Archive for Padres

In last week’s mailbag, I ran through the list of teams that posted losing seasons and finished with positive run differentials. The question was inspired by this year’s Tigers, who were 64-75 (.460) when I wrote my response the previous afternoon, despite outscoring their opponents by 0.34 runs per game. I wrapped up my answer by mentioning that the Tigers could become the first team ever to lose 90 or more games during a season in which they scored more runs than they allowed. So before we get to this week’s mailbag, I’d like to provide an update on Detroit’s chance at history.

As of Friday afternoon, the Tigers had gone 3-4 in their past seven games, bringing their overall record to 67-79 (.459) with a per-game run differential of 0.377. Fittingly, all four of their losses in that span were decided by one run, while their margin of victory in their three wins was +12. They are the worst team in the majors this season in one-run games, with a record of 14-27 (.341). Their .459 winning percentage on the season puts them on pace for between 87 and 88 losses this year.

This week, I’ll answer the inverse of that question and discuss teams that finished above .500 with negative run differentials. We’ll also see how different baseball would be if teams could use a DH for every position, find the teams that score the most runs on bases-loaded walks and hit-by-pitches, and look at how teams should deploy their relievers in the ninth and 10th innings of tie games. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

With the passing of Labor Day, the 2026 regular season has less than three weeks remaining. While neither league’s playoff races are as turbulent as the AL Wild Card race appeared to be just a couple of weeks ago — to say nothing of the Before Times, when Major League Baseball used actual tiebreaker games instead of math to settle ties, and rooting for end-of-season chaos was a whole lot more fun — it’s time for a check-in to outline what’s at stake.

Right now, in four of the six division races — all but the NL Central and NL West, where the Brewers and Dodgers both have comfortable margins — the first-place team leads by four games or less. That said, the hill that the Phillies (81-64) have to climb to catch the Braves (85-60) is steeper than it appears, because Atlanta clinched the season series with a 5-4 win this past Sunday and owns a 7-3 advantage, with the two teams set to play their final three games starting on Friday at Truist Park. Thus, if the two teams finish the regular season tied, the Braves would be the division winner and the Phillies a Wild Card team. Philadelphia has to overtake Atlanta to claim the NL East flag, something our Playoff Odds suggest has just an 8.2% chance of happening. Read the rest of this entry »

Bryan Balzer is arguably the most intriguing prospect in the San Diego Padres system. Currently ranked eighth with a 40 FV, the 21-year-old right-hander had virtually no pitching experience when he entered pro ball in 2023. Moreover, he blew out his elbow and had Tommy John surgery following his lone turn on the mound. That was at Joso Gakuin High School, roughly an hour northeast of Tokyo.

His current season has been somewhat of a mixed bag. Between Low-A Lake Elsinore (60 1/3 innings) and High-A Fort Wayne (32), he has a record of 6-2 to go with a 4.58 ERA, a 5.17 FIP, and a 23.4% strikeout rate. But while at times he’s been all too hittable, he has also shown flashes of high-ceiling potential. When I saw him toe the rubber for Fort Wayne in mid-July, Balzer fanned eight batters — including Tigers top prospect Bryce Rainer with two out and the bases juiced — while holding West Michigan to one run over five frames. A day prior, I asked him about his decision to sign with the Padres rather than joining another MLB organization or staying home to pitch in NPB.

“My goal was to be a professional baseball player; I didn’t care if was Japan or America,” replied the Yokosuka native. “But I grew up watching Yu Darvish and wanted to be on his team.”

