Yesterday, or perhaps it was this morning, the Padres’ playoff probability, per FanGraphs, dipped below 50% for the first time all year. The Padres are, entering play today, more likely to miss the playoffs than to make them.
They are, to be fair, the fifth-most likely National League team to make the playoffs. If you were tasked with predicting the playoff field and your only goal was accuracy, you would include the Padres. There’s nearly a coin toss of a chance they’ll make them, and their probability of winning the World Series is low but not zero. But the Reds, who trail by a game and a half, have a devastatingly (for the Padres) easy schedule the rest of the way, and there are enough smatterings of wild card chances elsewhere in National League Land (Atlanta, Philadelphia, St. Louis) that the Padres are, at this moment, more likely than not to miss the Wild Card Game.
The Padres know things are bleak. They knew it at the trade deadline. They allowed themselves to be outbid for Max Scherzer’s services by their primary division rival rather than risk future assets. Their biggest acquisition will likely help them more, quantitatively, next season than this one. They may have been overly confident in what was, at the deadline, an 80.8% shot at a playoff appearance, but they’re on the upswing, and they were not yet ready to push all their chips to the middle of the table, and they made the decisions they made with all of that in mind.
This is smart. If the goal is to maximize the probability of a single championship, or to maximize the total number of expected championships, the Padres should not give up future assets of significant value at this stage in their arc. To put it the most simply, Fernando Tatís Jr. and Manny Machado are both under contract through at least 2028 (Machado does have an opt-out after 2023, but at the moment it looks like the smart decision will end up being to remain in San Diego). Machado is not yet 30. Tatís is not yet 23. Years of production are expected from those two, and they’re far from the only crops in the field. The Padres have set themselves up to have opportunities again and again (and quite a few more “again”s) to contend, with financial flexibility relative to the current luxury tax thresholds, a farm system not far from the midpoint, and oh did I mention they have four pitchers who’ve been among baseballs forty most productive over the last four years? It’s hard to find a stat that properly conveys what a Musgrove/Clevinger/Darvish/Snell/Lamet/Paddack pitching staff looks like relative to staffs around the league, but it’s one of the best, and it’s locked up through at least 2023 itself.
The Padres are in a great spot in the long term. But, it’s fair to be disappointed. And it’s fair to be worried.
Things rarely work out the way they do on paper. Things could certainly go wrong over these next two or seven or thirteen seasons. Things will certainly go wrong, and every opportunity missed is an opportunity missed, even if you manage, as San Diego likely did, to hold off from investing too much value in an individual shot at a ring.
So, what went wrong?
The pitching is a good place to start. The Padres’ expected strength came largely from its pitching (this is what happens when you have Eric Hosmer at first base), and while it was clear Mike Clevinger would be out this season, Dinelson Lamet was supposed to throw a lot more than the 34 innings he’s amassed so far. Chris Paddack, largely healthy through his first two big-league seasons, is currently on the IL having not yet cracked 100 innings (the qualified innings threshold is currently somewhere around 118). Blake Snell, the target of what at the time appeared a blockbuster trade, has pitched his way to a 5.59 xERA, and has only just topped 100 innings himself. Yu Darvish just went on the injured list. Joe Musgrove is the only thing that’s worked, and he was something of an afterthought when acquired.
The bigger problem, though, hasn’t come from within. The Padres were expected to win 94.7 games. They’re currently expected to win 88.1. That’s a significant difference, but not massive, especially as these things go. No, the bigger problem hasn’t come from the Padres themselves.
It’s come from nine or ten hours up the coast.
On Opening Day, the San Francisco Giants’ playoff odds sat at 5.7%. They were expected, at that moment, to win 76 games as rosters were then constructed, a number likely to drop should they sell at the deadline, which was more of a foregone conclusion for the San Francisco Giants at that point than it was for even the Kansas City Royals. Since Opening Day, the Giants have been the winningest team in baseball, and the Padres have borne the brunt of it.
If the Giants hadn’t overperformed like they have, the Padres would be four games ahead of their biggest wild card threat. They’d be coasting to a more-likely-than-not home game against the Reds with wonderful starting pitching options (Joe Musgrove, for example), and they’d probably have another win or two in their pocket, considering their 4-5 mark against San Francisco has both come from and added to the Giants’ success. If the Giants hadn’t come out of near nowhere, the Padres, who had the second-best playoff probability of any team in the majors on Opening Day, would be rolling the dice once more, hoping to knock off their rivals in Los Angeles who’ve suffered through injury problems of their own then enter the NLCS as pennant favorites if not World Series favorites, as their pitching shortfall mattered a bit less with rotation needs dimming thanks to October’s rest increase. Their odds wouldn’t be spectacular, but they’d be about four times better, even if everything outside of the Giants’ orbit had gone exactly as it has.
This is another of those things that don’t work out the way they do on paper. You’re never safe from a team making a run. Even accounting for the 60-game schedule, the Marlins had only a 9.2% playoff probability on Opening Day last summer, one that dropped when they suffered a Covid outbreak out of the gate. In 2018, the Brewers had only a 2.5% chance on Opening Day of winning the NL Central. The 2017 Diamondbacks entered Opening Day with only an 8.2% playoff chance, with the Twins at 5.1% over in the AL. Each of those teams made the playoffs. The Brewers won their division. Surprises happen.
This isn’t to say that those probabilities are meaningless, or wrong. For every twenty teams with a five percent playoff chance, one should be expected to make it. That’s what five percent means. You’re never safe from a team making a run, and the more relevant preseason number for the Padres to look at this year was their own playoff probability, which stood at 92.3%, implying about a one-in-thirteen chance of missing the field, a worst-case that’s now quite close to happening.
But again, things don’t work out the way they do on paper. Which is why for as strong as the Padres’ forward-looking position appears at the moment, it would help a great deal to make the playoffs in some fashion this year. And why for as strong as the Padres’ forward-looking position appears at the moment, disappointment with this season’s likely missed opportunity is entirely justified.
