N.B. Lindberg

As a true .500 team entering the second half, the San Diego Padres are right on the buy/sell fence. They’re close enough to the playoffs where pushing their chips would be defensible, but so would a calculated retreat. And the player who sits atop the proverbial fence is Michael King. King has been at the forefront of the modern reliever-to-starter conversion. Between 2019 and 2023 with the Yankees, King made 19 starts against 96 relief appearances and excelled. As a spot starter and multi-inning reliever, he pitched to a 3.38 ERA and amassed 4.7 fWAR and 5.6 bWAR. For just 247.2 innings of work, those are excellent figures, and continuing as a bullpen fireman would have been an apt career choice. Why zig when the zagging is so swell? Well, the Padres had other, better ideas. King arrived in San Diego in 2024 as part of the Juan Soto trade, and instead of trotting out of the bullpen 50 times a season, the Padres decided to see if he could toe the rubber every fifth day. At the time, there was significant skepticism that King could make the transition, but he quickly and emphatically put those to bed. In 2024, King made 30 starts and earned a 2.95 ERA across 173.2 innings. It was good for 3.9 fWAR and 4.1 bWAR. That’s not quite ace-like production, but if that’s your number three starter, you’ve got yourself a great rotation. His 2025 wasn’t quite as sterling as injury limited him to 15 starts, but he still finished the season with a 3.44 ERA. And now in year three of his major league starting career, he has made 20 starts with a 3.34 ERA over 113.1 innings. King has been, without a doubt, the Padres' best starter. He leads their starting rotation in innings, ERA, fWAR (1.7), and bWAR (2.6), with the latter figure leading the entire team. If he were to seriously be available at the deadline, he’d be one of the top pitchers on the market, but he’d also be the proverbial white flag raised from the white picket fence. However, the decision to trade King isn’t as simple as quitting on this season, as he has a player option for the next two, which makes his trade candidacy a compelling thought exercise. The first place to start with a King trade is with that player option. The deal he signed with the Padres was an act of creative accounting. After so much success in San Diego, the Padres re-signed King to a three-year, $75 million deal this offseason, but it was really a one-year deal worth $17 million with an option for two years and $58 million. His average annual value of $25 million is spread evenly over the contract for luxury tax purposes, while the cash payouts escalate rapidly. The deal was structured this way to help offset their massive luxury tax figure of $258.4 million against just $230.6 million in projected cash payroll. Due to the Padres being above the $244 million competitive balance tax, they are set to pay $4.34 million in luxury tax. King, by only making $17 million in cash this season, helped offset the Padres' luxury tax payments and reduce their total cash expenditures for the 2026 season. Unfortunately, everything changes in 2027 and 2028. King’s cash payout increases to $28 million in the former year and $30 million in the latter, but that’s just the tip of the financial iceberg the Padres are steaming towards. Starting in 2027, Manny Machado’s salary bumps up to $40 million from $21 million, against the flat $31.8 million luxury tax figure for the life of his deal. While Jackson Merrill’s contract helps alleviate this spike, the Padres functionally built this roster to have a financial crunch in 2027, and King’s contract structure is a prime example. If King were to opt into his deal for 2027 and 2028, the Padres would very likely feel compelled to offload salary, so why not get ahead of disaster and move one of their most moveable contracts early? The financial motivations to trade King ahead of the deadline are massive, and while his contract structure might be a hindrance to a less cash-rich franchise like the Padres, his lower competitive balance hit, compared to his salary, might be awfully enticing for a franchise that prints money. Now, you can’t move a player as important as King just for financial reasons. He’s your best starting pitcher, and you’re still in the playoff picture. However, the return for King could help restock a depleted farm system. With Machado’s looming salary explosion and drop in production, the Padres' best hope of competing over the next half-decade is to receive an infusion of young, cost-controlled talent to offset an underwater contract. While there will undoubtedly be massive interest in King, presumably from the Cubs, his value league-wide will be incredibly interesting. