Overlord Dave and I exchange a lot of emails, and earlier Thursday he sent me an email declaring that everybody’s talking about the Padres. I chuckled heartily to myself, as Dave is one of the funniest people I know. The Padres are about as forgettable a franchise as any in the major professional sports. They could win seven consecutive World Series and still people would only talk about them in order to complain about the camouflage uniforms. But while everybody most certainly is not talking about the Padres right now, more people are talking about the Padres right now than were talking about the Padres some months ago. That’s because the Padres have been playing some outstanding baseball.

By their standards, at least. Maybe “outstanding” is too strong a term, but since June 10 — an endpoint carefully selected to make the Padres look as good as possible — the Padres have gone 41-30 and they’ve outscored the opposition by 23 runs. Overall, they’ve drawn to within a game and a half of the Red Sox, and while the Red Sox clearly aren’t what they were supposed to be, that’s a psychologically significant fun fact. The Padres and the Red Sox aren’t too different. The Padres now might well be better than the Red Sox now. What a game, baseball.

The Padres are nowhere close to a playoff race, because before they caught fire, they played baseball as if they were literally on fire. Yet their stretch of success has people wondering if the playoffs might be in the Padres’ near-term future. Let’s examine how this stretch has happened, and what the Padres’ outlook looks like.

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I’ve written quite a bit this year on trends in pitcher aging, specifically velocity loss and gain. In the last iteration I focused on the odds of pitchers gaining velocity back after a season where their fastball dropped by at least 1 mph.

In that piece I listed a few pitchers to keep your eye on given that their velocity was down from 2011. In June, I wrote about CC Sabathia for ESPN and noted that the big lefty is likely beginning to “age”, as the odds are quite a bit higher that pitchers over the age of 30 do not gain their velocity back once they’ve lost it.

After thinking about it a while it occurred to me that there is of course the chance that these pitchers will gain their velocity back by the end of the year (as I noted in both pieces). We know that, generally speaking, pitchers gain velocity as the season goes on. Temperatures rise, and so too do fastball velocities. If this is the case I wondered at what point in the season we can say with greater certainty that a pitcher is throwing as hard as he is going to throw. Is there a particular month where a velocity decline is more likely to translate to or predict a full season velocity decline?
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Trevor Bauer makes his Major League Debut tonight. Carson already wrote about it, and the coverage of his impending promotion has included months of conversation, including a movement to #FreeTrevorBauer. Bauer’s big league debut has been heavily anticipated and is now going to be heavily watched.

However, there’s another guy getting called up from the minors to join the rotation of an NL West team tonight too, and he’s doing it with little to no fanfare. Carson didn’t even mention his start under “other notable games”, and no one has ever used the hashtag #FreeAndrewCashner. So, while the Trevor Bauer Hype Train rolls on, don’t miss out on Andrew Cashner’s first real big league start of 2012, because he very well may be the best pitching prospect to take the mound tonight.

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The minor leagues are a vast landscape of prospects, fillers and veterans. Each year, players from all three of those category impact the major leagues — sometimes for the better, sometimes not. But before they make their September callups or injury replacements, let us familiarize ourselves with some of the standouts.

International League (AAA)
IL Leaderboards

Brad Eldred (.374 OBP, .695 SLG, .465 wOBA, 197 wRC+)

The 31-year-old Eldred was slugging away in the Tigers minor league system (since released and playing in Japan). Like Dan Johnson (173 wRC+) with the White Sox, Eldred would have required multiple injuries before getting consideration at first base. The Tigers have both Miguel Cabrera and Prince Fielder, while the Sox have a trio in Adam Dunn, Paul Konerko and now Kevin Youkilis. That cavalcade of injuries never came — nor an age of enlightenment in which Delmon Young is no longer a DH in Detroit — Eldred never got a steady shot with the Tigers.

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Few players have had the swings of fortune that Anthony Rizzo has experienced.

