Front Row Seat: Padres keep losing during crucial stretch
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Darren Smith
San Diego Padres
Padres go down early again, lose again to Orioles - San Diego Union-Tribune
A Padres starter has allowed at least four runs in the first five innings six times in that span of 15 games. Another two times, they allowed three runs in the first five innings.
Padres starting pitchers have worked a total of 28 innings over their past seven starts. Counting the bullpen game, Padres relief pitchers have had to cover 44 innings over the past nine games.
The big-picture view shows an unsustainable pace for the bullpen, especially after it lost Jason Adam for the season after he ruptured the quad tendon in his left knee Monday.
The immediate issue is that a team cannot be expected to maintain any sort of winning trajectory when it is regularly behind at or near the start of games.
Padres' engine idles when it's time to hit the gas - MLB.com
The Padres lost, 6-2, to the Orioles on Tuesday night – the fourth time in five days they’ve lost a game to an opponent outside the playoff picture. Nine days ago, they finished their series against the rival Dodgers tied atop the division. Since then, San Diego has lost three straight series and has fallen 2 1/2 games behind L.A. in the NL West.
“It's a stretch,” said manager Mike Shildt, “that is very uncharacteristic of this team.”
Padres Daily: Late struggles the norm; troubling starts; worry meter; Manny’s battery - San Diego Union-Tribune
Their starting pitching has been abysmal for much of the past 2½ weeks and downright horrible the past week-and-a-half.
The Padres got five quality starts in a span of six games from Aug. 19 to 24. Those are their only quality starts in their past 18 games. (Two of those were bullpen games, including one on Sunday. That still leaves their actual starters without a quality start over their past seven games.)
The Padres are the only team in the major leagues without a quality start since Aug. 25. Their starters have a 6.30 ERA in that span, third highest in the majors. Take away reliever David Morgan’s two scoreless innings at the start of Sunday’s game in Minnesota, and that ERA would be 6.75.
The Padres have enough concerns. Their starting pitching remains the biggest - The Athletic
Their odds of qualifying for the postseason, according to FanGraphs, are still above 97 percent. Shildt, whose contract runs through 2027, is the same manager who once oversaw 17 consecutive September victories for the St. Louis Cardinals.
But these Padres are inspiring limited hope of a surge into the postseason, when there will be almost no time to figure things out. The momentum from a blockbuster trade deadline has evaporated. San Diego has lost four games in the past five days while facing a pair of clubs that recently sold off much of their rosters. With their offense and defense sputtering at the same time, the Padres have embarked on a four-week stretch of favorable matchups by compounding notable injuries with oath-inducing baseball.
Padres Castoff Making San Diego Regret Trading Him With Dominant Season - Sports Illustrated
Grisham has already hit a career-high 28 homers this season, including 10 in August. Only three players cleared the fences more last month. His 130 OPS+ is on pace for a career high.
The center fielder was already a two-time Gold Glove Award winner (2020, 2022) by the time the Padres traded Grisham to the Yankees. Yankees fans perhaps figured Grisham would give the team an upgrade defensively over Judge in center field — and anything else would be a bonus.
Grisham has given New York far more than anyone expected.
Margin Call Part 1 - Letters to A.J.
It’s worth asking why, with the crystal clear understanding that sacrifice bunting reduces expected run scoring, a team would lean so heavily into the practice? This has an answer that is easy to understand. Although it’s invisible in the run expectancy matrix, there’s a tradeoff between total run expectancy, and run scoring distribution when moving between the base/out states that shift after a successful bunt.
It turns out that while sacrifice bunting always decreases the total run expectancy, it frequently increases the likelihood of scoring at least 1 run. The tradeoff for fewer total runs is a lower chance of coming up completely empty. And if you understand baseball, you can instantly see why in the right context this is an extremely favorable tradeoff for the purpose of winning the game. But the key is that context is everything. And some sacrifice bunts are almost pure downside.
Padres fans react to first day of downtown San Diego special events parking zone rates - 10 News San Diego
The Special Events rate is just like it says on the meter. $10 per hour for all parking meters within a half-mile radius of the ballpark. It's going to be for events of 10,000 people or more at Petco Park. It'll be from starting two hours before a special event at Petco Park until four hours after the event begins.
“I'm hearing it from you first. I would have not known until I went up, paid one. And like, well, when did this jump up to $10, you know, usually you could pay with the quarters in your car. But, not no more,” Angel Carbullido who was attending the Padres Game with his family, said.
