Nathan Lukes was 28 years old and in his ninth professional season when he made his MLB debut with the Toronto Blue Jays in 2023. He almost didn’t make it that far. Life down on the farm isn’t exactly a bed of roses, and that was especially true prior to conditions — financial and otherwise — improving via a collective bargaining agreement that essentially coincided with his reaching the bigs. A few years earlier, Lukes almost walked away.

“It’s been a journey,” Lukes said of his path, which began when Cleveland selected him in the seventh round of the 2015 draft out of Cal State Sacramento. “Five games into my career — this was in short-season ball — I broke my hamate and was out for the rest of the year. The next year, I started in Low-A, and halfway through I got traded to Tampa Bay at the deadline. I stayed with the Rays until my minor-league contract was up, then signed here [in November 2021].

“It was getting to the point where it was almost time to think about hanging it up,” continued Lukes, whom the Blue Jays placed on the IL with a hamstring strain prior to yesterday’s game. “But then, in 2023, they put me on the 40-man roster. Pretty much as long I had that 40-man ticket, I was going to keep running with it.”

The now-31-year-old outfielder didn’t feel that he had stalled out developmentally when he pondered calling it a career — “I always felt that I could play in the big leagues” — but he did recognize that there is more to life than baseball. Lukes and his wife had a child in 2021, and as he explained. “Family changes things.” While his financial situation had improved somewhat thanks to minor-league free agency, he was “going to play the 2022 season, and after that, probably just be a dad.”

“You weren’t getting rich,” I said to Lukes in our spring training conversation. “No,” he replied. “I was getting poor. My wife was working at the time, which helped… actually, it didn’t just help, it kept us running. At the lower levels, I was bringing home six thousand dollars a year after taxes, so I was making a thousand dollars a month. The most I ever made on a minor-league contract was $15,000. You can’t really do too much with that.” Read the rest of this entry »

“It seems that the long arc of time has finally bent to my whims,” said the man, sundering the veil of silence in which he had cloistered himself. The luxurious, sovereign growth around his mouth stirred and parted once more as its owner granted himself a fleeting moment of almost rapturous satisfaction. “Those worthy of my ambitions have finally revealed themselves, and now I am compelled to do naught but grind the ambitions of my enemies into pale dust,” he intoned to the unadorned darkness, steepling his fingers in sacerdotal triumph.

At least, that’s what happened in the disordered mind of Dan Szymborski, curious for months where Lucas Giolito would end up in 2026. Since the end of the offseason, with Giolito unsigned, he’s been a source of speculation as the grand Plan B whenever a pitcher has been lost to injury, almost as if he were lying in wait. The rumors finally materialized into fact on Wednesday, as the San Diego Padres signed him to a one-year deal with a mutual option for the 2027 season.

If Giolito had been waiting for a perfect fit, the team with which he’d make the biggest impact, he was correct to join the Padres. In fact, given the rumors that had popped up, I had already started writing a slightly different piece before reality quite rudely interfered; in it, I used ZiPS to estimate his effect on the playoff probabilities for each team in baseball. And the Padres just happened to rank number one in ZiPS-projected Giolito impact, with their playoff probability shifting from 55% to 65% upon his acquisition, ahead of the Cubs (+8.1%), Athletics (+7.9%), Astros (+6.9%), and Braves (+6.4%), in terms of the size of the bump.

San Diego’s rotation has been quite solid in 2026, with a 3.53 ERA in the early going, and 2.4 WAR, placing it eighth in baseball. But there were dangers that the front office could not ignore. While there’s a lot more reason to be optimistic about Randy Vásquez now that his changeup and curveball appear to have evolved into whiff machines, Nick Pivetta’s injury was still extremely unwelcome news given the team’s rather thin depth. At the moment, it looks like Pivetta’s flexor strain will not require season-ending surgery, but he isn’t going to be back anytime soon.

Pivetta’s injury left the Padres to fight with the Dodgers for the NL West title with an almost non-existent margin for error in their rotation. Before his injury, they were already banking on Walker Buehler, a big enough risk that he signed with them on a minor league deal, and Germán Márquez, who hasn’t been both healthy and good since 2021. Griffin Canning is coming back from a significant Achilles injury and hasn’t pitched since June, and there’s no firm timetable yet for Joe Musgrove’s return from the Tommy John surgery he had 18 months ago. Yu Darvish is certainly not going to be back in 2026, or possibly ever. Keeping up with the Dodgers isn’t an easy task, so there are only so many wins you can concede while you wait and hope for some good injury news on one of these fronts.

