles to hit:

The league-wide slash line on pitches in the chase zone is .260 / .258 / .329 with a .587 OPS. It is from this observation that the theory of Arraez’s struggles was born, because that’s what normal hitters struggle with. But that is not the problem. The problem is that he cannot, to this point in a nearly completed season, get to good contact on pitches in the heart of the zone. The ones he so often watches pass by. Waxen.

We think his struggles are more fundamental than pitch selection. The skill that made Arraez a successful hitter for the first five years in the league was otherworldly bat control. Skill that went beyond what is captured in superficial statistics like contact and whiff rates. He was a hitter who could do this:

But he’s not making millimeter perfect contact when he swings any longer. Not with the same regularity that made him one of the top hitters in the game for five years.

A troubling part of this is that Arraez’s struggles do not seem to be from any visible physical limitation on the field. It’s more likely he suffered a subtle loss of fine-tuning. A deterioration in bat control so small that he’s still able to put up a career-best contact rates, but he’s off by a millimeter frequently enough that his quality of contact has cratered even when he swings at good pitches to hit.

It’s not clear that a hitter afflicted by a minute loss of precision would feel significantly different. And that’s where the coaching is supposed to support the player. Direct his attention to what he is not doing well. The things he can’t intuit himself. Findings that only emerge from external analysis.

His consistent deployment in the 2nd spot implies the team doesn’t think anything has changed. Questions about Arraez continuing to hit 2nd have been deflected with bromides about batting titles. And it’s hard to understand that.

A coaching staff is wise to support a player that is struggling, but is certain to return to form, by carrying on as if nothing has changed. Because nothing has.

But if there is something wrong, if something has changed, failing to bring it to the attention of a struggling player eventually crosses a line from vote of confidence to iatrogenic harm.

To believe that he is still the same hitter one must reconcile what the measurable difference in his batted ball profile suggests. We haven’t been able to. Previous batting titles alone are not qualifications when this type of batted ball data is available. Invoking them is credentialism.

This will sound very critical, but it’s important to keep perspective. Luis Arraez is not a bad hitter. He is having a slightly below league-average season. And there should be a spot for him in the lineup. But his struggles don’t seem destined to spontaneously resolve (we would love to be wrong). And unfortunately they don’t seem to be a matter of pitch selection alone. And for this reason the 2nd spot in the order seems to be an area that the team can elect to pursue a marginal upgrade in offensive production through lineup optimization. This doesn’t mean Arraez has to be benched. High contact rates will play well in the 6th spot when more runners on base ahead of him augment the impact of his base-hits.

Making The Pieces Fit

To keep O’Hearn, Laureano, Sheets, and Arraez all in the order at once is likely the strongest offense the team can field. This would require Arraez shifting to 2nd base, and Jake Cronenworth moving to shortstop. That is far from the optimal defensive lineup. And that’s a tough pill to swallow for a team built on the identity of run prevention. But it’s a lever the team can pull if it decides to.

When It Matters

Bad luck befell the Padres in the waning days of summer. Nothing can be done about that. But while the woes on the run prevention side may not be easily remedied, there’s still juice to squeeze on the offensive side. Lineup optimization has been deemphasized all season. It didn’t matter when the team was winning and the integrity of the run prevention strategy was intact. It might matter now.

Part 3 will press further into the margins.