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I keep mentioning his fWAR and bWAR, with his bWAR always being superior, and there’s a reason for that. King has spent the past three seasons continuously beating his ERA estimators, which fWAR (Fangraphs) is based upon, while bWAR (Baseball Reference) uses ERA with a team defense weight. *2026 stats capture only the first half After a certain point, if a player keeps beating their ERA estimators, you have to believe they’ll keep doing so. Unfortunately, the team trading for him has to believe that as well, and front offices have never been more sophisticated in their player analysis. Landing a starter who can give you a mid-threes ERA over 180 innings is game-changing, but getting that level of bulk with an ERA at or above 4.00 is more of a backend starter. Over the past three seasons, among starters who have thrown 300 or more innings, King has the sixth-largest gap between his actual ERA and the average of his ERA estimators. This has been great for the Padres, but it will undoubtedly scare some teams off. The other confounding issue has been the erosion of his strikeout rate. In 2024, King posted a 27.7% strikeout rate, but that fell to 24.7% in 2025, and currently sits at 20.7% in 2026. Even if we view his 2024 season as a career year, the drop in strikeouts, combined with a corresponding increase in walk rate (a career high 9.7% this season), is likely to mute his market. However, based on King’s underlying contact, zone, and swing data, he’s probably underperforming his strikeout and walk rates a tad. If an enterprising team believes they can get his stuff to play better out of the zone, King should see his strikeout rate skyrocket, as it’s unusual for a player to miss bats in the zone, but not out of it. As for his walk rate, no player who is in the zone this much, throwing a league-average number of first-pitch strikes, should have a below-league-average walk rate. The question for any team trading for King is whether or not they think they can continue to get the same level of performance despite some yellow flags. With how pitching-needy teams are by the trade deadline, teams will certainly be interested in a relatively durable and stable starting pitcher under contract for the next two seasons, but is he worth moving if he can only net one back-end top-100 prospect? There are more reasons to move King than keep him, but waiving the white flag is something front offices should always do with caution. And even if the move makes long-term sense, if the Padres execute a quick turnaround or Machado, Jackson Merrill, and Xander Bogaerts start playing up to their usual standards, then King is the exact type of steadying mid-rotation force they’d need. All told, the case to keep or move King is as on the fence as the Padres’ season. But whatever they decide to do with him will tell us what they really think of this team. View full article

Where would the San Diego Padres be without Ty France? It’s impossible to know, but they almost certainly wouldn’t be 32-27. His 137 wRC+ leads the team among players with over 100 plate appearances, but that’s not really the interesting part. Unheralded players go through hot streaks all the time and carry their team in the process. While France has done that to some degree, it’s how he’s doing that which is noteworthy. Modern baseball hitting philosophy can be boiled down to three words: lift and pull. The reason for this is relatively simple. When you lift and pull, you’re more likely to hit the ball hard and in the air, which leads to extra bases. On top of that, if the pitcher knows you can do serious damage on contact, they pitch you more carefully, which means more balls and more walks. Functionally, lifting and pulling the ball leads to more power and on-base, which is kind of the name of the game. However, every hitter is different, and there is no one-size-fits-all approach, which brings us back to Ty France. France has gotten off to a torrid start by hitting the crap out of the ball. His 3.6% walk rate is scary, especially next to a 23.4% strikeout rate, but when you make that much contact and pair it with a 50% hard-hit rate, you can prosper. What is unusual is that France isn’t lifting and pulling his way to glory; in fact, he’s doing the opposite. On average, major leaguers pull 41% of their contact and go to the opposite field 23.7% of the time. By this metric, France doesn’t really stand out. He’s pulling 41.8% of his contact and going the other way at a 21.5% rate. However, that doesn’t mean he isn’t one of the most opposite-field-oriented hitters in baseball. On pulled contact, France is hitting fly balls 18.2% of the time, compared to the MLB average of 24.9%, and 58.8% of his opposite field contact are fly balls, against the MLB average of 62.20%. So, while France pulls the ball in the air much less than average, that’s still not really what makes him so interesting. Where you hit the ball is less important than how well you hit the ball. If you hit the ball hard enough, you have much more leeway with spray and launch angle, and this is where France has zigged where everyone else has zagged. France is currently sporting a 47.1% hard-hit rate on balls to the opposite field. If he had enough plate appearances to qualify, he’d rank third in that metric, behind only James Wood and Drake Baldwin, and even that undersells what he’s doing. On average, the MLB hard-hit rate is only 20.5% on balls to the opposite field, which France is more than doubling. When you factor in that France has a 29.4% line drive rate, on top of a 58.8% field fly ball rate, it’s easy to see why this unique profile is working. He’s lifting and crushing pitches to the opposite field in a way that few hitters have. Lift and pull isn’t actually about pulling the ball. In general, most hitters simply hit the ball harder to the pull side and struggle mightily to go the other way with authority. The thing is, France is not one of those hitters. He is elite at hitting the ball hard in the air to the opposite field, so why should he stop? Over the long haul, I doubt France will continue to run a wOBA of .368, as he has an xwOBA of .336, but that’d still constitute a successful bounce back after two mostly forgettable seasons. However, even if his production erodes, the first two months of the season have taught us a lesson: Hitting the ball hard, even the other way, is the key to hitting. View full article

