Chris Paddack, Emilio Pagán, and Drew Pomeranz are all a big part of the Padres’ plans this season. The latter two promise to play prominent roles in the San Diego bullpen, while Paddack will be counted on to bounce back and further fortify what looks to be a fearsome starting rotation. Here are snapshots from recent conversations with all three, the first of which was prompted by a question from a member of the San Diego media (apologies for not recalling who posed it), and the others coming via inquiries by yours truly.

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Chris Paddack took a step backwards in 2020. Coming off a rookie campaign that saw him log a 3.33 ERA over 26 starts, the 6-foot-4 right-hander struggled to the tune of a 4.73 ERA, and an even-uglier 5.02 FIP. He threw plenty of strikes, issuing just 12 walks over 58 innings, but all too often they got whacked. Looking back, Paddack has a pretty good idea of what led to the crooked numbers.

“Being a taller pitcher on the mound, my biggest success is when I’m north to south,” Paddack said earlier this spring. “Last year I was east to west. I was pulling off. My spin direction was outside of one, for y’all that know the baseball term of that. The axis of the baseball… I was getting two-seam run on my four-seam fastball… So, I [looked at] a lot of video from 2019, and well as 2018 in the minor leagues, really breaking down some of my mechanics on my front side. The term I use is ‘staying grounded as long as I can with my legs,’ and letting my upper body pinpoint a strong direction to whoever it is I’m throwing to that day.”

Per StatCast, Paddack’s four-seam spin rate was 2170 rpm last year, versus 2230 in 2019. His vertical ride decreased by 2.1 inches, while his horizontal increased by 2.2 inches. Velocity-wise, he threw two ticks harder, going from 93.9 mph to 94.1 mph. The 25-year-old Austin, Texas native doesn’t profess to be a pitching-analytics nerd, but he’s clearly begun dipping his feet into those waters. Read the rest of this entry »

Spring training taking place on (what is hopefully) the back end of a pandemic makes for different routines and challenges, and not just for players and coaching staffs. Media relations personnel are impacted as well. Due to COVID-19 protocols, how they’re going about their business is anything but ordinary.

Dustin Morse is among those having to adjust on the fly. Now in his 16th season with the Minnesota Twins — his sixth as Senior Director of Communications — Morse is doing more than masking-up when he arrives at Hammond Stadium every morning. With face-to-face interactions limited, he’s juggling responsibilities in an increasingly-virtual world, and with one of his favorite areas of the Fort Myers facility off limits.

“Not being in the press box is a real change,” explained Morse, who along with colleagues Mitch Hestad and Elvis Martinez have either Tier 1 or Tier 2 status. As they’re allowed in highly-restricted areas, they can’t mingle with reporters or with others in less-restricted areas. “One way we’d been doing it with Derek [Falvey] and Thad [Levine] is that they’d give me information and I’d deliver it directly to the media during spring training. My usual office there is right behind the press box, and we’d have almost-daily briefings. That’s not allowed this year.”

Nina Zimmerman, who is on Morse’s staff as a communications assistant, is being entrusted to run the press box. Her responsibilities include official scoring, keeping track of substitutions, and announcing when players are available to speak to the media in-game. Not being in a tier, Zimmerman doesn’t have access to restricted areas. Read the rest of this entry »

Tigers manager A.J. Hinch addressed the importance of being aggressive on the base paths during his Saturday morning media session. What he shared included the following, which I quoted on Twitter:

“Your WAR gets dinged whenever you get thrown out on the bases. It’s not valued. People are very aware… players are very aware of that. Winning baseball is good for your WAR too, even if it’s not quantifiable.”

Almost immediately, people began responding critically, opining that Hinch was (pun intended) off base. Feeling that more context was in order — I’d prefaced the original Tweet by noting the subject at hand — I added that Hinch also said that if you’re safe every time, you’re probably not being aggressive enough.

No matter. Commenters went on to suggest that Hinch doesn’t understand the value of an out, sometimes in a snarky, condescending manner. (On Twitter! Imagine that!)

Hinch had a second media session following the team’s workout, so I took the opportunity to bring up the minor foofaraw I’d caused at his expense. Would he like to elaborate on, and clarify, what he’d said, lest a faction of the Twitterverse continue to question his sanity? Read the rest of this entry »

It’s no secret that strikeouts are at an all-time high. Nor is it a secret that not every strikeout is “just another out.” Balls in play can advance baserunners, and that’s especially important when the 90 feet being traversed is from third to home. What fan, or manager, doesn’t bemoan one of the team’s hitters going down by way of the K with a man on third and less than two out? It’s an opportunity wasted, one that often leads to a squander.

