Almost all season long, MLB has faced the paradox of the San Diego Padres being one of the best teams in the league, unless it comes to actually winning games.
Despite a surge in September, that’s no longer an issue. The Padres were eliminated from MLB postseason contention on Friday after the Miami Marlins, current holders of the NL’s third-wild card spot, beat the Pittsburgh Pirates 4-3.
After making the playoffs as a wild-card team and reaching the NLCS last season, the 79-80 Padres were at the moment 19 games back of the Los Angeles Dodgers in the NL West and four games back of the Marlins with three games left in the season.
The Padres took forever to wipe out
Before we get into the Padres’ struggles for the season, they at least deserve credit for not taking the night off.
The Padres could have been eliminated as early as Tuesday, where they moved five games back of the Chicago Cubs with six games left. A Padres loss and a Cubs win would eliminate them for the day. Here’s what happened over the next four days, until the Padres were fired:
By Thursday, the Marlins had overtaken the Cubs for the third wild-card spot, and needed only a win against the New York Mets to end the Padres’ season. They took a 2-1 lead into the ninth and then … Mother Nature intervened. A day later, the Marlins finished in San Diego.
Basically, the Padres have survived four straight days on the brink of elimination, and that’s not something you often see from a team in the Padres’ position. The Padres actually spent the entire month charging back in the stands, with an MLB-best 17-7 record in September.
Of course, there are reasons why it is too late.
2023 Padres means nothing
Let me describe to you a baseball team. They were great last year. They went 89-73 — their first 162-game season over .500 since 2010 — and beat their big, bad division foe in the NLDS. The dragon was slain, though the campaign ended one series later in the NLCS.
That team entered this season with basically every major contributor returning. The only player worth 1.5 bWAR in 2022 who did not return in 2023 was Jurickson Profar, who rejoined San Diego midseason after being released by the Colorado Rockies.
The team — let’s just call them the Padres — isn’t content with bringing everyone back. It also signed Boston Red Sox shortstop Xander Bogaerts to an 11-year, $280 million deal to assemble a quartet of superstars: Bogaerts, Manny Machado, Fernando Tatis Jr. and Juan Soto. In addition, the Padres not only added Bogaerts but also brought back Tatis from a PED suspension and a full season of Soto after he was traded last year.
The 2023 Padres are built to be a very good team – and an expensive team, with their $296 million 40-man CBT payroll ranked third in the MLB, before the Dodgers. However, as we’ve seen with teams that rank first in payroll and second, money and hype don’t automatically make you a good baseball team.
However, the twist with the Padres is that they are actually a good baseball team. They just didn’t win.
Here’s everything the Padres have going for them in the 2023 season, with all stats entering Tuesday:
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A plus-97 run differential, tied for third-best in the NL
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Soto hit .275/.409/.520 with a career-high 35 homers while playing in every game of the season
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Tatis, Bogaerts and Machado all posted an OPS+ over 115 (ie an OPS at least 15% better than the MLB average) and played at least 135 games
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Ha-Seong Kim, last year’s starting shortstop, has become another star and ranks in the top 10 in bWAR among MLB position players while playing mostly second base.
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Top catching prospect Luis Campusano got his first regular playing time and hit .319/.356/.491
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Blake Snell ran away with the NL Cy Young race, holding an NL-best 2.25 ERA and 234 strikeouts in 180 innings.
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Michael Wacha posted one of the best seasons of his career at 31 years old with a 3.39 ERA in 23 starts
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Seth Lugo went from long reliever/swingman to become a starting pitcher with a 3.57 ERA in 26 starts
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Closer Josh Hader ranks second among MLB pitchers (min. 30 innings pitched) with a 1.15 ERA
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An active but unrelenting trade deadline featuring the acquisitions of Ji Man Choi, Rich Hill, Scott Barlow and more
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A farm system that from 23rd in MLB before the season, according to MLB Pipeline, to ninth
That combination seems like a must add to a playoff team. Except nothing.
The main symptoms of San Diego’s issues are well known to statistical enthusiasts. The team had a 7-23 record in one-run games and 1-12 in extra-inning games, by far the worst mark in MLB. You can blame bad luck for that or you can blame the lack of a clutch, but it’s brutal either way.
Down seasons or injuries to key players including Yu Darvish, Joe Musgrove, Jake Cronenworth, Trent Grisham and Robert Suarez did not help the team either.
No game was more emblematic of the Padres’ struggles than Monday’s loss to the San Francisco Giants, another potential NL West rival. Snell threw six scoreless innings to end his Cy Young case, while Tatis, Machado and Bogaerts were all 2-for-4, but a 1-0 lead disappeared in the eighth and turned into a backbreaking 2-1 loss.
The Padres didn’t win their first extra-inning game until Wednesday, when they beat the reeling San Francisco Giants 5-2 in 10 innings.
Where do the Padres go from here?
The finger-pointing has started around the team’s leadership. A feud between the Padres’ famously aggressive general manager, AJ Preller, and their veteran manager, Bob Melvin, was reported last week and described as “baseball’s worst-kept secret.”
Machado — the team’s longest-tenured player, who signed a franchise-record $350 million extension last offseason — is also pointed to questions about a clubhouse that has been accused of being a little too casual.
When a team faces plants as tough as the Padres this year, it usually gets ugly. Not only do the Padres have to hope this year is a bust and their core of players can win a World Series, but they also have some very expensive roster decisions on the horizon. Snell and Hader, the team’s top starter and reliever, are free agents this winter, while Soto is set to become one of the most expensive free agents after 2024.
The Padres have been making waves for years now as a small-market club willing to spend as much as a big-market club. This season was supposed to be the one where it all came together, but instead, it looks like owner Peter Seidler will once again have to open the checkbook to keep the dream alive.