Padres Lose Musgrove and Let Slip a Golden Opportunity

For a team with a losing record, the Padres were aggressive in advance of the August 1 trade deadline, swinging three trades in order to patch holes on the major league roster without fretting about the impact of further increasing their payroll. Yet their first week since upgrading their roster hasn’t gone well. Not only did they lose Joe Musgrove to the injured list on Friday, but they also followed that by losing three of four to the Dodgers this weekend at Petco Park, missing a golden opportunity to get to .500 for the first time in nearly two months and gain ground on the NL West leaders.

The 30-year-old Musgrove was scratched from his start last Wednesday in Colorado due to what was initially termed “minor” shoulder soreness. The thinking at the time was that he would just miss one turn and be able to start against the Mariners in a two-game series starting on Tuesday. But when Musgrove flew home to San Diego to be examined, an MRI revealed that he had inflammation in his right shoulder capsule. Surgery is not yet a consideration, but he’ll be shut down from throwing for at least three weeks, meaning that at best he’ll return sometime in September. The Padres won’t have much clarity until he is examined after his rest period, and then he’ll need at least a couple of weeks to rebuild his pitch count.

The injury caught Musgrove by surprise. “I honestly thought we were going in for a pretty routine checkup… but they went in and found some injury to the capsule,” he told reporters. “Every part of me wants to go out there and throw. But everything’s telling us that we needed to step back and give it some rest.”

The injury caught the Padres by surprise as well. Said general manager A.J. Preller, “At the time of the deadline, we honestly were not looking at Joe as missing a few weeks or extended time or anything like that.” Preller did reinforce the pitching staff by acquiring starter Rich Hill from the Pirates in one deadline-day trade and reliever Scott Barlow from the Royals in another, but they don’t add up to a healthy Musgrove.

On that note, after two seasons in which he threw a combined 362.1 innings with a 3.06 ERA, 3.64 FIP, and 6.9 WAR — a performance that helped him earn a five-year, $100 million extension along the way — Musgrove has had a hard time staying healthy this year. On February 27, he fractured his left big toe in a weight room accident, which put him behind schedule in spring training and landed him on the IL to start the season. During his first rehab start with Triple-A El Paso, he injured the AC joint of his throwing shoulder after landing on it following an awkward throw to first base, which required a cortisone shot and pushed back his regular season debut until April 22. Since then, he’s had one start pushed back by a couple of days due to a blister on his foot, sustained after attempting to run barefoot on 120-degree artificial turf during the team’s series in Mexico City, and revealed in June that he had been wearing a compression sleeve on his right arm to deal with bursitis in his elbow. Despite that litany, he’s pitched to a 3.05 ERA and 3.53 FIP in 97.1 innings, good for 2.1 WAR, second among the team’s starters behind Blake Snell.

The loss of Musgrove leaves the Padres with a rotation of Snell, Yu Darvish, Hill, and Seth Lugo, with Nick Martinez, Michael Wacha, and Pedro Avila available to round out a five- or six-man unit. Each pitcher has his issues, including the stalwarts. For as strong as Snell has been in terms of ERA (2.61, tops among qualified starters in either league), his 3.67 FIP and 3.84 xERA both suggest he’s walked a tightrope in terms of contact and baserunners, and his 13.7% walk rate is the highest among qualifiers by 2.7 percentage points. Darvish has posted a 4.41 ERA, the highest full-season mark of his career, and hasn’t strung together more than two straight quality starts all season.

Wacha has been effective when available (2.84 ERA, 3.72 FIP) but is just now working his way back after missing over five weeks due to shoulder inflammation; he made 46 pitches in his first rehab start this past Saturday and needs at least a couple more outings to be fully built up. Martinez began the season in the rotation but, save for a three-inning spot start in place of Musgrove on August 2, has been in the bullpen and would need to be stretched out. Avila, a 26-year-old rookie who has struck out 21 in 13.2 innings spread over four appearances thus far, is built up; he threw 88 pitches in a four-inning start on August 1 and then 90 in a 4.2-inning appearance in relief of Hill on Sunday.

Hill made an inauspicious debut for the Padres, facing a righty-heavy Dodgers lineup built for such matchups; the 43-year-old southpaw has allowed a .355 wOBA to righties this year. In the first inning, one of the new righties the Dodgers acquired ahead of the deadline, Amed Rosario, hit a two-run homer off Hill. In the second, another such righty, Enrique Hernández, hit a leadoff single and scored, and Freddie Freeman soon followed with a three-run homer. Hill lasted just three innings in what became an 8–2 romp in Los Angeles’ favor.

That loss prevented the Padres from evening their record at 56–56; they haven’t been at .500 since May 11, when they were 19–19. But after slipping to a season-high eight games under at 38–46 on July 2, they had gone 14–9, allowing them to head into the deadline with some sense of momentum and a notion that the season could be salvaged without tearing apart their $251 million roster.