Save for the rare occasions when a batter reaches on a wild pitch or a passed ball, a strikeout is also a guaranteed out. Making contact — even weak contact — at least gives you a chance. While last year’s .292 BABIP was baseball’s lowest in nearly three decades, that’s still markedly better than than the infinitesimal odds of taking first base on a punch-out. Moreover, fielders make errors. In short, contact matters.

Given MLB’s ever-increasing strikeout rate, I asked six managers a simple, straightforward question: Is the ability to hit with two strikes an undervalued asset in today’s game?

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Bud Black, Colorado Rockies

“It’s been undervalued in the history of the game. It’s probably lessened a little bit more [as] something that has been talked about. I think, more so than ever, because of the stuff today, it’s harder to hit with two strikes, especially the velocities that we’re talking about. The breaking pitches. The secondary pitches. The quality of those pitches. The swing-and-miss that’s happening now is a combination of maybe not shortening your swing, and maybe the stuff is that good to where it’s tough to make contact. Read the rest of this entry »

By now, you’ve presumably had some time to think about the enormity of the extension that Fernando Tatis Jr. signed last week. Fourteen years! Three hundred and forty million dollars! An excuse for me to use exclamation points! It’s such a huge deal, it would almost be unthinkable not to have spent a silly amount of time thinking about it.

As for me, I’ve thought a lot about it in a theoretical sense. You can math out the contract and say that our best estimates show the Padres getting meaningful value from it, which I did using Dan Szymborski’s projections. You can think about Tatis’ place in the pantheon of great young hitters, as Jay Jaffe did. You can think about the team-building implications of locking up a young star for so long. I decided to answer a different question, though: Why haven’t more players and teams agreed to these massive extensions so early in the arbitration process or even before it starts?

If you think that the Padres overpaid, this isn’t the article for you. I’m ignoring that outcome, because if that’s the case, we have an answer. Teams don’t try these deals because they’re negative value in expectation. That’s an unsatisfying answer, though. If you think that, imagine Tatis were good enough to merit the deal — give him Mike Trout’s numbers, let’s say — and indulge me in this one. Read the rest of this entry »

You probably haven’t thought about the Padres’ bullpen in a while, and you’d be forgiven for that. Most of the high-profile additions they’ve made in the last several months have come in the starting rotation. The other big moves, such as trading for Austin Nola and signing Ha-seong Kim, have been upgrades to the lineup. Oh, and there’s that whole record-setting contract they just gave to their 22-year-old superstar.

All of that has overshadowed the fact that the turnover in San Diego’s relief staff lately has been extreme. Seven of the team’s top eight projected relievers on our Depth Charts page were not on the roster at the end of the 2019 season. Like the rest of the Padres, though, that turnover has resulted in a unit that now looks like one of the best in baseball. It’s worth getting caught up, then, on who the newest arrivals are, who has recently departed, and where that leaves the group as a whole.

San Diego did a lot of its heavy lifting last offseason and at the trade deadline, but the team signed two notable big leaguers in the last few weeks. One was Mark Melancon, the 35-year-old veteran who will join the eighth team of his soon-to-be 13-year big league career. Melancon became famous at the back of Pittsburgh’s bullpen in the mid-2010s when his cutter made him one of the game’s most dominant closers for a few years, bringing about the obligatory comparisons to Hall of Famer Mariano Rivera. From 2013 to ’16, he threw 290 innings with a 1.80 ERA and 2.25 FIP, all while throwing his cutter about 67% of the time. After that, he landed a big contract with the Giants, who traded him to the Braves at the deadline in 2019. Melancon wasn’t as good over the past four seasons as the four previous, but he still managed to pitch effectively.

Read the rest of this entry »

Fernando Tatis Jr. has agreed to the longest contract in baseball history, and one of the most lucrative — and yet looking at the jaw-dropping ZiPS projection for his career, his 14-year, $340 million deal might be underselling him. At the very least, Tatis’ contract and his production to date cast him as a generational talent, and his forecast suggests he’ll wind up ranking among history’s great shortstops. While it’s hard to believe that a player with only two partial years in the majors has a leg up on a berth in the Hall of Fame, the statistical history of players who’ve done what he’s done at such a young age suggests that it’s true: Tatis is already soaring towards Cooperstown.

