Decision-making in the playoffs is a micro-focused as you can imagine. The level of preparation which goes into these games will never be fully known in the public sphere, but if a team wants even the slightest competitive edge, you better believe the details are as granular as the fine sands of Puerto Rico’s Playa Negrita.

Every opposing hitter has a zone and/or pitch that is a weak spot. You must know who on your pitching staff is best suited to throw to those weaknesses, and what hitters are most adaptable to use pitch sequences that will play to those same weaknesses. The following matchups are a few areas that could sway any given game in either direction. They are certainly not the only of high importance, but the statistical or situational holes make them worth mentioning. I’ll go through series by series and pick one that deserves attention, starting with the Yankees against the Guardians.

Guardians’ offense vs. Yankees’ sinkerballers

The Yankees’ bullpen is loaded with turbo sinkers and groundball pitchers. Lou Trivino, Jonathan Loáisiga, and Clay Holmes, to name a few, all feature a sinker as their primary fastball. Each of them will be used in high-leverage scenarios against any layer of the Guardians’ lineup, which has been the very worst in the American League against the sinker, posting the second-lowest wOBA (.317) and the lowest xwOBA (.319).

There’s plenty to suggest the Yankees’ bullpen will give the Guardians issues. Because of those turbo sinkers, New York’s bullpen led all of baseball in GB% (49.1%) and Run Value (-20.3 runs). The next best in both categories was Baltimore, which trailed in each by a decent margin (1.5 percentage points and 1.9 runs). In today’s game, being better than every team at throwing sinkers provides a significant competitive advantage, as it keeps batted balls out of the air and on the ground. Read the rest of this entry »

The National League’s adoption of the designated hitter this season eliminated the most noticeable difference between it and the American League. Now, the National League is what makes grown men in scarves weep on public transit, and the American League comes with a slice of melted cheese on top. (No, I have not updated my pop culture references since 2009, and I have no plans to do so.)

The only remaining difference is that the AL gets an extra off day during the Division Series. MLB announced in August that contrary to prior practice, the Division Series would no longer have a travel day between Games 4 and 5. But while the NL would play two games, get a day off, and then play three in a row, the American League gets an extra day off without travel between Games 1 and 2.

When the league announced this new scheme, an obvious question occurred to my colleague Dan Szymborski: How would this affect pitcher usage? Previously, a Division Series contestant could run four pitchers on full rest, and have both its Game 1 and Game 2 starter on full rest for the decisive match, if necessary. Or it could bring back its Game 1 starter on short rest for Game 4, and have everyone else start in order on regular rest. Moving or eliminating the off day throws that practice into chaos. Read the rest of this entry »

It wouldn’t be unreasonable to say that no matter what happens, the 2022 Padres ultimately had a fine season. Despite losing their best player for the entire season (and a chunk of the next one), they won 89 games and made the playoffs, and also acquired one of the best young players ever available via trade. They excised the worst of 2021’s demons in avoiding a repeat of the sudden, stunning collapse that transformed them from a top-tier contender to a sub-.500 squad. And most recently, they went to New York and ended the season of the 101-win Mets. But the season would still not feel like a triumph if they now fell to their biggest rival, the Los Angeles Dodgers (sorry, Giants fans, you have to share your bête noire). That’s easier said than done.

The rivalry between the Dodgers and Padres over the last few years has largely been a mismatch. San Diego went a miserable 5–14 against the Dodgers in 2022, didn’t even take a single series against them this season, and haven’t had a winning record in this matchup since 2010. To add injury to insult, the only time the Padres have made the playoffs during the A.J. Preller era, the weird 2020 season, it was the Dodgers that sent them packing in a 3–0 sweep in the NLDS.

Let’s start things out with the ZiPS game-by-game projection.

The Dodgers are keeping it close, as of press time, whether Clayton Kershaw or Julio Urías will be the Game 1 starter (though reportedly, they already know). While Kershaw has seniority in the rotation, the team has regularly not started him in the first game of a series when he’s available, with both Urías and Walker Buehler among the pitchers getting the nod in recent years among others. ZiPS would slightly favor Kershaw as the Game 1/Game 5 starter, bumping the projected probability of the Dodgers advancing from 60.2% to 61.6%. While Urías won his first ERA crown in 2022, his peripherals are down slightly from ’21. Read the rest of this entry »

There are plenty of ways to win a ballgame. Some teams like to get ‘em on, get ‘em over, and get ‘em in. Some go for pitching, defense, and a three-run homer. One fairly reliable method is to absolutely obliterate the baseball all night long while your pitcher nearly throws a perfect game. On Sunday night, the Padres opted for that approach.

