Good morning from Philadelphia,
From sweeping to swept.
From rolling to wheels coming off.
From seeming unstoppably good to seeming hopelessly bad.
This is what a team that hovers around .500 often looks like. This is what the Padres are.
They are 37-38. They are thrilling then boring. Powerful then ineffective. Smart then bone-headed.
They reached what is so far their peak of three games over .500 on June 1 and are four under .500 since then.
They have been a losing team more often (32 days) than anything else this season. They have spent 23 days at .500 and 20 with a winning record.
“It just feels like we just keep taking two steps forward and one step back,” Jake Cronenworth said.
If you don’t take him literally — because 2-1 over and over adds up to a great record — he is spot on.
Why we would be surprised at this point is the only thing that is surprising.
You know what? Mike Shildt was right. This isn’t a rollercoaster after all. (If you think so, you need to have ridden better roller coasters.)
Even though the ups and downs are somewhat dizzying, they have become predictable.
The Padres have lost five in a row twice and three in a row twice. They have won four in a row once and three in a row four other times. They refuse to die and refuse to live.
We talk in this space quite often about all the things the Padres do that good teams do. We also spend a fair amount of time discussing the bad things the Padres do that bad teams do.
A little bit of all that showed up in their 11-6 loss to the Mets yesterday. The Padres had another big inning and fought back. But they were in a big hole because another starting pitcher had a bad day.
You can read about what happened in my game story (here) and my sidebar (here) on Dylan Cease and the inconsistent starting rotation.
Left again
Cronenworth is like the rest of the Padres players and coaches when it comes to the topic of why the Padres have struggled so much against left-handed starting pitchers.
“It’s crazy,” he said yesterday morning. “No idea.”
But he was reasonably sure about something.
“I don’t think it’s possible to face more lefties in a two-week span than we have,” he said.
It is, of course, possible. But it is rarely required.
And while Cronenworth was perhaps subject to a recency bias, as the Padres had faced four consecutive left-handers before righty Tylor Megill started for the Mets yesterday, the abundance of lefties actually goes back a little more than a month.
They have faced a left-handed starter in 15 of their 30 games since May 15. A 50 percent rate is high considering just more than a quarter of the 122 pitchers to have made 10 starts this season are left-handers.
The Padres will face two more lefties in the coming three days against the Phillies — Christopher Sánchez tonight and Ranger Suarez on Wednesday.
It has not gone well so far.
They are 5-10 in their past 15 games that have been started by a left-hander and 11-14 overall in games started by lefties.
For the season, left-handed starters are 11-5 with a 2.52 ERA and 15 quality starts against the Padres. The Padres are batting .220 against left-handed starters and .227 against lefties overall.
There was a time early in the season when they had faced almost every one of the major leagues’ top 10 left-handed starters. Lately, that has not been the case. They got a run on four hits Friday against Sean Manaea (4.30 ERA coming in) and a run on two hits Saturday against Jose Quintana (5.29 ERA coming in).
What is strangest about their batting average ranking 23rd and their OPS (.663) ranking 22nd in MLB against lefties this season is that they have a number of players who have historically thrived against left-handed pitching.
The Padres hit .271 (fourth) with an .808 OPS (third) against lefties last season.
Out and out
Manny Machado said his sixth-inning ejection wasn’t about anything other than one bad call.
“The pitch was low,” he said. “I’m battling there, 3-2 count.”
The pitch that home plate umpire Adam Beck ruled was strike three in Machado’s at-bat leading off the sixth inning was low. Machado slammed his bat on the ground as he walked away and then turned back toward Beck and was immediately ejected.
Machado then said some loud words to Beck while their faces were very close together.
Shildt joined Machado on his way to the clubhouse a minute later, having come out to get his player away from the umpire and then getting tossed for the words he said to Beck.
Machado had driven in the Padres’ first run with a first-inning single and finished 1-for-3 on Sunday. He was 1-for-12 in the series, is 1-for-15 with eight strikeouts over the past four games and is batting .245 on the season.
But the frustration he showed on the field, he said, “was just that at-bat.”