Or if you prefer, stylishly shimmying there:

Hip-notized by @tatis_jr ? pic.twitter.com/25eBSeokFn

— San Diego Padres (@Padres) August 8, 2020

The skeptic in all of us may be saying, “Whoa, let’s pump the brakes on this kind of talk,” but it’s the Padres who have placed the bet on a Mookie Betts-like impact over the course of well over a decade, and looking at the comparisons and the company he’s keeping once we crunch the numbers, it’s tough to disagree. Nothing is guaranteed, least of all a player’s spot in the Hall of Fame a quarter-century from now, but the odds of him fulfilling that promise are substantial.

Regarding the Hall, consider first the baselines set by a player arriving in the majors at an early age. Repeating a study I did in relation to Ronald Acuña Jr. in 2018 (only this time catching a glitch in my accounting relating to 19th century players), I used Baseball-Reference’s Stathead to track the rates at which position players who made at least one plate appearance in their age-18 through 21 seasons reached the Hall:

Read the rest of this entry »

In 2021, Fernando Tatis Jr. is one of the Padres’ brightest stars. In 2031, he’ll presumably also be one of the Padres’ brightest stars, because he just signed a 14-year, $340 million extension to remain in San Diego, as Dennis Lin and Ken Rosenthal first reported.

That’s a lot of years, and a lot of money, and don’t you worry, we’ll have some ZiPS projections and some calculations of dollars per WAR and an explanation of how the arbitration system impacts this deal. First, though, here’s Tatis having fun:

With that important message out of the way, let’s get down to business. Tatis is one of the best players in baseball right this minute, and he turned 22 a month ago. When he broke into the majors in 2019, he truly broke in. His .317/.379/.590 line was scintillating, and also too short; a stress reaction in his back limited him to only 84 games. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Padres traded for Jurickson Profar before the 2020 season, they had a hole at second base. By the time the season started (give or take a week), Jake Cronenworth had filled that hole. But luckily for the Padres, Profar was flexible. He played the outfield for the majority of the season, more than doubling his career innings played total on the grass, and backed Cronenworth up at second while putting together the best batting line of his career. In a shortened season with heightened injury problems, his flexibility was exactly what the team needed.

On Friday, the Padres and Profar agreed to reunite, with San Diego signing him to a three-year, $21 million deal that includes opt outs after each of the first two seasons. But while Profar is headed back to southern California, what role he’ll play there remains undecided. A Padres team without many holes has spent the offseason filling in what cracks it has, leaving precious little space for more cooks in the kitchen — or so it seems.

One of the greatest unknowns facing NL teams is the DH rule. Will it come back next season? Opinions vary, and whether you can give an extra player at-bats changes roster construction significantly. The pre-Profar Friars straddled the gap between building for an extra hitter and for traditional rules. Ha-seong Kim, their prize position player signing this offseason, currently profiles as a super-utility player who starts on the bench. He could fill the DH position, but using a middle infielder (Kim is a shortstop by trade) there feels wasteful. Meanwhile, the team’s two corner outfielders, Tommy Pham and Wil Myers, are both mixed in the field. Either of them could slide to DH — Pham played DH during his tenure in Tampa — if the team could find a suitable defensive replacement. Read the rest of this entry »

On (day of week), the Padres acquired (talented pitcher) from the (spendthrift team) in exchange for a seeming pittance, including (name of decent but not overwhelming Padres prospect). Now, surely, AJ Preller is done. Or is he?

Oh, hello there! Sorry about that. That’s actually the Mad Libs-esque form that I normally use to cover Padres pitching transactions. Today, I’ve got some details for you. It’s Joe Musgrove heading to the best weather in baseball, Hudson Head and Endy Rodriguez highlighting the group headed out (in a three-team trade involving the Pirates and Mets), and Andrew Friedman gently whispering words of affirmation to himself: “We’ll still win the long game, we’ll still win the long game, the Dodger Way can’t be beat.”

Musgrove isn’t an ace, at least not in the way that new teammates Yu Darvish and Blake Snell are. He would have been Pittsburgh’s number one starter this year, which isn’t the same thing. In San Diego, he’ll slot in as the Padres fourth starter. Let the words of Anakin Skywalker speak for the rest of the NL West: “This is outrageous! It’s unfair!”

Seriously, take a look at our Depth Charts predictions for the Padre rotation:

There simply aren’t other teams throwing out pitchers like Musgrove after a whopping three other pitchers. We think that the Padres, Yankees, and Mets will accrue roughly equal value from starting pitchers next year, but the New York teams are doing it with Gerrit Cole and Jacob deGrom, the consensus best two pitchers in the game. Yu Darvish is nice, but not that nice. The Padres are building their own Death Star rotation, and they’re doing it with volume. Read the rest of this entry »