The San Diego Padres improbably find themselves at 31-22 and keeping pace with the reigning champions in the National League West. It’s not that the Padres being one of the best teams in the league is wholly surprising; it is how they’ve gotten there that is. At the beginning of the season, if someone had told you that the Padres were challenging the Dodgers for the division title, your first thought would have likely been that Fernando Tatis Jr., Manny Machado, and Jackson Merrill had played at an MVP level, but you’d be wrong. The Padres have gotten here despite their star trio. Machado has a wRC+ of 76, Tatis clocks in at 77, and Merrill sits at a lowly 74. Thankfully, their defensive abilities have prevented them from being complete negatives, but that trio's underperformance is the primary reason the Padres own the league’s 27th-ranked offense by wRC+ at 90. While Tatis’ continued home run drought, despite excellent hard hit rates, is well chronicled, as is Machado’s perplexing brand of flaccid patience, Merrill’s struggles have flown a bit under the radar. Jackson Merrill, Future Star Bursting onto the scene as a 21-year-old rookie, Merrill looked like a future star and potential perennial MVP candidate. His 130 wRC+ as a rookie, while performing admirably in center field, a position he had never played as a prospect, led to an incredible 5.3 fWAR season, and saw him finish second in Rookie of the Year voting to Paul Skenes. It was enough to get the Padres to offer him a nine-year, $135 million extension that no one batted an eye at. Early in his career, the game plan for Merrill was simple. In possession of an incredibly variable swing, he could square the ball up anywhere in the zone for doubles damage. His blend of contact volume with above-average pop formed the foundation of an incredibly enticing profile. If either his plate discipline or power trended up, two traits that usually improve as a hitter matures, he would instantly become one of the game’s elite hitters, but after a slight backslide in his second season, he has completely fallen off in year three. So, what’s exactly befuddling such a talented hitter that he could go from being an All-Star as a rookie to one of the league’s worst non-catcher hitters? Well, he isn’t getting results in the heart of the zone. Finding Love in the Heart of the Zone The dirty secret of hitting is that the pitcher is in almost complete control. The vast majority of extra-base damage is done on pitches the pitcher would like back, and no one tries to throw balls. Even a mediocre fastball, if well executed, is going to give the best hitter fits, which is why the best hitters excel at taking advantage of mistakes, either through slugging pitches down the middle or spitting on pitches off the plate. Merrill isn’t blessed with an elite batting eye, but early in his career, it didn’t matter. He offered at pitches outside of the zone infrequently enough that it didn’t detract from his ability to square up balls in the zone. The trade-off as a hitter he was making made sense. Yes, he’d swing at some bad pitches, but he’d rarely fail to offer at ones he could drive. The result was a lower walk and strikeout rate, but a higher batting average and slugging percentage. Unfortunately, the entire operation has gone backwards this season. Through 50 games and more than 200 plate appearances, Merrill’s contact ability has continued to erode, and he’s offering at pitches outside of the zone more than ever. However, that isn’t what’s really troubling him. Plenty of hitters can succeed with this approach as long as they punish the mistakes in the heart of the zone. The problem is that Merrill hasn’t done enough with those crushable mistakes. Compared to 2025, Merrill has seen a concerning drop in his production in the dead center of the strike zone. *Stats as of the week of May 25 It’s still early, but Merrill is whiffing more and hitting for a worse average and slugging percentage on pitches down the middle. If he were still using the same approach as his rookie season, his overall production would probably still be fine, but because his approach has shifted to take advantage of those exact pitches at the cost of plate coverage, it’s a serious problem. Now, it would be fine if Merrill’s plate discipline and in-zone contact figures declined if it came with a corresponding bump in production right down the middle, but right now, everything is coming up snake eyes. However, there is some good news. Process Over Results in the Heart of the Zone Whether or not you think Merrill changing his approach from being