Sunday’s loss additionally guaranteed the Padres no better than a split in the four-game wraparound series. On Friday, Darvish matched his longest outing of the season, turning in seven innings of two-run ball and leaving with a 3–2 lead. But the Dodgers pounced on reliever Robert Suarez, who retired just two of the seven hitters he faced; all five eventually scored off Suarez and Tom Cosgrove, and the Dodgers added three more in the ninth for a 10–5 win. The Padres withstood a wobbly five-inning, four-walk, three-run effort by Snell the next day, overcoming a 3–1 deficit against a shaky Dodgers bullpen to win 8–3; the victory broke a six-game losing streak against Los Angeles dating back to May 6.

So the Padres arrived at Monday afternoon’s game badly needing a win. When they rolled up five runs against Tony Gonsolin in the third inning — two via a Luis Campusano homer, two via a Fernando Tatis Jr. double, and one via a Manny Machado sacrifice fly — it looked as though they might get one. To that point, Lugo had allowed just two singles in three innings, one of them erased via a double play. Then all hell broke loose: six of the first seven Dodgers in the top of the fourth reached safely, five via hits. David Peralta hit an RBI double, Jason Heyward a two-run double, and Miguel Rojas an RBI single that loaded the bases and cut the deficit to one.

Lugo had pitched well to this point in the season, making a smooth transition from relief work to post a 3.54 ERA and 3.75 FIP in 89 innings. He’d also been consistently eating innings lately, lasting six or more in five of his last six starts, capped by two seven-inning outings against the Pirates and Rockies. Over his past three turns, including a six-inning effort against the Tigers, he’d generated a healthy 15.7% swinging-strike rate and a 34.5% called strike and walk rate (CSW%). But Dodgers hitters are in a different class than those lineups, and on Monday they weren’t buying what Lugo was selling; he entered the fourth inning having thrown 42 pitches but netting just two swinging strikes. By the time the Dodgers loaded the bases, six of the 12 balls hit off of him were 95 mph or greater, three of at least 106.9 mph, namely the Heyward double and two singles by James Outman.

Thanks to Avila’s long outing, Padres manager Bob Melvin had most of his bullpen available, but he sat on his hands as the Dodgers ate Lugo alive like a school of piranhas devouring a cow. With the bases loaded and Lugo 25 pitches into the weeds in the third, having retired just one batter, Steven Wilson was heating up in the bullpen. Up next was Mookie Betts, whom Lugo had struck out twice — his only two strikeouts of the day, as it happened. Melvin stuck with his starter, but Lugo fell behind 3–0 and then served up the cookiest cookie that ever cookied — a 92.4 mph middle-middle four-seam fastball that Betts launched over the left-center field wall for a grand slam and an 8–5 lead.

The Dodgers went on to add another five runs in the sixth against Barlow, making it 13 unanswered until Campusano hit another two-run homer during garbage time in the ninth.

Melvin said after the game that Wilson wasn’t ready in time to face Betts, but that he would be ready for Freeman, the next hitter. He seemed to be watching a different game when it came to Lugo:

“[Lugo] was pitching great leading up to that… We just scored five and got some hits. You’ve got to give him a little rope. Obviously, it was going to be his last hitter as far as Betts goes, then it’s a grand slam. Next thing you know, it’s an eight-run inning. Look, obviously (I) don’t feel great about it. But up until then, he was pitching great. Then there were some balls up in the zone and all of a sudden they were getting good swings on them.”

It might be hyperbolic to suggest that the one-two gut punch of losses on Sunday and Monday, and the 34 runs allowed over four games, were the death knell for the Padres’ season, but in light of the loss of Musgrove, it will be that much harder for the 55–58 team to string together the kind of run they need to make they playoffs. The Padres are seventh in the NL Wild Card race, four games behind the Reds (60–55) in the third spot, with the slumping Diamondbacks (57–56) two games ahead of San Diego, the Marlins (58–56) two and a half ahead, and the Cubs (58–55) three ahead. Our Playoff Odds still like them more than all but the Wild Card-leading Giants (62–51) and Phillies (61–51), giving them a 39.3% chance of making it via that route.

To these eyes, that seems a stretch, particularly given that the Padres’ next 18 games, and 32 of their next 35, will be against teams with records of .500 or better: the Mariners, Diamondbacks, Orioles, Marlins, Brewers, Giants, Phillies, Astros, and Dodgers again, with only a three-game road trip to St. Louis as a respite. San Diego does get such a pillow-soft landing after that, with four of their final five series against the A’s, Rockies, Cardinals and White Sox, that the team actually has the NL’s second-lowest opponent winning percentage for the remainder of the season (.498), but if the roster doesn’t start showing its mettle, those games won’t matter.

Facing all those contenders, do the Padres have it in them to go something like 32–17 the rest of the way to get to 87 wins and a likely playoff berth? We’re about to find out, but given what we’ve seen thus far, I don’t think too many observers will be surprised if they don’t rise to the occasion.