On-call catcher
Tyler Wade, who has started at least one game at six positions, has added another.
The hope is he is never needed behind the plate.
“But we don’t want to be dealing with ‘what-if’ in the middle of a game,” catcher coach Brian Esposito said.
The what-if scenario would most likely arise in a situation such as in the first two games of the Mets series when David Peralta pinch-hit for catcher Kyle Higashioka. Luis Campusano entered the game behind the plate in the next half-inning, leaving the Padres an injury away from not having a catcher.
Wade spent time on the field, in the cage and in the bullpen over the weekend at Citi Field practicing the basics of what would be required if he is ever needed to catch in a game.
“I’m already two players in one,” said Wade, who has played all three outfield positions and every infield spot except first base in his eight big-league seasons. “The more you can do.”
One player is not thrilled about this development — in a joking but not entirely joking sort of way. Cronenworth has long held himself to be the Padres’ emergency catcher.
“Oh, I saw it,” Cronenworth said of Wade’s preparation. “I let them know.”
Tidbits
- Luis Campusano, who had the previous two games (three days) off, was 2-for-2 with a walk yesterday. The rest helped his good fortune as much as anything. Campusano doubled on a bloop fly ball to right field and singled on a dribbler up the third base line.
- Jackson Merrill’s home run streak ended at three games, but he was 1-for-3 and forced in a run with a bases-loaded walk to extend his hit and RBI streaks to four games. Merrill has at least one hit in 10 of the past 11 games and is batting .350 (14-for-40) with two doubles and four homers in that span.
- Fernando Tatis Jr. has not chased any of the 22 pitches he saw outside the strike zone in the previous three games and had chased at less than a 20 percent rate in the six games before that. He swung at three of seven pitches outside the zone yesterday (one in three of his four strikeouts).
- Machado was just the second Padres player ejected this season. Jurickson Profar was tossed on April 20.
- Shildt has been ejected three times, which leads all managers in 2024.
- Through June 1, the Padres had the second-best road record in the major leagues (19-10) and led the majors with a .295 batting average and 5.4 runs per game on the road. Since then, they have lost seven straight road games and batted .211 and averaged 2.3 runs per game while doing it.
- When justifying why they have swept just one series this season, the Padres have talked about how difficult it is to sweep a team. And that might be a fact. Yet they have now been swept four times. (Just five teams have been swept more often this season.)
One last thing
The emails I get regarding a manager’s bullpen usage generally go something like this:
Emailer: He shouldn’t have used so and so in the seventh inning.
Me: Who should he have used?
Emailer: Anybody but so-and-so.
Rest assured, Shildt and his staff give far more time and thought to which pitchers they use than any of us. And they consider far information more than we do.
Shildt meets with pitching coach Ruben Niebla and bullpen coach Ben Fritz before each game to go over different scenarios of how they might navigate nine innings (or more). Most of the discussion revolves around how they can use relievers to get through a win.But they talk about who is available if things go wrong as well.
Niebla has his formula for deciding what level of readiness each reliever is at based on their workload over the previous few days and the previous week. They have received input from the training staff and analytics department.
They are aware, too, what is coming up.
Yesterday, as a Padres starting pitcher went 3⅔ innings for a second consecutive day, Shildt had to keep in mind the Padres were heading to play a series against the powerful Phillies and have 10 more games before their next day off.
With long man Jhony Brito having thrown 2⅓ innings on Saturday, he had to get 1⅓ innings out of Yuki Matsui and ask Stephen Kolek to go two innings after pitching an inning Saturday.
Of his game planning with the bullpen, Shildt said: “I’ve always said we’re preparing for the black and the white, and then the gray is gonna break out, which is the game.”
All right, that’s it for me.
Not sure if there will be a newsletter tomorrow. I haven’t seen my wife this month. She happens to be in Philadelphia this week. If she wants to hang out, then I might not do a newsletter one of these nights here. I guess it’s possible I won’t do one either of the next two nights. But we’ve been married 30 years, so I doubt she’ll want to see that much of me.
Talk to you soon.