a plate coverage monster to a home run-seeking slugger is a positive development, it appears to be the choice he has made. The good news is that while his surface numbers in the heart of the plate have declined, the underlying batted ball data suggest he has been incredibly unlucky. By and large, Merrill’s new approach has been working from a process standpoint. He has sacrificed his ability to cover the entire plate to improve his contact in the heart of the zone. However, one of the problems when you make this decision is that you’re at greater mercy of batted ball luck and the unknowable location of each pitch. A two-percent drop in pitches down the middle doesn’t seem like much, but for a hitter it’s massive. Merrill has swung at 92% of pitches down the middle this season and made contact at an 84% clip. This season, he has faced 797 pitches. At an 8% dead center rate, that’d equal 63.76 total pitches, but at 6%, it drops to 47.82. That’s 15.94, let’s say 16, fewer pitches where Merrill would swing 92% of the time, equaling 14.72 more swings and 12.36 more times where he makes contact. Considering his expected slugging is 0.943, that’s an incredible loss in potential production. In all likelihood, Merrill will see his metrics regress towards his expected stats in the heart of the zone, and it’ll pull his offensive production out of the red. While we can expect better days for Merrill ahead, it’s another matter if this evolution was the right one to take. He’s walking and striking out more because pitchers are throwing him fewer strikes, even though he’s chasing more than ever. On pitches not down the middle, his underlying production has mostly declined. While you can get the most bang for your buck on dead-red fastballs, Merrill’s superpower was his ability to get plenty of bang on pitches throughout the zone. This new approach will probably lead to Merrill being far streakier, as we’ve seen in the bad way, to start the season. Now, it’s not like Merrill has to abandon his new approach for it to be worthwhile, but he does need to refine it. If he can rein in the chase and continue to aggressively hunt middle-middle pitches, he’ll be fine. But if the chase is the cost of doing business, he might be better off covering the whole plate. The good news for the Padres is that they’re well above .500 and better days are likely ahead for their youngest star. His new approach might not be optimal long-term, but he has executed it far better than his current production would suggest. As the summer starts to heat up and he gets an unusually high number of middle-middle pitches, don’t be surprised if he goes on a surge, but also don’t be surprised when he comes crashing back to Earth. Merrill is still a good hitter, but he is fundamentally a different one than the star we knew. View full article

Very few players excel at everything. Sure, there are the Shohei Ohtanis and Bobby Witt Jr.s of the world who seemingly do it all, but the key to success for most players is that they do one thing extremely well and tread water everywhere else. Ramon Laureano was one of those players, and he still kind of is, except he is doing it in the complete opposite way as before. After parts of nine seasons in the bigs and at 31 years old, there isn’t a ton of mystery as to what makes Laureano tick. He plays solid outfield defense, holds his own against right-handed pitching, and crushes lefties. Just about every team would sign up for his career wRC+ of 108 against right-handed pitching and 123 wRC+ against lefties from a guy who can fake it in center for a game or two. It’s why the San Diego Padres traded for him last year, and he more than lived up to the billing in 2025, posting a wRC+ of 139 against left-handed pitching and a career-best 137 against right-handers. Heading into 2026, the expectation was that Laureano would cool off a tad against right-handers but would continue to mash lefties. And while he has cooled off a tad against same-handed pitching, he has cratered when he has the platoon advantage, just like no one expected. It’s still early, but heading into a mid-May clash with the Milwaukee Brewers, Laureano has a wRC+ of 113 against right-handed pitching and a wRC+ of 45 against lefties. While Laureano has had extended stretches where he has hit right-handed pitching well, the last time he finished a season with a wRC+ below 100 against left-handed pitching was the truncated 2020 season. If you exclude 2020 for the obvious reason that it was 60 games long, the lowest full-season mark of his career against left-handers is 108. Simply put, a wRC+ of 45 is beyond uncharted territory. Ramon Laureano Career Platoon Splits *Stats as of May 12, 2026 Early in his career, Laureano did hit right-handed pitching better than left-handed pitching, but he was still wildly productive against lefties. However, starting in 2021, he began showing more conventional platoon splits, but the degree to which it has flipped this season is jarring. The easy answer to his struggles is that he is running a BABIP of .250 against lefties, against a career figure of .338, but there’s far more to it than just bad luck. Laureano is struggling against left-handed pitching because he hasn’t been able to turn on it. