Remaining Schedule Favors Padres, But Only If They Take Advantage

[Randy Holt]

With now less than a month to go, all options are on the table for the San Diego Padres. 

When September reaches its end, the team could be named the champion of the National League West. Or they could take one of the three wild card spots available in the NL. The route they choose to take, however, is kind of on them to decide. Especially when one examines their schedule. 

Tankathon has the Padres with the easiest remaining schedule of any team in all of Major League Baseball. Their opponents have just a .434 winning percentage, with top opponents including the Milwaukee Brewers, New York Mets, and Cincinnati Reds. On the opposite end of the spectrum, they'll finish this week's series versus the Baltimore Orioles and get a series against the Chicago White Sox, to say nothing of seven games against the Colorado Rockies this month. It's a schedule worth taking advantage of if they're able. 

But it's also important to acknowledge the other end of things. From a win percentage standpoint, the Los Angeles Dodgers rank just 26th in their September opponents. They'll get a bit tougher of competition against the Philadelphia Phillies and Seattle Mariners, with seven games against a San Francisco Giants squad that would love to spoil some things for their rivals down the stretch. On the lower end, they get Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Colorado. So while it's easy to think that the Padres' schedule lines up favorably, that's also not happening in a vacuum. 

Plus, it's not as if we're looking at a Padres team ready to confront these lackluster squads while firing on all cylinders. 

The Padres dropped a series to the Minnesota Twins over the weekend. They lost their series opener to Baltimore on Monday. It's bad timing considering that the Dodgers just lost a long series to the Arizona Diamondbacks, preventing the Padres from making any headway in matters of the division and leaving them 2.5 games back heading into the remainder of the week. Nevertheless, it'll be really hard for them to not emerge from September with a playoff spot in hand.

FanGraphs likes the way the Padres are positioned in the standings and what they have the rest of the way. They're at 99.1 percent in terms of playoff odds. Similarly, Baseball Reference has them at that mark in their overall chance to reach the postseason. Where the two sites differ is in their chance to steal a division out from under the Dodgers. FanGraphs is giving the Padres only a 16 percent chance of taking the crown, while Baseball Reference has them at a 27 percent chance to do so.

So it would take something genuinely catastrophic for the playoffs not to be in the team's October future. At the same time, they're going to need to elevate play from what we've seen since a hot start to the month of August. 

In the second half of August, San Diego ranked just 19th in runs scored (73), with concerning trends emerging from the respective outputs of Manny Machado (56 wRC+), Luis Arráez (54), pre-injury Jackson Merrill (35), and Freddy Fermin (16). That's roughly half the lineup finding itself in some form of offensive woe. The pitching staff, meanwhile, posted a collective ERA that ranked 17th (4.34) and a FIP that sat just 26th (4.99) while posting the league's fourth-highest walk rate (9.9 percent). The team won just twice in their last seven to close out the month. 

It's a concerning trend for a team with such a favorable outlook for the remainder of the season. If the team is able to figure it out in short order, however, that favorability could bode well for them in establishing their positioning for the first round of next month's postseason. If they can't do so, even in the midst of such a healthy schedule, their failure to control their own destiny could spell doom early in October.

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