Balzer, who was mostly raised in Nippon but spent a few years stateside while in grade school, went on to say that his decision was also influenced by his Tommy John surgery; the Padres expressed less concerned than other MLB teams about his having gone under the knife. As for the NPB teams he might have landed with — this via the league’s draft process — the Hanshin Tigers were the first to have a scout approach him after his lone pitching appearance. In terms of overall interest, he recalls the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants having been “the main ones.” Read the rest of this entry »

With apologies to Tarik Skubal and the Dodgers, for my money the most eye-catching deal ahead of Monday’s trade deadline was the Red Sox acquiring Adley Rutschman in a six-player blockbuster with the Orioles. Not only did a switch-hitting All-Star catcher move from one Wild Card contender to another, but he did so within the same division — and he’s more than a rental, with one more year of arbitration eligibility before he reaches free agency. Though he’s currently on the injured list due to inflammation in his left wrist, Rutschman is reportedly nearing a rehab assignment, and once he returns, he should provide a substantial upgrade for a team whose catchers landed on my Replacement-Level Killers list a few weeks ago.

Rustchman wasn’t the only prominent catcher on the move to a contender on Monday, as the Marlins traded Liam Hicks to the Rays, but he’s a part-time backstop whose hitting makes him a useful DH and first base option as well. While the concurrence of his being dealt illustrates that trading for a catcher on the fly in the midst of a playoff race isn’t unheard of, such moves do stand out. They’re not to be undertaken lightly because of the weighty responsibility that falls on a catcher’s shoulders in terms of quickly having to build relationships with a new pitching staff to understand repertoires, situational preferences, and interpersonal dynamics. Odds are that those newcomers are also expected to provide more offense than the catchers they replaced, because offensive slumps often spur teams to make such changes. Read the rest of this entry »

The Padres got the second-best pitcher traded by the Tigers at the deadline.

On Monday, Casey Mize was traded from Detroit to San Diego in exchange for pitching prospects Kash Mayfield and Jackson Wolf. The Padres also got minor league infielder Gage Workman in the deal.

Mize has been exceptional in 2026… when healthy. He’s posted a 2.70 ERA and 2.58 FIP in 86 2/3 innings. His 2.9 WAR is already a career best. He’s thrown strikes, missed bats, and kept the ball in the ballpark. He looks very much like the pitcher the Tigers were hoping to get when they drafted him first overall way back in 2018.

Unfortunately, Mize has also looked like the pitcher the Tigers ultimately got — or didn’t get — since his debut. He missed a few weeks in May with an adductor strain, and a few more weeks in June with adductor inflammation. Those trips to the injured list were the fifth and sixth of his career. He missed most of 2022 and all of 2023 while recovering from Tommy John surgery, and missed time with less significant hamstring injuries in 2024 and 2025. Mize exits Detroit having thrown just 526 2/3 innings over 105 outings spread across seven years; he’ll be a free agent this offseason. Read the rest of this entry »

The Padres added some sorely needed starting pitching on deadline day, bringing in left-hander Robbie Ray from the Giants in exchange for a pair of prospects, right-hander Miguel Mendez and shortstop Joniel Hernandez. Ray, 34, has put up a 3.08 ERA and a 4.36 FIP across 21 starts in 2026, with 15 homers allowed, 57 walks, and 107 strikeouts over 122 2/3 innings. In 11 Double-A starts this year, Mendez has a 4.93 ERA but a 3.21 FIP with more than a strikeout per game. He’s yet to allow a home run in 2026. Hernandez signed out of Cuba back in January as an international free agent and, at age 17, is running a .927 OPS in the Dominican Summer League.

The 2021 AL Cy Young winner is not the only coveted starter heading to San Diego. In addition to Ray, the Padres also acquired right-hander Casey Mize from the Tigers just minutes before the 6 PM ET deadline. (We’ll cover the Mize trade in a separate post.)

San Diego spent the first two months of the season pleasing most of the baseball world by sticking its thumbs in the eyes of the playground’s big dog, the Los Angeles Dodgers. Wresting first place for spells in the early going, the Padres hit their high-water mark on May 18, when they stood at 29-18 with a half-game lead earned by besting the Dodgers in the opener of a three-game series. Los Angeles took the final two games, though, and the Padres haven’t been serious threats for the NL West since then. After dropping 10 of 11 games in late May, they’ve been preoccupied just trying to keep above the .500 mark. But just as things looked their bleakest, the Friars turned things around. Having won eight of their last nine games, the Padres entered Monday just a game behind both the Diamondbacks and Phillies for the final wild card spot, quieting any whispers that they’d be sellers at the deadline. Read the rest of this entry »

Three interviews — two with pitchers, another with a hitter — were published here at FanGraphs over the past week. All were the result of lengthy conversations, and in each case, worthwhile snippets landed on the cutting-room floor. This week’s column will lead with those leftovers, which come courtesy of Drew Rasmussen, Cole Sulser, and Pete Alonso.