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but Laureano’s offensive profile is driven by power. He doesn’t possess monster bat speed or exit velocities, but when he does make contact, it’s usually hard, in the air, and to the pull side. For his career, he has a pulled air rate of 19.4%, against the league average of 16.7%, and it was 21.8% in 2025. Unfortunately, in 2026, his pull air rate is down to a near career-low of 15.9%, and it has come largely against left-handed pitching. For his career, Laureano owns a fly ball rate of 37.1% and a pull rate of 43.6%. Against right-handed pitching, his career fly ball rate is 38.5% with a pull rate of 43.3%, and when facing left-handed pitching, his fly ball rate clocks in at 33.9% with a pull rate of 44.3%. In 2026, his fly-ball rate against left-handed pitching is up to 45%, but his pull rate is down to 30%. That's a lot of numbers to throw at you, but the point of the data is thus: Throughout his career, the more he has lifted the ball against left-handed pitching, the worse the results have been (-0.83 linear correlation to wRC+), but the more he has pulled the ball, the better they have been (0.836 linear correlation to wRC+). With that in mind, his 2026 spray map shows exactly why he has cratered. Most of his elevated contact has been to right field, while the vast majority of his pulled contact has been on the ground. This isn’t an unusual split, but the trade-off for pulled grounders needs to be elevated-and-celebrated pulled contact. To be a successful hitter with Laureano’s raw thump, you need to lift and pull, not lift or pull. It’s difficult to parse exactly why Laureano has struggled to turn on left-handed pitching, but I doubt that he has suddenly become Derek Zoolander. It’s very likely that this is a small sample quirk, which has been exacerbated by him facing better-than-average left-handed pitching. He has already faced Tarik Skubal, Framber Valdez, Ranger Suarez, Aroldis Chapman, and Gregory Soto, among others. Upon pulling the data, the average left-hander he had faced up to that point had a 3.17 ERA and 3.44 FIP, against league averages of 3.82 and 3.97. At the end of the day, Laureano’s struggles against left-handers have only come in 32 plate appearances. I trust his track record of pulling the ball with authority when he has the platoon advantage more than what he has done in the early going. Now, if this continues, it’ll be worth examining, but we’ll also have more information to really figure things out. And considering how well he has hit right-handers, there’s a good chance he goes from being a league-average bat (99 wRC+) to the middle of the order thumper he was last season (138 wRC+), which the Padres could desperately use. View full article

Somehow, the San Diego Padres are 18-9 and tied for first in the NL West. The reason I say somehow is that their team wRC+ of 95 ranks 23rd out of 30 teams. At the end of the season, no one cares how many games you deserved to win, but usually, you want to earn your wins. While the Padres have done well to overcome a sluggish start at the plate, they’ll no doubt want to turn it around. And of all their surprising underperformances, of which there have been many, Manny Machado’s is the most perplexing. Machado hasn’t just fallen off at the plate; he has completely changed as a hitter, which is an odd thing for a 33-year-old coming off a top-50 wRC+ who has three Silver Sluggers and four top-five MVP finishes to do. The season is still in small sample theater, but the wholesale changes Machado has made are too large to ignore. Before 2026, Machado’s operation at the plate was quite simple. He swung hard, he swung often, and he did damage on contact. Functionally, he went up to the plate looking to get beyond first base, not on it. In fact, the correlation between Machado’s isolated power relative to the league average (ISO) and wRC+ is 0.92 for his career. Obviously, power is a big factor in hitting performance, so a strong correlation is to be expected, but Machado built a Hall of Fame career by putting a charge in the ball. The downside to Machado’s approach was that he never walked much, which made him a bit more susceptible to fluctuations in his batting average on balls in play (BABIP). Now, it wasn’t like Machado’s walk and strikeout figures were awful. He was routinely at or bettered the league average walk rate, and has always struck out less than the league average, but they were never his carrying trait at the plate… until now. It’s still very early, but Machado is walking at an incredible clip to start the season. His 15.5% BB% is almost double his career figure of 8.2% and ranks 19th in the league. The spike in walks isn’t a fluke either. He is currently sporting a 22.9% out-of-zone swing rate and a 66.8% in-zone swing rate. For a player whose career figures in those categories are 29.1% and 66.9%, respectively, Machado’s newfound patience suggests an overhaul in approach. In a vacuum, swinging at fewer balls is almost always a good thing. Walks are good. As are favorable counts. And it’s much easier to drive a strike past an outfielder than a pitch a few inches off the plate. However, baseball is not played in a vacuum, and what is usually a good development may be