After being drafted in the sixth round by the Red Sox in 2007, he had an unspectacular but promising debut for an eighteen year-old in rookie ball (.286/.375/.429). Then he found out he had Hodgkin’s lymphoma and spent most of 2008 eating, sleeping, and getting chemotherapy. It took him until 2010 to really bounce back, but that year he hit .263/.334/.481 in Double-A for the Red Sox and suddenly appeared on prospect lists. Then he was traded to the Padres and hit .141 with the big league club in 153 plate appearances. Then he hit 26 home runs in Triple-A. Then he was traded to the Cubs. Then he hit 23 home runs in 284 Triple-A plate appearances.

Now the 22-year-old first baseman has been called up a second time, perhaps to stay. That’s a lot of back-and-forth swings for Rizzo. It should be no surprise, then, that his fortunes hang on his ability to sustain the changes he’s made to his swing.

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If you hadn’t guessed from my first piece on Midwest League prospects, the league is simply loaded with talent. Taking that statement one step further, few would argue it was the best prospect league in all of minor league baseball at present. In this installment, seven more prospects ranging from the relative unknowns to household names (if there is such a thing when it comes to prospects).

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Yesterday, the Padres traded reliever Ernesto Frieri to the Angels, in exchange for Minor Leaguers Alexi Amarista and Donn Roach. Frieri has pitched very well thus far this season, with walk and strikeout rates significantly better than he had in 2011, albeit in a much smaller sample. But will the Angels be getting that pitcher? Petco Park seemingly has a way of elevating mediocre pitchers into above-average, or even elite ones. That has never seemed as prevalent as it has this year, as we have watched Heath Bell struggle to put away the likes of Joaquin Arias and Travis Buck.

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According to the San Diego Union Tribune, the Padres are currently considering adopting an adjustment in the dimensions of their home ballpark.

“We’re open-minded and we’re seriously considering it,” Padres interim CEO Tom Garfinkel said Tuesday.

“I do believe it is too extreme right now. It will still be a pitcher’s ballpark. But a hitter should be rewarded if he crushes it. And if a team is down 4-0, they should feel there is some hope. It’s just too extreme.”

Petco is, of course, well known as the best pitcher’s park in baseball, and especially so for right-handers who benefit from the amount of space in right-center field specifically. The 400 foot distance to right-center makes it the hardest place in baseball for a left-handed hitter to pull a home run. In fact, no stadium affects any other outcome as much as Petco deflates home runs by left-handed hitters. As Garfinkel notes, the park is just too extreme, especially in that specific area. Right-handed pull hitters can survive – which was part of the reason the Padres acquired Carlos Quentin – but left-handed pull hitters just have little chance of success in San Diego.

While it’s true that the park has given the team the ability to build up quality pitching staffs without expending too many resources on premium arms, the Padres ability to develop quality left-handed bats is severely compromised by the park they play in. Bringing in the fences in right-center field is probably in the best interest of the franchise.

Yesterday, the Dodgers and Padres played for the seventh time on the season. Just like they had done in five of the first six match-ups, the Dodgers ended up victorious. However, unlike the previous games, they got some significant assistance in coming out on top. Here’s the Win Expectancy graph of yesterday’s SD/LA match-up:

Source: FanGraphs

You’ll immediately notice a giant spike in the Dodgers’ Win Expectancy in the ninth inning, as they went from having just a 30.1% chance of winning to a 62.2% chance of winning on one play. This is how that play is described in the play log:

Jesus Guzman hit into a triple play to catcher (Grounder). Yonder Alonso out at third. Chase Headley out at second.

And this is what that play actually looked like:

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Every year it seems there’s a new reclamation project looking to get his career restarted in PETCO Park. This year, it’s Edinson Volquez. The former Reds hurler is looking to recapture the magic of his 2008 season, in which he struck out 206 batters in 196 innings and recorded a 3.21 ERA and a 3.60 FIP.

Nobody expects quite that much out of Volquez in 2012 as a member of the Padres, but his first two starts in San Diego have gone quite well. The 28-year-old rightyhas racked up 15 strikeouts in just 12 innings. His trademark wildness is still there — he’s already walked seven batters — but he’s done enough to limit the damage, allowing five total runs (four earned) in the two starts. In the final six innings of last night’s start he shut out the Diamondbacks while allowing just two hits — a three-hit first inning brought about the only runs Arizona would muster until extras.

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