We’ll start with Rasmussen, who addressed his ability to command his offerings, particularly his four-seam/two-seam/cutter combination.

“Command is kind of a sliding scale,” said the Tampa Bay Rays right-hander, whose 4.3% walked rate ranks lowest among qualified hurlers. “Some days it’s really good and some days it’s not so good. The job is to figure out what you have as quickly as possible. On days when my command is really good… I would say that is situation-driven. If I need a ball on the ground, I can throw it with a little more tail and a little less carry. If I’m just trying to steal strike one, maybe I don’t want the [movement] profile to be as big; that way it has a better chance of staying in the zone.

“Conversely, on days that I’m not overly confident with my command, I simplify to the absolute max,” he continued. “We’re going to try to just throw the same one over and over again. Then, hopefully at some point over the course of the outing, something clicks and I start to get more and more confident, and comfortable, with the command I have that day.” Read the rest of this entry »

Fifty-one weeks ago, the San Diego Padres traded a king’s ransom in prospects to the Athletics in exchange for depth starter JP Sears and hard-throwing relief ace Mason Miller.

Ordinarily, I would’ve abhorred such a move. The top prospect who went the other way, Leo De Vries, came in at no. 6 overall in the Preseason Top 100 Prospects list, and in my mind there’s no more overrated commodity in baseball than team control for a reliever. What the Phillies gave up for two and a half years of Jhoan Duran, immense a haul as it seemed at the time, was a fraction of what four and a half years of Miller cost.

Still, I kind of got it. Read the rest of this entry »

At last we reach the end of my annual series spotlighting the weakest positions on contending clubs. While still focusing upon teams that meet that loose definition of contenders (Playoff Odds of at least 10% when this series began), I’ve also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included it here because the team’s performance is worth a look.

At the other positions in this series, I have used 0.6 WAR or less thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — as my cutoff, but for the designated hitters, I’ve limited the list to the teams below zero, both to keep the length manageable and to account for the general spread of value. In the fifth full season of the universal DH, 0.2 WAR represents the current median, with 11 teams below zero, 12 between zero and 1.0, and just seven with 1.0 or more, with only five reaching 2.0. DHs as a group have hit .244/.325/.422 for a 106 wRC+ this season, down four points from last year’s final mark, the highest since the adoption of the universal DH.

It does appear that an increasing number of teams are investing more playing time in a single DH. From 2022 (the first full-length season with the universal DH) to ’25, the number of players reaching 450 plate appearances in the DH role increased from three to four to seven to nine; this year, they’re on pace for nine, as well. That said, all but one of the teams on this list are the ones that haven’t found that special someone to take the lion’s share of the plate appearances. Read the rest of this entry »

In years past, I’ve generally addressed the teams receiving less-than-acceptable production in one corner outfield spot or the other within the same post, but this year’s batch of right fielders is disproportionately large, mandating a separate entry that led me to combine the left and center field lists instead. There’s still some crossover between most teams’ pools of right fielders and the positions I covered in the previous post, with a couple teams from this group landing on both lists. As they look to upgrade, there’s some fluidity as well, with teams willing to test the defensive limitations of their outfielders in order to shoehorn better bats into the lineup.

While still focusing on clubs that meet the loose definition of contenders (a .500 record or Playoff Odds of at least 10%), and that have gotten about 0.6 WAR or less out of a position thus far (which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season), I’ve also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included the club here because its performance is worth a look.

As noted previously, some of these situations are more dire than others, particularly within the context of the rest of a team’s roster. As always, I don’t expect every team here to go out and track down upgrades before the August 3 trade deadline, but these are ones to keep an eye on. Read the rest of this entry »