robbing Machado of what made him a special hitter in the first place. Despite Machado’s newfound discerning eye, he has functionally become a slap hitter. He really boosted his stock with a two-homer day on Sunday, but prior to that, his ISO stood at a career-low of .093, which was the 30th-lowest figure among qualified hitters this season. The culprit for Machado’s power outage is almost certainly varied, but he has earned these career-worst figures. His hard hit percentage is a career low 38.8%, as is his average 9.1 degree launch angle. For a player who has routinely been one of the best high-volume sluggers, this about-face is alarming. One of the first places to look is at swing speed data, and lo and behold, Machado is posting a career low figure. His 73.1 MPH average bat speed is his lowest recorded figure, which continues a consistent downward trend from 2023, the first season we have data. However, while a slightly slower bat is part of the picture, it doesn’t explain the totality of the power outage. Machado’s average bat speed might be down, but it is still well above the MLB average of 71.9 MPH. The problem is that average bat speed isn’t nearly as important as your fast swing rate. A fast swing is a swing that hits or exceeds 75 MPH, and it’s here where Machado has nose dived. In 2023, he had a 66.3% fast swing rate, in 2024 it dropped to 52.6%, then in 2025 it dropped further to 43%, and now in 2026, it’s sitting at 26.5%. While that downward trend is concerning, the league average is still 23.7%. Needless to say, shaving 20% off your fast swing rate isn’t going to do anything positive for your power production, and it comes with another concerning trend. Along with diminished bat speed, Machado’s bat angle has become less advantageous. His attack angle is at a career low of 4 degrees, and his attack direction is now at 4 degrees to the opposite field. The problem is that Machado already had a slightly flatter and less pull-oriented bat path. In 2025, his attack angle was 8 degrees, his attack direction was 0 degrees, and his swing tilt was 26 degrees, against league averages of 10 degrees, 2 degrees to the pull side, and 32 degrees of tilt. So, now, Machado is swinging slower and gearing his contact for less lift, which means way less power. Based on the preponderance of evidence, it appears that Machado’s decision to rein in chase has inadvertently reined in his power stroke. Baseball is played on razor-thin margins, and in the millisecond where your brain decides to swing is delayed even a fraction, it can prevent you from getting your bat to the ball in the most advantageous spot. The benefit might be better counts and more walks, but at the end of the day, the best hitters put a charge in the ball. If Machado wants to recapture his prior form, all he needs to do is get back to his prior approach. He has been one of the best players in baseball for a decade because he went to the plate looking to slug. Hitting is about controlled aggression, and Machado is leaning far too far into the control side of the equation. Simply put, he needs to go up there ready to swing, and if it means he chases a slider off the plate, well, that’s just the cost of being Manny Machado, future Hall of Famer. View full article

The San Diego Padres are on something of a roll. After starting the season 1-4, they’ve won 10 of their past 12 and own the second-best record in the National League. Usually, when a team is racking up wins with such ferocity, there is a bit of good fortune at play, but the Padres have gotten off to a 11-6 start despite possessing the least lucky bats in the league. Based on Statcast’s expected statistics, the Padres, as a team, should have a wOBA of .346. That’s the third-best figure in the league, which suggests that this is one of the league’s elite offenses. Well, here’s the thing: Baseball isn’t played in a simulation, and the Padres' actual wOBA is .314, which ranks 17th, and is sandwiched between the Guardians and Angels. While a guardian angel is usually nice company to keep, that’s not the case when it comes to hitting a baseball. So, what the heck is going on here? When Statcast debuted in 2015, the tired excuse of explaining away everything with BABIP finally eased. Make no mistake, hitting them where they ain’t is still a great idea, but exit velocities and launch angles made analyzing hitting as granular as it had ever been. We suddenly knew, with increased precision, the likelihood that any batted ball would be a hit, if it would clear the fence, who was getting hosed by bad luck, and who was really struggling at the plate. However, expected stats are just probabilities based on launch angle and exit velocity. In the real world, you can’t hit 50% of a double; you either get to second and get 100% of it, or you don’t and get 0%. Now, stacking a bunch of probabilities based on real events usually gets you very good results, and it’s why expected stats have steadily grown to almost become the actual stats, which is weird, because one is imaginary, and the other is very, very real, which brings us back to the Padres. The Padres are underperforming their Statcast data by a massive margin. To put human faces to their agony, Francisco Lindor produced a wOBA of .350 