The simple truth about Giolito is that he’s clearly no longer the pitcher he was when he got Cy Young votes each year from 2019 through 2021. If he were, he probably would have signed a contract north of $150 million during the offseason, instead of waiting to be a reinforcement for a contender in need. Even so, last year represented a successful comeback season for him, as he missed 2024 with internal brace surgery to repair his UCL. Giolito previously had full Tommy John surgery immediately after being drafted in the first round by the Nationals in 2012, those elbow questions being responsible for his falling to the 16th pick.

It’s true that last season was a successful return for Giolito, but there are some important caveats to that statement. His 3.41 ERA in 26 starts was certainly solid, but dark things lurked in his peripheral numbers. His FIP was a more middling 4.17, and his 7.5 K/9 represented a 20% drop-off from his 2022-2023 numbers and a third off his peak. Statcast’s xERA was especially negative, giving him a 5.01 for 2025, and though the ZiPS version was kinder, the zERA of 4.55 was hardly top-free-agent material. The goal here isn’t to add an ace — though I can’t imagine San Diego would object if he channeled his best years — but to get an arm capable of throwing some dependably league-average innings. And I think the Padres have a good chance of getting that.

The mutual option has real value to the Padres. If Giolito performs well, he would be a natural fit for their rotation next season should Michael King exercise his an opt-out. (The exact values of Giolito’s option are not yet public.) It’s hard to gauge this kind of thing in a projection, but it’s at least nice that signing Giolito also removes him as an option should the Dodgers or another contender, such as the Cubs, find themselves in dire straits, rotation-wise.

Does signing Giolito drastically change the story of the 2026 San Diego Padres? Probably not, but he’s a supporting character, and if the Padres are able to topple the Big Blue Empire on their seventh try and take the NL West crown, he will likely play a role in writing that happy ending.

Arjun Nimmala has a high ceiling that he is still far away from reaching. No. 2 on our Toronto Blue Jays Top Prospects list, and No. 48 on our Top 100, the 20-year-old shortstop is presently slashing .163/.308/.372 with two home runs and a 94 wRC+ in 52 plate appearances with High-A Vancouver. Last season, he left the yard 13 times while putting up a 92 wRC+ over a full course of games at the same affiliate. But while the production hasn’t been anything to write home about, the potential is clearly there. As Brendan Gawlowski explained in his scouting profile, “We really like the athlete and tools here, and we’re betting the results will follow in time.”

Nimmala’s right-handed stroke projects to produce plus power once he fully matures, and I asked him about it during spring training

“It’s a swing that’s built to do damage,” replied Nimmala, whom the Blue Jays drafted 20th overall in 2023 out of Dover, Florida’s Strawberry Crest High School. “I pride myself in taking good swings. When things are going well, I have a really good idea of the zone and am doing damage to all parts of the field.”

Asked to elaborate, Nimmala said he considers his bat path a plus — “I think it’s been good since high school” — adding that his adjustments since reaching pro ball have mostly been about putting himself in better launch positions. He further explained that he has tweaked his posture and how he lands.

As for reports saying that his swing is a little on the long side, but also quick, he agrees — but only to a point. Read the rest of this entry »

Another week, another delightful slate of games, which can only mean one thing: It’s time for another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) In Baseball This Week. One of my favorite parts of the early season is rediscovering the small pleasures of watching baseball that I’ve forgotten over the winter. I don’t mean watching Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge play. That’s obviously very enjoyable, but it’s not something I forget about in the offseason. But the feel of the game, the look on players’ faces when something unexpected happens, the pure happiness I get from seeing a bunch of grown-ups throw a ball around for a job? I only have that experience when the games are on, and the feeling is strongest after a prolonged absence. So no stars today, just stuff I watched that gave me a happy (or, in one case, angry) feeling. As always, a shout out to Zach Lowe of The Ringer, who popularized this article format in his seminal basketball column. And a programming note: Five Things won’t be appearing every week this season, to help balance out my workload and allow me to work on other projects here at the site. I’ll likely be off next week – unless the baseball I watch this weekend is just too enjoyable not to write about.

