Calm down about the Padres

SkullKing Sports
Originally published March 1, 2021

The San Diego Padres have been doing just about everything right over the past couple of years. They’re making big trades, they’re signing big free agents and they’ve given a mega-extension to their young, exciting franchise cornerstone who is quickly turning into the face of baseball.

Everything they’ve done has been commendable, especially for a team playing in a market that has routinely been ranked in the bottom-five in the country. In the current climate in the sport of baseball, it’s really refreshing to see a  “small-market” team actually spend to bring in new talent and retain their existing stars.

Just look at the left side of their infield, Manny Machado and Fernando Tatis Jr. have contracts with an average annual value of $30 million and $24 million apiece. That’s $54 million just between two players. There are four teams — Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Miami — with an entire 2021 payroll less than that, and Tampa Bay just barely edges them out.

San Diego is going for it, and the baseball world has noticed.

MLB.com has the Padres power ranked No. 2 as of right now. Sports Illustrated has them at No. 2 as well. As does NBC Sports. And CBS Sports. Essentially, just about everyone is picking them as the second-best team in baseball, only behind the Dodgers. 

Are they REALLY that good though? The Padres had a breakout season in 2020, which, coupled with an extremely strong offseason, has given them some incredibly lofty expectations for 2021.

After all, the Padres won 37 games in 2020, the third-most in baseball only behind the Dodgers and Rays — the two World Series teams. The Dodgers have only gotten stronger, but the Rays not so much, even sending former Cy Young Award winner Blake Snell to the Padres this offseason.

Snell was far from the Padres only acquisition. He wasn’t even their only major addition to the rotation. Enter Yu Darvish, the runner-up in the 2020 NL Cy Young race. Those two, added to a rotation of Dinelson Lamet, Joe Musgrove and Chris Paddack, make a formidable lineup of starting pitchers. And, that’s not even mentioning Mike Clevinger, who should be healthy for the 2022 season. 

There are a lot of positive surrounding this team, but they also might have the most questions of any franchise in baseball.

To put it frankly, everything went right for the 2020 Padres. 

Let’s start with Wil Myers, who is the best example of this. After winning AL Rookie of the Year in 2013 with Tampa Bay, Myers fell off. Through his next six seasons (one with Tampa and five with San Diego), Myers never even cracked a .800 OPS. His best season was in 2016 when he hit .259/.336/.461 with 28 homers, 94 RBIs, good for a .797 OPS and 115 OPS+. He’s dropped off even more recently since then, hitting .245 with an OPS of .749 and OPS+ of 102 from 2018-19, barely above league average. 

But in 2020, Myers was otherworldly, hitting .288/.353/.606 with 15 home runs and 40 RBIs in just 55 games. That’s an OPS of .959 and OPS+ of 159. He even finished No. 16 in the NL MVP race, the first time in his career he ever received MVP votes.

Then there’s Eric Hosmer, who after putting up an OPS of .728 and OPS+ of 97 in his past two seasons, hit .287/.333/.517 through 38 games last season. In his 156 plate appearances, he had an OPS of .851 and OPS+ of 131, by far his best since 2017.

Even Machado had his best season yet, hitting .304/.370/.580, all career highs. His OPS of .950 jumped over 150 points and OPS+ of 158 jumped 48 points from 2019.

Machado, Myers and Hosmer were statistically three of the Padres’ four best hitters in 2020, and they all had absolute career years. By ranking the Padres so high, the expectation is that all three of them can have a repeat season. Machado is the most likely to do so as he should have the highest floor, but even then it’s a reach. As for Myers and Hosmer, who are both on the wrong side of 30, it would be far from a shock to see them regress back to what had been the norm for their careers.

This offseason, the Padres doubled-down on players who had great 2020 seasons but don’t really have the track record to back it up in a season longer than 60 games. Darvish and Snell are good pickups, but like everyone mentioned before, they too are far from guarantees.

With Darvish, yes, he had an outstanding season, putting up a 2.01 ERA, 0.961 WHIP and NL leading 2.23 FIP in 12 starts. But that’s just it — 12 starts. How much weight can really be put in 12 starts? From 2016-19, Darvish pitched to a 3.90 ERA, 1.151 WHIP and 3.89 FIP, which is still solid, but far from the elite status we saw from him in 2020. Going into his age-34 season, it’s much more realistic to expect to see the pitcher Darvish had been from 2016-19 rather than the 12 start spurt he had in 2020.

As for Snell, he might be the biggest unknown of anyone on this roster. He had an outstanding 2018, putting up a 1.89 ERA, 0.974 WHIP and 2.94 FIP en route to the AL Cy Young Award. His injury-riddled 2019 was interesting, finishing with an ugly 4.29 ERA but relatively solid 3.32 FIP, so maybe he just got some bad luck. Then in 2020, his ERA and FIP basically swapped, and he ended up with a good 3.24 ERA and a not-so-good 4.35 FIP. The one thing that was consistent between the two years? His 1.271 WHIP in 2019 and 1.200 WHIP in 2020, a big step back from his Cy Young season.

At this point, the jury is still out on Snell. Is he the dominant starter we saw in 2018 or the complicated one we saw the next two years? We don’t know yet, but it’s probably more likely that he’s the middle-of-the-rotation guy he’s been for four years of his career rather than the ace he’s been for one.

Now, time for Fernando Tatis Jr.

Tatis is probably going to be a superstar. He arguably already is. He’s one of the most exciting young players in the game, and he has the personality to back it up.

He’s also played in 143 career games and has 629 career plate appearances. Yes, he’s been electric in those plate appearances, but his finish to 2020 should at least be a little bit concerning. In the final third of the season, Tatis hit .214/.309/.429. That’s not good. He hit four home runs to drive his slugging percentage up a bit, but overall, he was just bad.

Yes, that’s just 20 games and 81 plate appearances, but that can also be written as 14% of his career games and 13% of his career plate appearances. The bottom line here is Tatis is yet to play a full 162 game season. He hasn’t even hit 162 games total yet in his career. While his finish to 2020 was probably just a slump, there is at the very least the smallest of question marks next to his name.

Even if Tatis fully blossoms into a superstar, which is honestly more likely than not, it’s also very likely that most of, if not all of Myers, Hosmer, Machado, Darvish and Snell regress. With Machado, he’s probably good enough where it might be less obvious. Snell is a wild card, he could be the worst of the bunch or he could be the best, he’s just had no consistency from year to year in his career. 

But with Myers, Hosmer and Darvish, they played so wildly above their recent track records in 2020 that a decent-to-significant regression should almost be expected.

Myers had a .959 OPS in 55 games in 2020, so we should expect him to do it again in 162 game season in 2021 despite never even hitting the .800 mark from 2014-19?

Hosmer was arguably a top-10 first baseman in 38 games in 2020, so we should expect the same in 2021 despite being a statistically below-average hitter in the previous two seasons?

Darvish pitched an outstanding 12 games in 2020, so we should expect that level of play over 30-plus games in 2021 despite no history of being able to do so since undergoing Tommy John in 2015?

No one knows yet how much the 2020 season will be reflective of what a player can do. For now, it’s best to pump the brakes a bit and recognize that the same size was extraordinarily small.

The Padres are still going to be good. They should still be expected to make the playoffs. But they shouldn’t be expected to be the second-best team in baseball. The roster is just simply not that good.