The Padres' Starters Short Outings Are Putting Too Much Stress On The Relief Corps... Or Are They?

Our eyes are the great deceivers. They're riddled with confirmation bias. Baseball might just prove this more than any other sight which they can observe. The latest example is my own subscribing to the idea that the San Diego Padres are driving their bullpen into the ground with short outings. 

The eye test is famously a failure when compared to hard data. In this case, the eye test spent a good deal of the first half telling me that the Padres weren't getting what they needed out of their starters in terms of length. Such an outcome would hardly be a surprise. We've watched Randy Vásquez struggle to work through multiple outings. The rest of the rotation has been filled, at times, out by the inexperienced likes of Stephen Kolek, Kyle Hart, and Ryan Bergert. Yu Darvish's return isn't going to offer much in the short-term length department, either, as he works his way back to full strength. 

Given such context, my eyes were entirely of the mind that the Padres were leaning too heavily on their vaunted bullpen. It is, of course, a relief corps worth leaning on. Padres' relievers are second in the league in ERA (3.20), sixth in the league in strikeout rate (24.3 percent), and fifth in the league in Hard-Hit% allowed (37.7 percent). But there's a little bit of a temperance factor, as well. One starts to wonder how sustainable such success can be in the long-term when you're regularly being deployed on the earlier end of the middle innings. 

Except that's not entirely what's happening. It's not what's happening at all. 

The average length of a start in all of Major League Baseball in 2025 is 5.2 innings. The Padres are at exactly that mark (the Philadelphia Phillies lead the league with 5.7 per start). While starters are throwing a volume of pitches per inning that ranks on the higher end of the league (16.47 pitches per inning), it hasn't manifested into markedly shorter outings in a broad sense. 

Of those that have started at least a game on the bump for San Diego this year, it's probably not surprising to know that each of Vásquez (5.0 IP/GS), Bergert (4.6), and Hart (4.3) falls below the league average. Yu Darvish, at 4.2 IP/GS, also falls in with that group through his two starts. 

The rest of the staff, meanwhile, has largely kept things together. Nick Pivetta is at 5.8 IP/GS, Michael King was at 5.6 prior to his injury, and Dylan Cease is at 5.4. Even Stephen Kolek has worked to a steady 5.7 IP/GS with a couple of clunkers mixed in. So while there have been questions about efficiency within starts, those that were expected to hold things down in terms of volume have (when healthy). 

While certain starters require more innings from the bullpen, it's not something that has translated into an abnormal volume. At 348.2 innings, the Padres rank only 13th in usage. Of the 174 qualifying relievers throughout MLB, five Padres sit inside the top 60: Jason Adam (47.2), Adrian Morejón (43.2), Jeremiah Estrada (43.0), Wandy Peralta (42.1), and Robert Suárez (40.2). In other words, three All-Stars (Adam, Morejón, and Suárez) and a late-inning guy (Estrada).

So it's more a matter of Mike Shildt leaning on his upper-tier arms than any deficiency being wrought by an inefficient rotation. 

The concept of leverage further illustrates this thinking. FanGraphs' Leverage Index quantifies the cruciality for individual players and classifies it into low, medium, and high leverage. The Average Leverage Index illustrates just that: in what type of leverage do players most often find themselves? 

The Padres' relief corps is at a 1.19 pLI, which ranks third in the league. That puts them firmly in medium-leverage situations, on average (defined as 0.85 to 2.0). By being involved in late-inning action, the leverage is automatically going to increase from what might be considered the lower end of the spectrum. So that figure lands kind of where one might expect without any indication of being regularly pressed into situations that were left by their starters.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the top four arms in pLI for San Diego in 2025 go Suárez (2.26), Adam (1.81), Estrada (1.62), and Morejón (1.46). Your closer in high-leverage and reliable arms at the upper end of medium just reads as logical. Names like Yuki Matsui (0.80) and Peralta (0.69), meanwhile, represent bullpen regulars that serve in the realm of lower leverage (under 0.85). Between the usage and the leverage, there just isn't anything to indicate that the starting pitching has been in any way damaging to the relief group. 

Which entirely speaks to the fact that our eyes deceive us. Or these eyes have seen a disproportionate amount of starts from Randy Vásquez this year. Either way, the reliance on an excellent bullpen isn't visibly coming at the expense of their longer-term efficiency.