What Should We Expect From the Padres in 2025?

[Davy Andrews]

Injuries and inaction have taken their toll on the Padres. How good is this team really?

This is my first article for Padres Mission, and with Opening Day on Thursday, it seems like a fitting time to talk about what we should expect this season. That’s important, because a lot has changed over the last couple months, and there seems to be a disconnect between the team’s expectations of itself and the projections.

Let’s start in 2024. The Padres went 93-69, the most games they’d won since they went to the World Series in 1998. They beat the Braves in the NL Wild Card Series and took the Dodgers, the eventual World Series winners, to five games in the NLDS. That’s a successful season by just about any standard, but as you’d expect, the Padres wanted more. "We got unfinished business," manager Mike Shildt recently said on MLB Network Radio. "It's a good group, you know. We don't want to, we want to build on last year, but not take it for granted. So we started zero, but we got a good group that's really hungry, and we're taking it, you know, putting our bricks in to build a really solid foundation for the season."

Unfortunately, the team has undeniably gotten worse since last season. With Peter Seidler gone, his brother John is the team’s control person (for now, anyway). John very clearly does not possess the same commitment to spending money on a winning team as his brother. Dylan Cease trade rumors have been flying for months. Along with catcher Kyle Higashioka and All-Star Jurickson Profar, the team let Ha-Seong Kim, who put up 2.6 fWAR even in an injury-shortened 2024 season, walk in free agency. Not only is Tanner Scott gone, but he’s on the Dodgers. Speaking to reporters about the offseason, Manny Machado said, “Are we disappointed we haven’t made any moves? Yeah. As a team, we do kind of look up there [to the front office], and you’re a little disappointed that we let some of the guys that were [part of the] core group here go elsewhere.”

Injuries have also played their part. Yu Darvish and Matt Waldron are starting the season on the IL, and Joe Musgrove will be out all year as he recovers from Tommy John surgery.

The catcher situation is particularly dire. In addition to losing Higashioka, the Padres demoted Luis Campusano to Triple-A, which means Elias Díaz will be the starting catcher, with Martín Maldonado backing him up. According to FanGraphs, that gives the Padres the worst catcher situation in all of baseball. But it’s actually worse than that, because when FanGraphs ran the numbers, Campusano was still expected to be the backup. Instead, the 38-year-old Maldonado, who has put up a combined -2.3 fWAR over the past two seasons and will almost certainly put up negative value again this season, will be the backup.

What do the projections think of this version of the Padres? Over at FanGraphs, the Padres are projected to go 81.4-80.6, finishing third in the division and possessing a 32.5% chance of making the playoffs. Baseball Prospectus's PECOTA is much more sanguine, projecting an 86.9-75.1 record. Those would represent enormous drop-offs from last season’s 93 wins. Back in February, Shildt told reporters, “What we have is pretty darn good… I’m really excited. You hear my voice, right? We all should be excited, but I can’t help everybody else and how they feel. But I can just tell you I couldn’t be more pumped.”

Shildt isn’t wrong. The Padres still have stars all over the place: Jackson Merrill had a huge coming out party in 2024. Fernando Tatis Jr. is a legitimate MVP candidate. Manny Machado and Xander Bogaerts are elite talents, and Luis Arraez is the game’s best pure hitter. On the pitching side, Dylan Cease is still here for now, and Opening Day starter Michael King is coming off an excellent 2024 season. The team also added stuff-monster Nick Pivetta. However, what they lack is depth. That’s the real reason the projections are scared. They know that people get hurt. Jose Iglesias is a perfectly solid utility infielder, but if someone should go down with an injury, he’s unlikely to continue the magical run he had with the Mets in 2024. The team is hoping to get by with Jason Heyward and Brandon Lockridge platooning in left field and no backup to speak of. That’s already not great, but if Tatis goes down with an injury, which he tends to do quite a bit, there doesn’t seem to be any backup plan.

Still, as the fine people who run them will gladly tell you, projections are by no means gospel. They’re meant to do a good job of predicting performance on a global level, and every year, players and teams overperform or underperform for all sorts of reasons. The Padres could absolutely have a great season and they could absolutely have another great postseason run. But the margin for error is a lot thinner this season. They’ll need good luck, especially when it comes to injuries, in order to get to the promised land.

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[Brock Beauchamp]

Getting Pivetta was a nice move, especially considering the budget, but it's hard to see a path forward beyond 2025. So I guess win it all this season?

[Brandon Glick]

Jason Heyward MVP incoming