Artur Ivanov

The Padres' bullpen significantly regressed in May, posting a combined ERA of 5.36, compared to 1.77 in March and April. What once seemed like the team's strength has now become a bit of a question mark, as the group has given up several leads throughout the month and experienced several significant setbacks. The starting pitching stayed roughly the same, but with the injury to Michael King and the uncertainty of Yu Darvish’s return, the Padres’ starting pitching staff will be tested in the coming weeks. The team may need more starts from pitchers like Steven Kolek and Kyle Hart, and the daunting June schedule may prove to be a challenge for the group. Despite the downer month, there were still several bright spots for the Padres’ arms for both the starters and the bullpen. A couple of honorable mentions will go to starter Dylan Cease and reliever Jason Adam. Cease has been more like himself in May and has seen a significant improvement since his rough start to the season. His biggest improvement was cutting down the base traffic. He cut his WHIP down significantly since the previous month, going from a 1.62 to a 1.00, and opponents hit a cool .208 off of him. His 3.71 May ERA was a full two runs lower than his March/April ERA. However, Cease ended the month with a poor start against the Pirates on May 31, going just 4.2 innings and allowing three earned runs. He is also having trouble keeping the ball in the ballpark, allowing five home runs in May, and his Barrel% remains the highest of his career thus far at 11%. If Cease can limit the damage to solo home runs and avoid hard contact, he’ll continue to keep the Padres in games and get completely back on track. The emergence of Cease is also well-timed, as it is uncertain how long King and Darvish will remain injured. The Padres will need Cease to continue to improve and be a reliable starter while the two remain on the IL. Despite recent control issues, Jason Adam still had an impressive month of May and was one of the lone bright spots during a rough bullpen stretch. He led relievers with a 1.64 ERA in 11 innings pitched. In his 12 appearances out of the pen, Adam allowed just two earned runs while striking out eight in the process. While still certainly a good month, Adam ended it on a sour note, relinquishing the lead against Miami, where he allowed two unearned runs to score off three hits. His next time out against the Pirates, he walked two batters in ⅔ of an inning. Speaking of walks, Adam walked six batters in May, which was the third most among the Padres' relievers. These few hiccups, along with blowing a two-run lead to the Yankees earlier in the month, allowed for a different Padres reliever to win the reliever of the month award instead. While Cease and Adam were certainly great candidates for the pitchers of the month, two other pitchers arguably had a better May. Those pitchers were Randy Vasquez and Jeremiah Estrada. Vasquez has been the Houdini of pitchers since the start of the season. He can make baserunners disappear with the snap of a finger. While the underlying stats don’t favor Vasquez’s disappearing baserunners trick, the Padres have certainly benefited from it over the last month. Vasquez has quietly given the Padres valuable innings over the last month. His numbers won’t jump off the page like a pitcher of King or Cease’s caliber would. Still, with pitching injuries and the uncertainty of the starting pitching depth, Vasquez has been the most reliable pitcher outside of Nick Pivetta. In May, he threw 28 innings to the tune of a 2.89 ERA, the lowest starter ERA during the month. While Vasquez’s WHIP remained relatively high at 1.21, he cut down on the walks, his Achilles heel. He only walked a total of eight batters in May, five of which came in one game. As a result, cut his walk numbers in half from the total he had up to that point and vastly improved his SO/BB ratio from a .53 to a 2.75 in that same time frame. Vasquez has done an excellent job of keeping the Padres in games, especially in May. He pitched at least five innings in 4/5 of his starts and didn’t give up more than three earned runs in any of those appearances. As a result, the team won four of his May starts. His knack of escaping jams and limiting damage when multiple runners are on base has been puzzling, to say the least. The most egregious of which came on May 5, where the Padres won 2-1 against Pittsburgh in a game where Vasquez gave up six hits and five walks in five innings but managed to give up just one run. Since that start, however, Vasquez has been significantly better, with his best outing coming on May 14 against the Angels, where he went six innings of one-run baseball, allowing just one walk and four hits. Vasquez’s ability to escape major damage has been remarkable, but pretty soon, he may be more like Icarus than Houdini. Vasquez’s 4.95 FIP suggests that he should be giving up more than 1.5 more earned runs per nine than he currently is with the way he’s pitching. Eventually, putting runners on base at the rate Vasquez has been can lead to blow-up starts and shortened outings. Vasquez’s career SO/9 of 6.0 means he pitches to contact, and this can be troublesome if he constantly has runners on base and in scoring position. Still, Vasquez’s totals in May are significantly better than in the past, and he seems to be improving as the season progresses. His innings have been invaluable to a Padres team desperate for quality pitching innings as of late. For the bullpen, we turn to a completely different type of pitcher with Jeremiah Estrada. Estrada struck out twice as many batters as he pitched innings. His 20 strikeouts in May rank first out of all Padres relievers and fifth out of the entire pitching staff. He ranked third on the team in ERA during May out of the pitchers who pitched at least 10 innings. Estrada also picked up his second career save on a night when Suarez was unavailable. Estrada’s save came in the four-out variety, locking up an 8-6 comeback win against the Marlins. Estrada’s splitter, or what he calls his “chitter”, has continued to be one of the top pitches in all of MLB this season. Opponents are hitting just .050 against the pitch, and it has accounted for 13 of his strikeouts this season. This pitch has helped elevate Estrada into one of the top setup men in MLB. In a month where the Padres have been snake bitten by poor relief appearances, Estrada remained consistent and helped the team maintain their lead in most of the games he’s appeared in. His ability to strike out most of the batters he faces remains a key asset to the team and has helped him earn the relief pitcher of the month honors. View full article

