On opening day, the Padres lost to the Dodgers by 11 runs, and the score makes the game seem closer than it was. It was more or less how the game was expected to go, and half the postgame stories revolved around the same narrative: It’s going to be a long season for San Diego. And, you know what, it probably will be a long season for San Diego. But after game number two, the Padres and Dodgers are even at .500. The Dodgers didn’t just lose on Tuesday — they got blanked, 4-0.

Yangervis Solarte hit a home run. That was a big deal. Erick Aybar went 3-for-3 with two doubles and a walk. That was a big deal. Wil Myers scored on a pop-up to short. That was a big deal. But the biggest deal of all was Clayton Richard, and his eight shutout innings. Richard threw 69% strikes and induced four double plays, and he wound up with a game score of 75, tied for the second-best mark of his career. His only better game came in 2012. Clayton Richard isn’t supposed to turn in these outings.

He won’t make a habit of it. Nobody could. But that isn’t the point. The larger point is that Richard is back, he’s healthy, and he’s rebuilt. He’s 33 years old and he’s part of a rotation many expect to be the worst in the league, but you have to give Richard some credit. He possesses a true 80 skill.

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The other day, I got a text from a baseball friend, asking if the Padres and Dodgers were getting prepped for the most lopsided opening-day matchup in baseball history. I didn’t and don’t have any good way to respond, since the necessary calculations would be way over my head, but it’s at least fun to poke around here to show just how awful this really looks. The Padres are bad, and the Dodgers are good. To make matters worse, the opening-day Padres get Jhoulys Chacin, and the opening-day Dodgers get Clayton Kershaw. One of the best teams in baseball, at home, against one of the worst teams in baseball, and the best team gets to use the best starting pitcher on the planet. Fantastic!

You might know that we calculate game odds, based on matchups, lineups, and location. When the Nationals hosted the Marlins earlier today, we put the Nationals’ pregame odds of winning at 63.2%. When the Mets hosted the Braves, we put the Mets’ pregame odds of winning at 65.2%. Here is where the Dodgers started off:

75.6%. Before anything had happened, we gave the Dodgers a 75.6% chance of winning. You don’t need the numbers to tell you the Padres were already up against it coming in, but for reference, all of last season, there were just seven games with the favorite at at least 75%. The most lopsided matchup of all had the favorite at 77.8%. Of the seven games in this table, four were Kershaw starts.

You see that the favorite won all of those games. This Dodgers-Padres showdown would’ve ranked as the seventh-most lopsided game of last year. No one’s going to be favored against Kershaw and the Dodgers, but at least in theory, on opening day, you get to put your best foot forward. The Padres’ best foot involves Jhoulys Chacin. The next game, at least, should look a lot better.

I’ll point out that last year’s biggest upset had the Phillies overcoming pregame odds of 74.4% in the Pirates’ favor. One day in, and the Padres have a shot to pull off a bigger upset than anything we saw all of 2016. How have things been going since I started this entry, when the teams were knotted up 1-1?

I see.

Christian Bethancourt made the Padres! This is exciting, because he’s making the team as a catcher and a reliever at the same time. His existence challenges norms in a sport that’s known for the specialized roles of its participants. That said, we’ll have to see if he’s more Brooks Kieschnick or more Kenley Jansen eventually. Because hitter-slash-pitcher Kieschnick was nearly a unicorn, while Jansen — though a special reliever since abandoning his work as a catcher — has a story that’s been told in baseball’s history before.

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Every year we release team projections, and every year people express disagreement with them. But it’s not large-scale disagreement — typically, people differ on one or two or three specific teams. Sometimes it’s been the Royals, sometimes it’s been the Orioles, and this year it’s the Rockies. Most of the projections are considered basically fine. The FanGraphs crowd has determined that the Padres’ 2017 projection is basically fine. The Padres are projected to be the worst team in baseball, at 65-97, and we put their playoff odds at 0.1%.

But there are certain numbers I love to bring up. I have team projections going back to 2005, and since then, all the teams projected to win no more than 70 games have averaged 68 projected wins, and 68 actual wins. In that sense, the projections have been great. Yet the 2008 Marlins were projected to win 68 games, and they won 84. The 2010 Blue Jays were projected to win 65 games, and they won 85. The 2012 Orioles were projected to win 70 games, and they won 93. All of those teams were thought to be bad. All of those teams were contenders.

The Padres, right now, are thought to be bad. What if they turned into contenders? Let’s follow an 11-step process to make that happen. Let’s try to get these Padres into the playoffs, without doing anything too unrealistic.

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Alan Zinter has a challenging job. The 48-year-old former first baseman is San Diego’s hitting coach, and the position players on the Padres roster are, with few exceptions, young and inexperienced. There is a plenty of raw talent, but there are also plenty of learning curves. Works-in-progress abound.

Zinter embraces the challenge, in large part because he enjoys teaching. By all accounts, he is very good at it. Prior to joining the Padres a little over a year ago, he served as assistant hitting coach in Houston, and before that he was Cleveland’s minor-league hitting coordinator. He began his coaching career in the Diamondbacks system.

He’s anything but old-fashioned in his understanding of the craft. Zinter is well-versed in launch angles and exit velocities, and as a result, he’s not interested in seeing his hitters — not even the speedy ones — slap balls on the ground and run. He wants them driving through the baseball with a swing plane that opens up a window and results in gap shots. From his perspective, it all starts from the launch position.

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Zinter on teaching proper swing mechanics: “With technology being what it is today, with the slo-mo cameras — the ability to slow down the swing — we can actually see what a good swing looks like. A lot of times, what’s taught is ‘chop wood, swing down on the ball, knob to the ball’ — things like that, which make for a shorter compact swing. But some guys who feel they’re doing that end up swinging improperly.