San Diego’s batters crushed everything the Mets could throw at them, while Joe Musgrove allowed no runs, one hit, and one walk over seven shutout innings. He also allowed one person to get very intimate with his ears, but we’ll get to that later.

Coming into the game, much of the talk was about Mets starter Chris Bassitt, who was riding high after posting a 2.94 ERA in the second half of the season. Some predicted that Bassitt’s curveball, which Stuff+ ranked as the best pitch in the game this year, could decide the game, as the Padres usually feast on curves. Instead, it was Bassitt’s fastball that ended up being the issue. Read the rest of this entry »

Coming into last night’s win-or-go-home game for the Mets, the biggest question concerned ace Jacob deGrom. In his last four starts of the season, he tossed 21 innings with an incredible 39-to-4 strikeout to walk ratio, but when he got hit, he got hit hard. He allowed 14 runs in those starts, mostly coming off of six home runs allowed, including three in his last start against Atlanta that ended up deciding the division. Perhaps more importantly, deGrom had averaged just 21.7 batters faced in the regular season, with abysmal results when facing the order a third time. While he looked like normal Jacob deGrom through his first 18 batters of any given start, he allowed a .936 OPS his third time through the lineup, with five homers in 42 plate appearances. What would the Mets do with deGrom if the game entered the later innings in a close situation?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this exact situation occurred. After setting down the first seven batters in order while touching 101.8 mph on his fastball, Trent Grisham took a triple-digit heater on the outer edge deep into center field for a homer. But deGrom wasn’t out of the inning yet. He allowed Jurickson Profar and Juan Soto to reach base with two outs, but struck out Manny Machado on a perfect slider to escape the jam. deGrom got through the fourth inning unscathed, but it was clear that he didn’t have the near-robotic command that led him to historic success in 2021, especially on his slider. He spiked a few of them, and threw many more off the plate in noncompetitive locations.

Those command issues came into play as deGrom began the fifth inning by walking Grisham on five pitches, three of them sliders low and inside. After a successful sacrifice by Austin Nola, deGrom had to face the Padres’ lineup for the third time. Profar, the Padres leadoff hitter, saw four sliders in the same place before a fifth leaked out over the middle of the plate and singled, driving in the Padres’ second run of the game. The next batter, Soto, lined a 2-0 changeup down the pipe into right field for his second hit of the game. With runners on the corners and just one out in a tie game, deGrom was in a tight spot. But he kicked it back into gear after that. Four consecutive sliders perfectly located on the low and outside corner resulted in three swinging strikes from Machado, and deGrom ended the threat with a 99.4 mph fastball that got Josh Bell whiffing, his hardest-thrown pitch of the inning. Read the rest of this entry »

You bring in star pitchers for games like this. Cost? That’s for the accountants. You can’t put a price on a lockdown playoff start, the kind that sucks the air out of the opposing offense one out at a time. Bring in an ace, find your way to the playoffs, and the dominance will flow.

Oh, this is awkward. Did you think I was talking about Max Scherzer? I meant Yu Darvish, who the Padres acquired before the 2021 season in a blockbuster trade. Darvish didn’t harness his usual swing-and-miss stuff Friday night, but he’s spent the entire 2022 season learning how to succeed without it. He’s never run a lower strikeout rate or missed fewer bats, but it hasn’t mattered: He’s having his best season in eight years thanks to a raft of soft contact and no walks to speak of.

Darvish has been a cutter-first pitcher for years, and he leaned into it to the tune of 39 cutters in 101 pitches against the Mets. It’s still Yu Darvish we’re talking about, so he threw six different pitch types, but cutters and four-seamers comprised 65% of his offerings. Add in his slider, and the count climbs to 90%. We think of Darvish as overpowering opposing hitters, but he’s become adept at keeping them off balance, with equally offense-suppressing results. The Mets were eternally in a 1-2 count, eternally popping up pitches they were just too early or too late on. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite spending 175 of the season’s 182 days atop the NL East, building a 10.5-game lead by the end of May, and winning 101 games, the New York Mets lost out in the division race to a red-hot Atlanta Braves team that has played at a .696 clip since the start of June — and lost out via a tiebreaker, a 10-9 season series disadvantage. Now they’ll have to take the long route through the new postseason format, one that includes a potential matchup with the top-seeded, 110-win Dodgers if they advance beyond the Wild Card Series.

