The San Diego Padres Are the Unluckiest Team in Baseball
By wins and losses, the Padres are a subpar team. They’re also a sleeping giant capable of making a postseason surge that shouldn’t surprise anyone.
The San Diego Padres were one of MLB’s most-watched teams at the trade deadline — and not for good reasons.
Despite making the National League Championship Series last fall, San Diego has spent most of the season battling the New York Mets and St. Louis Cardinals for the title of baseball’s Most Disappointing Team.
On the morning of last Tuesday’s deadline, the Padres found themselves 8.5 games back in the NL West and 5 games out of the NL’s final wild-card slot, with a 35% chance to make the playoffs. Other teams in comparably bleak situations — most notably the Mets — ended up selling, and the Padres had plenty to offer if they’d opted to do so. (For instance, Blake Snell and Josh Hader were among the most coveted pitchers potentially on the trade market.) But instead, San Diego decided to buy, doubling down yet again on the multi-year series of high-stakes bets this franchise has recently made.
One might be tempted to chalk this up to the typical riverboat-gambler style of general manager A.J. Preller, who has never met a trade he wouldn’t consider or a risk he wouldn’t take. And there is probably an element of not wanting to give up on a season that was supposed to see San Diego take another step toward a championship, not slide backward with a pricey roster that isn’t getting any younger. But the Padres may also be looking past their lackluster record and seeing a team that deserves a much stronger position in the playoff chase.
By wins and losses, San Diego is indeed a subpar team. The Padres opened the year at 37-45, and despite a recent surge — a stretch of 18 wins in 32 games since July 1 — they’re now four games below .500 for the season overall, at 55-59. Because this has been a comparison point all season, the Mets and Padres had the same record as recently as July 8, which speaks volumes about just what a struggle it has been for Hader, Snell, Juan Soto, Xander Bogaerts, Manny Machado, Fernando Tatis Jr., Yu Darvish and company in San Diego. (Incidentally: Wow, this team still has a ton of star power.)
However, while the similarly star-laden Mets deserved every bit of their awful record — which probably led owner Steve Cohen to make the painful-but-pragmatic decision to tear everything down — the Padres’ story is more complicated.
If we plug San Diego’s runs scored (13th best per game) and allowed (fourth best) into the Pythagorean formula, which predicts the record a team “should” have with neutral luck in close games, we would expect the Padres to be 63-51 right now, or eight games better than their actual record.
That 8-game gap makes San Diego the unluckiest team in MLB this season by a wide margin; no other team has undershot its expected record by more than five games. (The Mets, by comparison, are only running three games worse than their expected record.) If the Padres were actually 63-51, they’d be leading the NL wild-card race right now, and they would also be only 4 games out of first place in their division. It’s fair to say that, with better luck than their MLB-worst 6-18 record in 1-run games, the narrative around this team would be completely different.
And the Padres look even better if we dive deeper into their numbers.
Wins Above Replacement (WAR) is primarily an individual metric, designed to quantify the value of a player’s entire statistical profile (including every batting, baserunning, fielding and pitching event they participated in). But if we sum WAR over an entire team’s roster and add in the replacement level, we get another estimate for how many wins a team “should” have — this time removing not only the close-games luck that Pythagorean record adjusts for, but also situational factors like clutch hitting and sequencing, which influence whether a team has scored fewer or allowed more runs than it should have through what is mostly luck.
Right now, the Padres rank fifth in team WAR per game, trailing only the Atlanta Braves, Texas Rangers, Tampa Bay Rays and Los Angeles Dodgers. If it had the record that its WAR predicts, San Diego would be 66-48, which would rank third overall in the NL and put the Padres hot on the Dodgers’ trail in the NL West race.
Despite their reputation as underachievers, the individual members of the Padres have actually played quite well this season. Do-everything infielder Ha-Seong Kim ranks fifth among all MLB position players in WAR, while Soto isn’t far behind at No. 11. Snell ranks fifth overall in pitching WAR as well, and Hader ranks fourth among relievers. In total, San Diego has 10 players on pace for at least 2.5 WAR this season — tied with Atlanta and Texas for the most of any team in baseball.
Of course, not everyone on this Padres squad has lived up to expectations. Fresh off of signing an 11-year, $350 million contract extension in February, Manny Machado is on pace to finish with 3.7 fewer WAR this year than last, while Xander Bogaerts, Yu Darvish and Jake Cronenworth aren’t quite performing to the level of their career track records. Recent developments like the injury that puts the rest of starter Joe Musgrove’s season in doubt could further compromise San Diego’s potential to cash in on its roster talent and their under-the-radar production.
But there’s no doubt that the Padres are a lot better than their record. And there are also plenty of stretch-run precedents for them to emulate — success stories where teams with seemingly little chance to make a run identified their dormant promise when nobody else did. The 2021 Atlanta Braves were treading water at the deadline, but a series of shrewd moves to address weaknesses and a belief in the team’s existing core led to a championship. Both NLCS teams last year — the Padres and Philadelphia Phillies — were in the thick of a tough wild-card race before making important deadline deals that set them up for a series of postseason upsets.
After losing three straight and four of five, the Padres need to start their turnaround soon — their playoff odds were sitting at 34% on Wednesday morning. If San Diego indeed makes a surprise run and finds itself in the playoffs, it means they finally got a little lucky. But no one should be surprised by anything that this dark-horse team might accomplish the rest of the way.
Filed under: Baseball