1. Late-Night Hijinks
I associate West Coast games with wackiness. It’s likely because I grew up out East, and was usually halfway asleep and fully loopy when I turned on late-night baseball (or late-night any sport, really; I have fond memories of silly Pac 10 football games at 1 a.m.). But there’s something thrilling about the last game of the day’s slate going into extra innings, whether you live in Portland, Maine or Portland, Oregon. Last week, the Padres and Rockies did their best to deliver. Read the rest of this entry »

Davey Lopes was my first favorite ballplayer. In retrospect, I’m not sure how my eight-year-old self settled upon Lopes in a star-laden lineup featuring power hitters Dusty Baker, Ron Cey, Steve Garvey, and Reggie Smith, who the year before (1977) had become the first quartet of teammates to homer 30 times apiece in a season. I have a much better grasp of how Bill James helped my teenage self appreciate Lopes for his combination of high on-base and stolen base rates with mid-range power, but James wasn’t communicating those ideas via mass-market paperbacks circa 1978. Perhaps it was Lopes’ position atop the lineup I memorized while learning to decode box scores (my theory) or the Topps baseball card set that began my collection. Maybe it was simply his instantly recognizable, bushy mustache (my friends’ theory), but one way or another, even before later heroes such as Fernando Valenzuela and Jim Bouton, Lopes was my guy.

The news that Lopes passed away on April 8 at age 80 due to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases — a brutal double bill — reached me while I was traveling in Austria with my own 84-year-old parents and additional family as we tracked down the Vienna addresses of my long-deceased paternal grandparents. I had no shortage of thoughts regarding mortality, and yet the hits kept coming. Lopes wasn’t even the most recent former All-Star-second-baseman-turned-manager to pass away, as Phil Garner, his National League rival and then predecessor in managing the Brewers, died of pancreatic cancer on April 11. So it goes.

Though he didn’t debut until well past his 27th birthday, Lopes spent 16 seasons in the majors (1972-87), the first 10 with the Dodgers, whom he helped to four pennants and a championship while making four All-Star teams, winning a Gold Glove, and becoming team captain. From 1973–81, he manned the keystone in the longest running infield in major league history, along with Garvey at first base, Cey at third, and Bill Russell at shortstop — a unit that formed the foundation of those pennant-winning teams under managers Walter Alston and Tommy Lasorda. “He was the catalyst of the engine. It was 700 horsepower with the four of us, and the equation was his ability to get on base,” Garvey told CBS LA in the wake of Lopes’ death. Read the rest of this entry »

My puny mortal brain is having trouble making sense of the numbers coming out of San Diego right now. It’s an uncanny valley thing. Mason Miller’s statistics just don’t quite seem like they’re numbers that you can put up in the majors. Oh, they’re all in the right columns. They’re not impossible or anything. It’s just that no one else has numbers that look quite like this, and even more so than that, if you think about what they all mean together, it doesn’t seem like the performance they describe can possibly be real.

Let’s start with the most striking statistic: 19 strikeouts in 24 batters faced. That 79.2% strikeout rate is obviously technically feasible, but I keep saying it in my head and it keeps not making sense. I look at strikeout rates a lot, particularly early in the season. But even for very good pitchers, they tend to top out around 40%, maybe 50% if they’re performing especially well. I can fit those numbers into my head. That means that about half the batters they face are going to strike out – easy enough. Face four batters in an inning? Two punchouts.

But 79% doesn’t work so easily. In a four-batter inning, that’s three strikeouts! But you don’t get a lot of four-batter innings if you’re striking out three batters an inning. Another way of thinking about that: Batters reach base safely about 40% of the time when they don’t strike out. But if they’re striking out 80% of the time, they’re already making outs in 80% of their plate appearances right off the top, and then add another 12% from in-play outs (60% times 20%). That’s an out rate of 92%! I can’t wrap my head around 92% outs. That’s the ratio of outs in your average two-hit complete game. But your average two-hit complete game includes a ton of batted-ball luck. Miller’s dominance doesn’t involve a lot of batted-ball luck – or a lot of batted balls.

That leads me to my next point of cognitive dissonance: all the swinging strikes. Right now, Miller is running a 39.6% swinging-strike rate on his slider. That means that batters swing at – and miss – 39.6% of the sliders he throws them. But they only swing half the time! That means they’re coming up empty 79.2% of the time when they offer at that pitch. Likewise, his four-seam fastball carries a 24.4% swinging-strike rate, off of a 43.5% whiff rate. These numbers are all ludicrous if you stop to think about them. Read the rest of this entry »

Randy Vásquez has struck out 19 batters in his first three starts of 2026. He didn’t record his 19th strikeout in 2025 until May 14, in the third inning of his ninth start.

Vásquez has simply dominated in the earliest days of the new season. He opened the year with six shutout innings against the Tigers, striking out eight. He picked up a mere three strikeouts in his second start against the Red Sox, but his stuff was just as good, generating whiffs on 32.6% of swings. And then he picked up eight more strikeouts on Thursday against the Rockies. He now has a 1.02 ERA, a 2.57 FIP, a 27.5% strikeout rate and a 5.8% walk rate, pitching like a top 20 starter in the majors to begin 2026.