last season (right around the Padres' current mark), while Miguel Vargas managed a wOBA of .314. Ask yourself this: would you rather have Lindor come up nine times in a row or Vargas? The simple explanation for this divergence between the expected and the actual is that the Padres are getting unlucky, and their statistics will slowly converge with their expected statistics. While I agree directionally with that notion, it also misses a crucial component. Expected stats are based on all batted balls hit throughout the year, but Petco Park loves to suppress offense, and especially so in April. The Padres have played 11 out of 17 games at Petco, with their other six coming at Fenway and PNC Park. Petco is one of the toughest places to hit, PNC is also a bottom-third hitters' park, and while Fenway is a hitters' park, it is in a very unique way. Fenway suppresses triples and home runs tremendously, but it is the best park in the league to hit doubles. Depending on how you hit the ball, it is feast or famine. Using Baseball Savant’s three-year rolling park factor as our baseline, Petco has a park factor of 97, PNC 99, and Fenway 105. Just on that alone, you’d expect the Padres to underperform their expected stats a tad, but according to research by Kiri Oler of Fangraphs, each of Petco, PNC, and Fenway are 4% less hitter-friendly in April than their overall figure. And on top of that, the time of day can make a dramatic difference in how a park plays. For instance, Petco has a park factor of 99 during the day, nearly league average, but falls to 96 at night, while PNC has a park factor of 97 during the day and 101 at night. Considering the Padres have played seven of their 16 games at Petco at night in April, it shouldn’t be a surprise to see their batted ball results lagging behind their exit velocities and launch angles. With this cocktail of information, we can do back-of-the-envelope math to see what type of park factor the Padres have opened the season with. Using the time of day park factors and inputting the -4% April park factor tax, the Padres, on average, have played in a ballpark with a 94.56 park factor. That’d be the worst park outside of T-Mobile in Seattle (91), which is in a tier of its own. Does this mean the Padres haven’t gotten a little unlucky with their batted balls? Almost certainly not, but the combination of bad luck and a rough-hitting environment is the reason they’re underperforming their expected stats more than any other team. As the weather warms up, so should the Padres’ bats, but in the meantime, maybe try scheduling a few more day games in April. View full article

Through the first week and a half of the season, the best pitcher in baseball has been San Diego Padres closer Mason Miller. Over 6 1/3 innings, he has allowed exactly zero runs, struck out 16, walked one, and allowed a single solitary single. He leads all relievers in FIP (-1.43), fWAR (0.5), and strikeout percentage (76.2%) — a negative FIP is truly demonic. You basically cannot pitch better than Miller has, and like so many elite relievers before him, the man armed with the league’s fastest average fastball velocity (101.2 MPH) is dominating with... his slider? Yes, Mason Miller, he who burst onto the scene in 2024 with the then-Oakland Athletics by throwing straight 100 MPH gas past MLB hitters, has bent his arsenal away from the pitch that made him famous and has never been better. Thus far, he has thrown his slider 52.5% of the time, followed by his fastball at 42.5%, and his nascent changeup, which deserves its own look, clocks in at 95.5 MPH and 5.0%. Compared to 2024, when he reared back for a fastball on 63.1% of his pitches, Miller now looks like a junker-baller, but it has unequivocally been a successful evolution. The question isn’t if Miller has made the right choice; it’s why he decided to even entertain (relatively) shelving such an elite fastball. And there’s a pitcher just north on the interstate who made the same fateful decision. Before Edwin Diaz became a national sensation for making trumpets cool again, he was your quintessential fireballing reliever. Between 2016 and 2021, Diaz used his upper-90s fastball at least 60% of the time to solidify himself as one of the game’s top closers. His high point came in 2018, when he threw his fastball 62.2% of the time, struck out 15.22 batters per nine innings, and racked up 3.5 fWAR, the seventh-highest reliever total of the 21st century. Diaz had a formula that not only worked but arguably made him the best. Then in 2022, Diaz suddenly flipped his fastball usage to 41.9% and his slider usage to 58.1% and posted another all-time season. He rode his slider to a 1.31 ERA, 17.13 K/9, and a fWAR of 3.0. In the following seasons, he has eased his slider usage a tad, but he still throws both pitches about half the time. Now, Diaz’s evolution would make sense if his fastball velocity fell off a cliff, but his fastball averaged 97.3 MPH in 2018 and 97.2 MPH in 2025. What caused Diaz to stray off the straight and narrow is the same force that looks to have pushed Miller: throwing strikes. Pitching is fundamentally about strikes, and you can get them one of two ways. You throw the ball in the strike zone, and the umpire calls it, or you get a