If you asked most Padres fans which recent Padres team was the most fun to watch throughout the season, chances are a lot of them will say the 2024 team. What’s not to love about that team? They made it to the NLDS, they got career years out of players like Jurickson Profar and Kyle Higashioka, and their bullpen was lights out at the end of the season. One key aspect of that team that stood out was the offensive numbers the team put up; the 2024 Padres were top 10 in almost all offensive categories and led the league in batting average. Despite losing several of the key offensive contributors from that team, the Padres remain more or less in a similar position offensively. The Padres remain in the top half of the league in several key offensive categories, including batting average, slugging percentage, OPS, and OPS+. Through 45 games this season, the Padres have hit a total of 41 home runs, which ranks them 23rd in that category behind teams like the Colorado Rockies, Miami Marlins, and Washington Nationals. This puts them at 0.91 home runs per game, their lowest total since the 2015 Padres, who hit them at the same rate. To put this into perspective, the Los Angeles Dodgers, who have played just three more games than the Padres this season, lead the league with 80 home runs on the year and average 1.67 home runs per game. Even a team like the Orioles, which has struggled offensively throughout the season, has run into 14 more home runs than the Padres in just one extra game. Another alarming layer to the home run numbers is that almost 30% of the home runs hit by the team have come from one player: Fernando Tatis Jr. Tatis’s 12 home runs on the season rank him first by a wide margin, with the next closest player being Gavin Sheets with six. Players like Manny Machado and Jackson Merrill, who contributed to a lot of the Padres' home runs last season, have combined for only seven home runs. Now, despite this home run drought, the team still boasts one of the top records in the MLB and ranks 13th in the league in runs scored per game. So what’s the big deal if the team doesn’t hit many home runs? First off, the Padres' offensive numbers can be seen as a bit overinflated. If you remove the two games against the Rockies, where the team scored a combined 34 runs in two games, the Padres would rank 25th with just under 3.84 runs per game. While it is unfair and unrealistic to remove this offensive outburst, it was an outlier against a really poor Rockies pitching staff. A problem with having an offense that doesn’t hit many home runs and relies on several hits being strung together means that when players are in a drought or your best offensive players aren’t in the lineup, it is tough to score. During the seven-game stretch where the Padres were without Luis Arraez, Jake Cronenworth, and Merrill for the entire game, the Padres went 2-5. The team scored just 12 runs over that stretch, and the only two games they won were those in which they hit a home run. Even this past weekend, the team got swept by the Mariners, scoring just three combined runs, two of which came from solo home runs. This came in a weekend where Machado, Merrill, and Tatis had four combined hits. It’s simple: if the Padres' top sluggers aren’t stringing together hits, the team will not score runs. But what changed? What happened between last year and this year that has caused such a sharp decline in the home run totals? A couple of reasons can be to blame. The Padres' offseason moves are a good starting point. Between last year and this year, the Padres lost key lineup contributors who helped the team offensively last season, specifically in left field and at catcher. Profar and Kyle Higashioka combined to hit 41 home runs, a number not many people expected coming into the year. To make up for this loss, AJ Preller brought in Connor Joe, Jason Heyward, Elias Diaz, and Martin Maldonado. Certainly not the flashiest bunch, but neither was last year’s offseason haul. However, this group of players has combined to hit just seven home runs, and one of them is no longer with the team. The production the team was getting from the catcher and left field position was crucial to the team’s offensive numbers, and this year’s team just isn't getting the same production. When the star players weren't hitting, Profar and Higashioka could still run into a couple of home runs while also getting on base. This year’s replacements have mostly been automatic outs. Another issue has been health and slow starts. Jackson Merrill hasn’t been able to contribute much to the home run totals, playing in just 20 games this season. Machado has hit just three home runs in 45 games this season, tying Luis Arraez, who has hit the same amount. Xander Bogaerts, who still hasn’t shown San Diego his Boston self, also has just three home runs. The only player who the power outage hasn’t hurt is Tatis. So, what’s the solution? For many of the star players, it’ll be about just staying healthy and continuing to swing the bat. Merrill needs to stay healthy because when he’s on the field, he’s hitting .367 with a .995 OPS. While Machado has not hit the ball over the wall, he has hit the ball all over the field. He’s had a .317 average and a .847 OPS to start his year, a vast improvement from his start last season. Despite only having five home runs through the same number of games as this year, Machado still finished with 29 home runs last season. As long as Machado plays, he seemingly posts his typical numbers. With Bogaerts, it’s more complicated. His power numbers have slowly declined over the last few years, but we’ve seen him contribute more to the power numbers as of late, with three homers in his last 16 games. If he can keep this up, it’ll be a vast improvement over last season. As for left field and catcher, it may be time to explore other options in the form of trades. While the catcher position is thin throughout all of the majors, left field is certainly doable. Taylor Ward, who just hit two home runs against the Padres last week, is undoubtedly a viable option. He’s hit 13 home runs for a subpar Angels team that may look to move him at the deadline. The Orioles, who have had a disappointing year thus far, may look to move some of their players, including Cedric Mullins, who has 10 home runs and can certainly play left field. If Padres fans know one thing about AJ Preller, it’s that he will stop at nothing to fill the holes in his team’s roster if he thinks the team has a shot at contending, even if that means moving prospects. So while the Padres have lacked in the home run department, it may be just a matter of time before players revert to their usual power-hitting selves and Preller helps get a bat or two to help fill the team’s voids. View full article