Weird, right?

It’s not that Vásquez was terrible before this year. He posted a 3.70 ERA and 4.96 FIP across 26 starts in 2025, and his performance was similar in the two seasons prior. That’s a pitcher who can stick in the backend of most rotations and serve as useful depth. But it wasn’t clear what Vásquez did well, or how he might take the next step to becoming a true mainstay in the majors. He walked more batters than average. He didn’t really limit hard contact. And his 14.8% strikeout rate was the lowest among any starting pitcher with at least 200 innings from 2023 through 2025. He was just kind of there. Read the rest of this entry »

Jeremiah Estrada’s path to big league success was bumpy. Drafted out of Palm Desert High School in California in 2017, the now-27-year-old right-hander battled multiple injuries, including one that required Tommy John surgery in 2019. There was non-health-related adversity as well. Estrada spent his first seven professional seasons in the Chicago Cubs organization, and he didn’t always see eye to eye with the club’s pitching coordinators and coaches. They were occasionally at cross purposes when it came to optimizing his repertoire.

Estrada reached the big leagues with Chicago in 2022, although it wasn’t until two years later that he found much success. Cast aside by the Cubs, with whom he’d thrown just 16 1/3 big league innings over parts of two seasons, he has thrived since being claimed off waivers by the San Diego Padres prior to the 2024 campaign. Over 145 appearances, Estrada has logged a 3.35 ERA, a 2.85 FIP, and a 36.1% strikeout rate over 139 2/3 frames. His Friars ledger also includes four saves and an 11-9 won-lost record.

Estrada discussed his nonlinear, and often frustrating, path to big league success over a pair of conversations. The first came in early March at the Padres’ spring training complex, while the second was conducted at Fenway Park this past weekend.

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David Laurila: How much have you changed since coming to pro ball?

Jeremiah Estrada: “I’d say a lot, and not just what happens on the field. With the baseball side, you learn what’s important and what’s not important, but that’s pretty much like life. Right? Life starts to kick in. Even though many of our lives are different, we worry about the same things. Read the rest of this entry »

Mark Grant is one of the game’s most entertaining color analysts. Teamed with play-by-play announcer Don Orsillo, the man affectionately known as “Mud” is a big part of why the San Diego Padres TV booth polled as baseball’s best in Awful Announcing’s 2025 local broadcaster rankings. Now in his 11th season alongside Orsillo, Grant first began working Padres games in 1996. His previous partners in the booth include the legendary Dick Enberg.

Grant was a pitcher prior to becoming a broadcaster, toeing the rubber for six teams across the 1984-1993 seasons, including the Padres, with whom he made 126 of his 233 appearances. All told, he went 22-32 with eight saves and a 4.31 ERA over 638 2/3 innings.

How well does he remember his matchups against certain batters he faced? As I’ve done previously with David Cone, Mark Gubicza, and Jeff Montgomery — those pieces can be found here, here, and here — I decided to find out by challenging him to a career quiz. Not only did he oblige, he supplied fun anecdotes along the way.

I began by asking the pitcher-turned-broadcaster which batter he faced the most times. Read the rest of this entry »

Going into yesterday, Mason Miller had thrown 37 pitches on the season, 19 of them fastballs averaging 101 mph, while another 17 were sliders that elicited a 60.0% whiff rate. There was also one changeup. Delivered to Luis Arraez on a 1-1 count, the ninth-inning offering was wide outside and taken for a ball.

Why did the San Diego Padres closer throw his seldom-used changeup to the three-time batting champ on Wednesday night? Low leverage was certainly a factor; the Friars had scored four times in the bottom of the eighth to turn a 3-1 lead into a far safer 7-1 advantage. It nonetheless represented an outlier for the 27-year-old flamethrower. Over the previous two seasons, only 2.3% of his pitches were changeups.

I asked him about it when the Padres visited Fenway Park on Friday,

“A changeup is a good pitch, but I’m not going to feel comfortable with it if I’m not throwing it,” Miller told me. “I’m picking my spots. There are certain guys it matches up well against. [Arraez] is a guy who isn’t going to swing and miss, so I’m not going to be hunting a strikeout. If I can get softer contact on it… any time you have a guy who isn’t fast and he puts it on the ground, that’s an opportunity for an out.”

Arraez didn’t kill any worms in his matchup with Miller, instead lining a 2-1 fastball to right field for a single. Not that it mattered. The righty proceeded to fan the next three batters, one on a 101.5-mph heater, and two on nasty sliders. While those pitches were pristine, the execution on his lone changeup was another story. Read the rest of this entry »