batter to swing and miss. The best pitchers do both, as do the best pitches. If you rack up a bunch of called and swinging strikes, it’s pretty hard not to have success. Edwin Diaz and Mason Miller, in particular, might have elite fastball velocity, but that doesn’t mean it’s their best pitch. Miller’s fastball has never had outlier horizontal or vertical movement, which means it relies mainly on velocity to be effective, and Diaz, despite not losing velocity over the years, has lost vertical movement, which has hurt the pitch’s effectiveness. On top of that, neither has been particularly accurate with their fastballs. When you add it all up, their heaters were effectively wild, which stood in stark contrast to what their sliders became. A decent proxy for what pitch a pitcher should lead with is a little metric I call, “Zone Percentage + Outside Zone Swing and Miss Percentage.” While I need to find a catchier, shorter name, the metric’s simplicity is why it works. Pitchers want to throw strikes, and what better way to do that than to throw it in the strike zone? Also, when pitchers don’t throw it in the zone, they want someone to swing and miss because that’s still a strike. Looking at Diaz’s four-seamer and slider figures, it’s pretty obvious why he has ramped up his slider usage in recent seasons. *Data reflective of updated stats as of April 9, 2026 Edwin Diaz Season Pitch Pitches O-Swing% O-Contact% Zone% Zone% + O-Swing Strike 2017 Fourseam (FA) 772 27.50% 64.60% 54.80% 64.54% 2017 Slider (SL) 354 44.10% 30.90% 39.80% 70.27% 2018 Fourseam (FA) 727 24.60% 60.30% 59.10% 68.87% 2018 Slider (SL) 436 40.10% 22.40% 38.80% 69.92% 2019 Fourseam (FA) 706 28.60% 66.30% 54.40% 64.04% 2019 Slider (SL) 363 37.60% 24.70% 46.60% 74.91% 2020 Fourseam (FA) 294 23.10% 51.60% 54.40% 65.58% 2020 Slider (SL) 182 34.70% 25.70% 44.50% 70.28% 2021 Fourseam (FA) 615 21.40% 61.30% 52.80% 61.08% 2021 Slider (SL) 378 41.40% 24.40% 47.60% 78.90% 2022 Fourseam (FA) 389 26.20% 53.30% 55.80% 68.04% 2022 Slider (SL) 539 48.80% 23.60% 43.80% 81.08% 2024 Fourseam (FA) 475 18.80% 52.40% 52.80% 61.75% 2024 Slider (SL) 437 37.50% 41.70% 48.70% 70.56% 2025 Fourseam (FA) 560 25.10% 44.40% 55.20% 69.16% 2025 Slider (SL) 505 34.20% 35.60% 47.90% 69.92% Diaz has never thrown his fastball in the zone that often, and fastballs just never garner nearly as many swings out of the zone. Meanwhile, his slider has always enticed an incredible amount of swings out of the zone, while being nearly unhittable. Unsurprisingly, his best season as a primary fastball pitcher was 2018, when he posted the best Zone% of his career with the pitch, but it’s hard to lead with a fastball, even a great one, that you can’t consistently throw for a strike. And the same trend follows Miller. Mason Miller Season Pitch Pitches O-Swing% O-Contact% Zone% Zone% + O-Swing Strike 2023 Fourseam (FA) 338 28.80% 69.00% 56.80% 65.73% 2023 Slider (SL) 145 25.30% 38.10% 42.80% 58.46% 2024 Fourseam (FA) 646 37.60% 52.40% 56.80% 74.70% 2024 Slider (SL) 358 37.80% 27.00% 45.30% 72.89% 2025 Fourseam (FA) 507 31.20% 48.10% 50.10% 66.29% 2025 Slider (SL) 443 42.50% 16.20% 44.20% 79.82% 2026 Fourseam (FA) 26 35.70% 80.00% 46.20% 53.34% 2026 Slider (SL) 31 57.10% 12.50% 54.80% 104.76% It’s incredibly early, but what Miller is doing with his slider is basically a cheat code. Major league hitters are chasing it out of the zone over half the time and are coming up empty at a 87.5% rate. To make matters worse, for hitters, he’s throwing his slider in the zone at a 54.8% clip, where he’s allowing a 40% contact rate. These numbers should all regress to the realm of mortals eventually, but that shouldn’t quell any of its usage, especially because his fastball command has continued to back up with a career low 46.2% zone rate. For as excellent as Miller has been, there’s a chance he has another gear. In 2024, Miller’s fastball had a 70.3% contact rate in the zone but that figure rose to 75.3% in 2025, while also finding itself in the zone less often. Since it was generating fewer strikes, it makes sense he would lean less on his fastball in 2025, but there’s a chance he could rediscover his 2024 fastball mojo. In 2026, his four-seamer again has an in-zone contact rate of 70%, in line with his 2024 figure, and that’s despite hitters clearly sitting on the pitch. Batters have swung at 83.3% of the in-zone fastballs they’ve faced, which far exceeds his career average of 71.2%. At a certain point, hitters will have to stop sitting on his fastball if they want any hope of handling the slider. And when that happens, don’t be surprised if his fastball becomes a major weapon again. Miller might not be pitching off his four-seamer anymore, but hitters are certainly treating it like he is. The final evolution for Mason Miller is to find the harmonic 50/50 fastball-slider split. The former was such a standout pitch that hitters sold out to hit it, only to be destroyed by the latter. When Diaz did that in 2022, he had a season for the ages, but eventually batters began to lay off his slider, and his fastball usage rebounded. The truly terrifying thing is Miller’s stuff is even better than Diaz’s was, and if he ever figures out a change-up... well, let’s not scare the kids. View full article