Postseason Manager Report Card: Craig Stammen
While his season ended with a sour taste, having been bounced from the playoffs by the Brewers in the NLDS, it’d be hard to argue that Craig Stammen’s first season as Padres skipper was anything but a success, with 91 wins plus a Wild Card series victory over the Cubs. Now that his season is over, I’m back to the grade book to give Stammen a report card for his postseason performance in the six games he managed.
I’ll once again remind you, as Ben Clemens also will for his report cards for the AL managers, that I care about process and not results here. It’s easy to say, “That was a great move because it worked,” or “That was a bad move because it failed,” but managers obviously can’t know the results of their decisions as they’re making them. I’ve tried my best to transport myself back to the moment of each decision — taking into account the pitches, innings, and plate appearances that led up to it — while ignoring its outcome.
Before we get into the grades, I’ll also re-reiterate that while these are ostensibly manager report cards, there’s a much larger group of people behind the manager that helps to inform his decisions. Before the game, that includes discussions with the front office, which provides the reams of data that every manager has at his disposal during play. During the game, he’s getting feedback from his coaching staff and players on their levels of health and readiness. It really does take a village to get through a baseball game, and realistically, the praise and scorn doesn’t belong to the manager alone.
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The unavailability of Morejon and Miller for parts of the series obviously limited Stammen’s options and none of the bullpen moves really backfired on him, but in a vacuum I like to look at batters faced as a proxy for quality. King led the Padres with 27, which makes perfect sense, but Ray was second with 19. The Brewers have fairly dramatic platoon splits, so I get why you’d want to use lefties, but I’d rather have bet on Musgrove or Vazquez for bulk than Ray and reserved Ray to be the third lefty.
This is certainly not Stammen’s fault, but in the last series of the season the Padres sent a clearly injured Mize to make a disasterous start vs AZ, which necesitated sending Kyle Hart down to clear space for Adam. Had the Padres IL’d Mize and just thrown that game, they would have had a better lefty option in the pen than Ray or Wandy Peralta. Mize also would have been eligible to be activated during the NLDS had they backdated his placement.
It’s probably as much or more an FO decision as it was a Stammen one, but if Morejon was truly unable to pitch they had the option of IL-ing him and brining on someone else.
Of course that would have meant no Morejon for the NLCS. And perhaps he really would have been ready for a Game 5, or perhaps there were not reinforcements available that they thought would be worth calling on.
The biggest negative decision by the Padres for this series was the weird preference for Ray and Buehler over Randy Vazquez.
Vazquez pitched six innings of one run ball on the last game of the regular season against the Dbacks, and was a better pitcher than both over the course of the season.
For some reason that never seemed fully explained, he lost his spot and was moved to the pen behind not only those two but also Casey Mize, who was beyond awful. I assumed there was some injury … but after seeing Vazquez look perfectly fine, I just think they had a preference for two worse pitches.
Neither Buehler nor Ray could make it through any number of innings, which caused the stretch out of the bullpen, and that’s part of why the Padres lost.
Is there something we don’t know about Vazquez? I dunno, but it was very predictable that Ray and Buehler wouldn’t get through 4 innings.
I think some consideration should be given to other in game decisions like baserunning. In Game 1, the Padres had Harris tried to steal 2B with 1 out and he was thrown out. Ultimately, that cost the Padres a very important run, but that’s ok, I’m fine with the decision to send Harris in that spot, and it took a perfect throw from Contreras to nail him.
My bone to pick with Stammen is that it felt like he allowed that one play to change his decision making for the rest of that game and the next day which is when the Padres really lost the series. In the 7th in Game 1, Tatis singles with 1 out, had he stolen 2B, maybe he scores on Machado’s single. In the 8th, now trailing 3-2 they get 2 walks off of Hall, bring in pinch runners, but is there any small ball to grind out the tying run? No. Leadoff single in the 9th by Harris, but Stammen opts to wait for the 3 run homer that never comes.
Game 2. Top of the 8th, Padres lead by 1 run, Merrill singles to lead off, then Taylor follows with a bunt single. 2 fast runners on base, no outs, up by 1 run. Nothing happens, Bogaerts K’s, then Fermin grounds into a DP?!? Why didn’t they send the runners at some point, or have Bogaerts bunt, then bring in a pinch hitter for Fermin? Andujar was available to hit, Salas was available to catch, why allow Fermin to torpedo that opportunity?
Stammen was a deer in headlights after Harris got thrown out stealing and it may have cost the Padres the series.
This Padres core just lacks clutch as a whole in my opinion. Mason Miller turned into a pumpkin. Tatis and Merrill turned into ghosts… But this team was still just a roof cable away from making this a real series, kidding! It’s interesting to think about whether or not this core has reached its ceiling or if there’s actually more there. But with new ownership, the impending lockout, salaries owed (and no-trade clauses) and the team’s financial imperative to keep the building sold out, I don’t think we’re going to see a full-on Preller rebuild until Machado and Xander are pushing 40.