“A lot of hitters, when they try to swing down, lead with their hands. They’re too steep into the zone. Other hitters, for whatever reason, think the same thing and do it properly.

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As if being a 27-year old rookie weren’t hard enough, Ryan Schimpf went at things in an unprecedented way last season. While the fighter — schimpf literally means “to curse and fight” in German — probably established himself as a useful major leaguer with a couple of important tools, regression will come for a player with such an extreme batted-ball mix.

Since we started recording these things, no batter has ever had a qualified season during which he hit fewer than four grounders for every 10 fly balls. Schimpf hit three for every 10 in his debut last year. Even if you relax the entry to 300 plate appearances, the San Diego second baseman is an outlier — only one person has ever recorded a higher fly-ball rate.

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Baseball announced a handful of rule modifications today. For the most part, they’re concerning pace-of-play adjustments — there’s the modification about the new, automatic intentional walk, and there’s a line in there about a two-minute guideline for determinations on replay reviews. There’s nothing in there that should cause too much of a stir. We were given plenty of warning about the intentional walks. Yet one bullet point stands out from the others:

• An addition to Rule 5.07 stipulates that a pitcher may not take a second step toward home plate with either foot or otherwise reset his pivot foot in his delivery of the pitch. If there is at least one runner on base, such an action will be called a balk under Rule 6.02(a). If the bases are unoccupied, then it will be considered an illegal pitch under Rule 6.02(b).

With that, baseball has moved to clarify and formalize its position on Carter Capps‘ delivery.

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Last week, we ran an interview with Charlie Blackmon and Chris Denorfia on the subject of swing paths and launch angles. If you read the piece, you’ll recall that the Rockies outfielders share a similar philosophy, but come to it in different ways. One is studious in his pursuit of the science, while the other is satisfied to be aware of the launch-angle concept.

San Diego Padres teammates Carlos Asuaje and Wil Myers are much like their Colorado contemporaries. Both want to elevate the baseball, but one puts a lot of thought into the why, while the other tries to keep things as simple as possible.

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Carlos Asuaje: “It’s easy to overanalyze things, and try to focus on something that’s pretty tough to control. The angle of where the ball is going off your bat is a good example of that. But you want to hit the ball in the air. That’s the reality of it. It’s the way to get hits nowadays. There’s enough technology and science to back that up.

“It’s something I definitely focus on. Being a smaller guy doesn’t change the fact that it’s true. If you hit ground balls, you’re going to be out, especially at the major-league level. Guys don’t boot balls, they don’t throw poorly, and you’re not going to outrun the baseball. You have to play the odds, and the odds are that if you hit the ball in the air, you have a better chance to be successful.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about the Padres’ bullpen. More specifically, it was a post about how the Padres could dismantle their bullpen around the trade deadline. I tucked something in near the bottom, but I don’t know how many of you read that post, so here I want it to stand alone. Sorry for repeating myself, if you knew I was repeating myself.

First, to establish what we’re doing: Andrew Miller’s slider is one of the best pitches in baseball, yes? Miller is one of the best pitchers in baseball, and he just threw his slider more than half of the time. Miller’s secondary pitch, in 2016, was his primary pitch. Whenever one player does something extraordinary, people wonder who’s going to be next. So, who else, if anyone, throws something like the Andrew Miller slider? There is one name that stands out.

A few years ago, I introduced pitch comps. It’s just a simple method of comparing individual pitches based on velocity, horizontal movement, and vertical movement. Long story short, I looked at all 2016 lefties who threw at least 25 sliders. I ran the math, and just one other slider earns a comp score below 1.0. Granted, that threshold is arbitrary, but it’s what we’re working with. By a good margin, the slider most similar to Andrew Miller’s belongs to Brad Hand.

Miller has a little more zip, and an inch and a half more sink (on average), but the pitches are siblings, if not quite twins. Here, you can see the pitches in action, courtesy of a perfect Tampa Bay camera angle. Thank you, Tampa Bay! Here’s Miller:

And here’s Hand:

Miller threw his slider 61% of the time. It was a strike 72% of the time, and 48% of all swing attempts missed. Hand threw his slider 31% of the time. It was a strike 61% of the time, and 53% of all swing attempts missed. But it’s worth noting that Hand threw 44% sliders over the season’s final month. His command of it improved. And why wouldn’t it have? The pitch was relatively new. Hand hardly threw sliders until 2015’s second half.

Brad Hand’s slider is not as good as Andrew Miller’s slider. Not yet. But it is a very good pitch, and a very similar pitch, and considering how new it was to Hand last season, who’s to say it couldn’t get better? There are different ways for players to succeed. Andrew Miller blazed his own trail. Brad Hand could now be following in his footsteps.

Major League Baseball would never root for its own players to be injured, but sometimes the timing of certain injuries can be convenient. We spent a chunk of 2015 talking about whether Carter Capps‘ throwing motion should be allowed. Parallels were drawn to Jordan Walden, who has his own unorthodox delivery. Nothing was approaching the level of a crisis, but Capps was drawing a lot of attention, and he was dominating all the while. Then he got hurt, and he didn’t pitch in 2016. Walden also didn’t pitch in 2016. Baseball didn’t have to deal with anything, here, because nothing was happening. The deliveries were out of sight and out of mind.

Walden is still working his way back. There’s a chance he might never return to the majors. But, Capps? Capps has recovered from his elbow surgery. He’s been throwing in Padres camp, and based on early looks, he has made a mechanical change. Yet it still seems to be against the rules. Once more, this could turn into an issue.

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