That can’t be taken for granted. Even with Max Scherzer and Jacob deGrom available to start in this best-of-three series, all of which will be played at Citi Field, they can’t overlook the Padres, who can offer some top-notch starting pitching themselves and who beat the Mets in four of the six meetings between the two teams. Not that such results are predictive — and it’s worth noting that the aforementioned pair combined for one start in the six games (Scherzer in a 4-1 loss opposite Yu Darvish on July 22) — but they do illustrate the range of possibilities here. The ZiPS Playoff Odds pegged this as the biggest mismatch of the Wild Card round, narrowly edging out the Mariners-Blue Jays series, but with the Padres still having a 42.4% chance of scoring an upset.

Both deGrom and Scherzer looked all too human last weekend during the Braves’ division-s(t)ealing sweep, combining to allow five home runs and seven runs in 11.2 innings. If there’s good news, it’s that manager Buck Showalter didn’t have to send deGrom to the hill in Game 162 in hopes that the Mets would win and the Braves would lose, because that would have ruled him out of the Wild Card round had they lost. Read the rest of this entry »

Blake Snell had to have seen 2022 as an opportunity for a bounce-back. After infamously being pulled by Rays manager Kevin Cash with a one-run lead in the sixth inning of a decisive Game 6 of the 2020 World Series, the lefty was dealt to the Padres in a blockbuster that December. He struggled to find his groove in San Diego in 2021, battling through an inconsistent season for a disappointing Padres team and finishing with a 4.20 ERA, a 3.82 FIP, and a 3.74 xFIP. He must have been eager to put his middling Padres debut behind him when he prepared for his first start of 2022 on April 10, but he was scratched during his pregame bullpen session, hitting the injured list and making way for then-Padres prospect (and current Washington National) MacKenzie Gore to make his major league debut.

No, the comeback would have to wait. Snell would have to endure rehab starts in Fort Wayne, Indiana, then Lake Elsinore, California, and then El Paso, Texas before rejoining the team on May 18 in Philadelphia. He would have to suffer eight team losses in his first eight starts, during which he posted a 5.13 ERA, 3.71 FIP, and 4.04 xFIP and finished the sixth inning just twice. And in his final start before the All-Star Break on July 14 in Colorado, Snell walked six and allowed five runs over 3.2 innings. He walked his final three batters of the first half, forcing in two runs.

But you wouldn’t have known any of that last Wednesday night, when Snell took a no-hitter into the seventh inning at Petco Park against the Cardinals, one of the league’s most potent offenses, finishing the night with a career-high-tying 13 strikeouts over 7.0 scoreless innings. The performance was the crown jewel of a second half during which Snell has pitched himself back into the conversation as one of the league’s most dominant lefties – and one of San Diego’s October X factors. Read the rest of this entry »

San Diego Padres Data Engineer

Location: San Diego, CA
Department: Baseball Operations
Reports To: Director, Baseball Systems
Status: Full-Time, Exempt

Job Summary:

The Data Engineer is primarily responsible for designing and developing data pipelines and helping to ensure high quality data is readily available to the Padres R&D and Systems teams. The role is responsible for working internally to optimize proprietary data as well as helping to build out the ingestion of third-party data from a variety of vendors

Duties & Responsibilities:

• Manage internal PostgreSQL databases & Amazon Web Services data infrastructure
• Monitor internal ETL processes to ensure data delivery
• Design workflows and monitoring tools to identify issues in advance regarding data quality
• Define, implement, and document Padres organizational data pipelines, including ETL, logging, and performance optimization
• Table and query optimizations for large data sets
• Work with third party vendors to establish intake of data
• Collaborate on data delivery platform: design and develop internal APIs for the rapid delivery of information to applications and analysts

Skills:

• Extensive work with PostgreSQL optimization and management, including development with PL/pgSQL
• Knowledge of Amazon Web Services data offerings, including RDS, AWS Glue, and AWS Data Lakes
• Extensive knowledge of data formats including JSON, XML, CSV
• Fluency with SQL and Python
• Familiarity with the Linux shell
• Familiarity with R

