The Padres Didn’t Get Better without Juan Soto and Blake Snell. But They Did Get Luckier.
San Diego is far more likely to make the playoffs now than they were a year ago.
The decision of whether to buy or sell at the trade deadline can be one of the trickiest balancing acts in sports. Last season, the San Diego Padres were buyers despite playoff odds sitting below 40 percent — one of several metrics which suggested that unloading their impending free agents (such as Blake Snell and Josh Hader) would be more valuable than loading up for the stretch run.
But still, a week after the deadline, I wrote a piece calling them a “sleeping giant capable of making a postseason surge.” My rationale was this: San Diego had been one of the unluckiest teams in MLB history, according to the gap between their actual record and what we would predict from their run differential. Surely, the Padres were set up to turn things around when their luck improved, right?
Unfortunately for San Diego, the team didn’t get the message that they were supposed to start winning: They went 10-18 in August to effectively end their postseason hopes, before a 20-7 run in September made their season look more respectable than it actually was. And as if that wasn’t enough, the Padres then went on to lose Snell, Hader, Juan Soto and more total talent than any other MLB team over the offseason. Everything was set up for San Diego to hover around .500 again this year, with another challenging path to the playoffs.
All of which makes it shocking that San Diego is currently in a much better position as the calendar flips to July of 2024 than they were in 2023:
How can a team that lost its best two players — Snell and Soto, among many others — be more than five games better at the start of July than it was a year earlier?
It may not be because the Padres are actually better. Looking once again at Pythagorean records — those we would predict based on run differential — San Diego’s current (through Monday) .539 mark is not only far below what it was in 2023 at the end of the season (.568), after the team’s meaningless late-season surge, but it even lags behind what it was through the same number of games a year ago (.540).
The big difference is that the team has gone from a 5-15 record in 1-run games at that stage of the season — part of what would become a league-worst 9-23 mark in such contests by season’s end, MLB’s fifth-worst single-season record in 1-run games since the ‘94 strike — to a far more respectable 10-12 mark this season. That means San Diego has been a lot more efficient at turning those Pythagorean wins into real ones this year.
How much more? On a per-162-game basis, San Diego is currently tracking for the 15th-biggest year-over-year reversal in Pythagorean luck in AL/NL history:
Not that the Padres have even gotten neutral luck in 2024 so far… hence the below-.500 mark in 1-run games. But they were so bad in that regard last year — one of only 27 teams in AL/NL history to have a luck per 162 mark of -10 or worse — that reverting most of that away has made for historic gains.
(It’s also really interesting that all of the other teams on our list above were in the same boat as San Diego, with a horribly unlucky season followed by only a mildly unlucky one, suggesting that at least some of what we’re calling “bad luck” here has a level of persistence. But I digress.)
There’s a certain bizarro irony to the net result of all this. The 2023 Padres were, by Pythagorean winning percentage, the third-best team in franchise history — trailing only the small-sample 2020 team and the 1998 version that went to the World Series with Kevin Brown and Tony Gwynn. By a measure like Wins Above Replacement, they were even better: The best Padres team ever in a full season (i.e., if we toss out 2020). That team missed the playoffs despite all of its stats and star power because of a chronic inability to win close games.
This year’s team still has some big names, to be sure, but many of them (namely, Xander Bogaerts, Manny Machado and Joe Musgrove) are underperforming horribly. And yet, the 2024 Padres will probably do what their predecessors couldn’t, getting into the postseason and maybe even making some noise there. Who needs Soto and Snell when you have Lady Luck more on your side?
Filed under: Baseball
Neil any theories as to reasons for the possible persistent part of poor pythagorean performance? e.g. teams with bad bullpens or something?
Beyond this insightful look at the distress of Pythagoras over his failing Theorem, two things that make me go hmmmm with the Padres.
First, I cannot believe the season Jurickson Profar is having after a litany of bad years. I remember when he first went to San Diego, Harold Reynolds on MLB Network was responding to a question about the Padres being a potential postseason threat when he noted, "can you really consider yourself a postseason threat with Jurickson Profar in left field every day?" To which Greg Amsinger replied, "we should now probably apologize to the Profar family in case they are watching."
Reynolds wasn't wrong.
Second, imagine how good the Padres would be today if they didn't make that ill-advised trade for Soto that everyone applauded as a steal? Soto didn't deliver what Preller anticipated, he then walked, and the Nationals greatly accelerated their rebuild from that trade's assets alone.
Before considering how good MacKenzie Gore has been this year, just keeping CJ Abrams alone would have alleviated the need to make a second ill-advised move - signing Xander Bogaerts. It's hard to imagine that San Diego has the 31-year-old Bogaerts for 8 more years after this one for around $25 MM per and a no trade clause. Ouch.
Sometimes your best deal is the one you were prevented from making.