The Necessity of The Padres' 7-8-9 Reliever Sequence

[Randy Holt]

If it's a tightrope with so many injuries, the San Diego Padres' late-inning trio are Philippe Petit.

I won't pretend I knew Philippe Petit's name offhand. I've seen The Walk (2015). I've heard of Man on Wire (2008). Regardless of your choice of media regarding the famed walk between the Twin Towers in 1974, the combination of walking and performing across a wire over 1,300 feet above the ground draws a (rather absurd) comparison to what the San Diego Padres are currently faced with as it relates to winning baseball games. 

The Padres are not healthy. They're currently rolling without Jackson Merrill, Jake Cronenworth, and Luis Arráez (among others) on the positional side and Yu Darvish, Bryan Hoeing, Matt Waldron, and Sean Reynolds on the mound. Despite a start that has them positioned as one of the best teams in Major League Baseball, it's not getting any easier considering the volume of IL placements. 

And yet, if the team can muster just enough offense, the late innings feel like the easy part. In the same way, Petit was able to traverse the length of the Towers with relative ease only after the arduous process of reaching the top; the late-inning combination of Jeremiah Estrada, Jason Adam, and Robert Suárez brings the same level of confidence in stepping out on the wire once they're there. 

Estrada & Adam rank in the top 30 in usage out of 215 qualifying relief pitchers. Estrada has thrown 11.2 innings while Adam has tossed an even dozen. Estrada has pitched to a 1.54 ERA and a 32.6 K% while stranding 90.9 percent of baserunners. His change in usage has been imperfect, but he's emerged clean in nine of his 11 appearances. Adam has been even better. His 37.0 K% is his best since limited work with the Chicago Cubs in 2021, with whiff, barrel, and hard-hit rates that all sit above the 90th percentile. 

Perhaps the most important part of this is a return to form for Suárez. Through just 10 innings of work, he's already two-thirds of the way to his 2024 fWAR total (0.9) thanks to a jump in usage on his change, allowing for more variety against opposing hitters. With that, he's experienced an uptick in punchouts (34.3 K%) and a decline in walks (5.7 BB%). He has yet to allow a run. 

 No team in baseball has a better relief corps than San Diego at the moment. Their collective 1.57 ERA and 4.5 percent barrel rate are pacing the league by a wide margin, with each of their K% (26.6) & Hard-Hit% (35.1) sitting in the top five. The Estrada-Adam-Suárez trio has accounted for roughly 40 percent of innings in relief for the Padres thus far. While Alek Jacob & Adrián Morejón have each been important factors in the middle innings, the late-inning group is the most important component of the team's roster at present.

The next couple of weeks will bring matchups against a Detroit Tigers roster that is in the top 10 in runs scored, a San Francisco Giants team that ranks sixth, and the No. 2 offense in the New York Yankees. They'll mix in tilts with the Tampa Bay Rays and Pittsburgh Pirates in between. Each of those teams also features the distinction of sitting in the top half of the league in ERA. Which means, again, that runs aren't going to be easy. 

This means that on those occasions when the Padres are able to secure a lead, they'll need the pitching staff to shoulder the load in keeping it. Getting out on that wire with a lead is going to be the challenge, but keeping it appears to be the easy part.

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