Job Requirements: Must meet the following minimum requirements:

• Minimum of a Bachelor’s degree (BA) preferably in Computer Science or Information Systems, or equivalent job experience
• Minimum of three (3) years working in a structured software development lifecycle
• Demonstrated passion for baseball
• Consistent, punctual, and regular attendance
• Professional image and demeanor
• Strong ability to work with others and supervisors in a collaborative, team environment
• Excellent time management, interpersonal, verbal and written communications, decision-making, and organization skills
• Able to work flexible hours including evenings, weekends, holidays and extended hours as needed
• Minimum physical requirements: able to travel to and gain access to various areas of the ballpark for prolonged periods of time during games and events; able to lift and transport up to 25 pounds
• As a condition of employment, the job candidate(s) must successfully complete a post-offer, pre-employment background check and drug screening

The San Diego Padres are an Equal Opportunity Employer

To Apply:
To apply, please follow this link.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the San Diego Padres.

The Josh Hader trade isn’t the only deadline deal that has yielded less-than-rewarding results thus far for the Padres. Juan Soto hasn’t been as bad as Hader at his worst (the closer has lately righted the ship), but after a good start for his new team, he’s fallen into a deep slump. As the Padres battle to hold onto the third NL Wild Card spot, his struggles are worth a closer look.

When he was acquired from the Nationals in an eight-player blockbuster on August 2, Soto was in the midst of a solid-but-not-great season by his own high standards. While his 151 wRC+ was only four points off his career mark, his .246/.408/.485 line was far below his typical slash stats (.291/.427/.538) — not enough to be a dealbreaker or to rate as a significant long-term concern, but notable nonetheless. That said, the Padres’ right field mess made my Replacement Level Killers list, and an on-base percentage above .400 will cover a multitude of sins.

Soto debuted with the Padres on August 3, going 1-for-3 with a pair of walks in a 9–1 rout of the Rockies. He continued to hit well (.286/.438/.460 from August 3 to 21), but on August 23, he was scratched from the lineup with what the Padres called “left mid-back tightness.” Via MLB.com’s AJ Cassavell, “His back flared up while he was swinging in the batting cage shortly before first pitch. During the game, Soto took further swings in the cage, hoping he might get a chance to pinch-hit, but he wasn’t able to.”

Soto didn’t play again until August 27, though he missed just three games thanks to a schedule that bracketed a two-game series against the Guardians with off days on either side. Upon returning, he collected hits in his first two plate appearances against the Royals’ Daniel Lynch, and the next night homered off Anthony Misiewicz. But in the 13 games since then, he’s gone 3-for-42, all singles, and didn’t collect an RBI until Tuesday night. He’s walked 12 times during that stretch and was hit by a pitch — causing him to leave a September 7 game with a right shoulder contusion, which may be a contributing factor here — en route to a .120/.313/.180 post-injury performance. In all, his six hits over a 15-game span is the second-lowest total of his major league career; he had five hits in 15 games in two overlapping stretches in September 2019.

Is the slump as bad as it looks? My assumption going into this investigation was “probably not,” given that even with his return against the Royals, we’re talking about a total of 64 plate appearances and even fewer batted ball events. With the caveat that this is some small sample spelunking, it’s worth noting that since his absence, Soto has pretty much matched his Statcast stats for the first four and a half months of the season, which is to say that he’s hit the ball as hard, more or less:

Soto has produced a similar average exit velo and hard-hit rate and a slightly lower barrel rate (the difference in the smaller sample amounts to falling about two barrels short), but very different expected and actual outcomes. Note the difference in average launch angle; Soto generally ranks among the game’s top power hitters despite the fact that he hits the ball on the ground about half the time (career 48.6% groundball rate) and has an average launch angle below 10 degrees. In fact, since his debut in 2018, he’s one of four players with a slugging percentage above .500 (.528) and an average launch angle below 10 degrees (8.4); the other three — Eloy Jiménez, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and Christian Yelich — all have SLGs in the .507–.510 range with angles in the 5.9–8.3 degree range. If Soto is averaging 16.4 degrees even for a stretch of time, something is probably off. Read the rest of this entry »