<img alt="MLB: SEP 26 Padres at Dodgers" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/oHS1Qy1m8w3xNOPve9TQQCO7Ef4=/0x549:3100x2616/1310x873/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73624500/2175077889.0.jpg">
Photo by Brian Rothmuller/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
The Braves draw one of the best teams in baseball in the first round. There’s no rest for the wicked, no rest for the weary, and no rest for a team that had to play a hurricane-induced doubleheader to clinch a playoff spot in Game 162. About 24 hours after their brief celebration, the Braves will start fighting for their postseason lives across the country, hosted by the Padres in Game One of a three-game set. But before we get there, let’s take in a brief refresher on who the Padres are, and how they got here.
The 2024 San Diego Padres
There’s no question that the 2024 San Diego Padres are a good team. They finished with MLB’s fourth-best record (93-69) and fifth-best BaseRuns record (92-70). Their run differential wasn’t actually all that great (ninth in MLB), but that doesn’t matter too much considering that projections based on their roster strength have them squarely in MLB’s top five.
The Padres finished seventh in position player fWAR and fourth in pitching fWAR, which is maybe slightly worse than you’d expect given their overall record and placement. Probably the biggest knock on them is their team defense, as everything else is squarely above average, and generally very good. They finished tied for the league’s fifth-highest wRC+ with 111, and the league’s fourth-highest xwOBA. They also play in a park that’s had some strange effects throughout the years: there’s no question that Petco Park suppresses batted ball distance and is generally one of the unfriendliest hitting environments in baseball, but especially this year, the effect seemed mostly limited to balls in play rather than would-be homers. To that end, their roster construction where defense is effectively a dump stat works in their favor — and especially in this series, which will take place entirely in San Diego.
At times in the past, the Padres have been accused of, or blamed for, a stars-and-scrubs roster construction that lacked sufficient depth or contribution beyond their standouts to withstand the rigors of a full season. Not surprising, then, that this hasn’t been the case this year. Jackson Merill, who should probably win the Rookie of the Year but won’t because there is no justice, finished the year with 5.3 fWAR and a 130 wRC+ that was the result of substantially underhitting his xwOBA. Jurickson Profar pulled off something wild, going from essentially the worst MLB regular last season to a 4.3 fWAR season that did not involve outhitting his inputs to any meaningful degree. Manny Machado and Fernando Tatis Jr. both finished in the 3-4 WAR range, even though Tatis missed about two months of action. Three others (Ha-Seong Kim, Jake Cronenworth, Xander Bogaerts) finished between 2-3 WAR. And then, you have all the guys pitching in — the Padres had solid performances from four others, in addition to the seven average-or-better producers already named. Pretty much the only drag on their team position player-wise was catcher Luis Campusano, who finished the season in the minors after some of the worst catching you’ll see anywhere.
Pitching-wise, the Padres appear somewhat top-heavy, though a lot of that is due to something that’s plagued pretty much every team’s staff: injuries. Both Dylan Cease and Michael King were awesome and made it the whole year, but Joe Musgrove only made 19 starts and finished one out shy of 100 innings. 38-year-old Yu Darvish is probably hitting the twilight of his career, finishing with his worst line and fWAR total stateside (excepting a a barely-there-due-to-injury campaign in 2018), but was still an average arm, as was pseudo-knuckleballer Matt Waldron.
Like most good teams, the Padres enjoyed a random bullpen breakout in the form of Adrian Morejon, who went from 75 total innings and 0.1 fWAR as a swingman over five seasons to a 1.1 fWAR, full-season relief campaign in 2024. Robert Suarez had a nice bounceback year, and the Padres will likely also lean heavily on Trade Deadline acquisitions Tanner Scott and Jason Adam, each of whom have been great down the stretch.
How they got here
Though they finished with 93 wins, it wasn’t smooth sailing all season for the Padres. They started the season 15-18, and were below .500 as late as June 20. That was the day they notched a walkoff win over the Brewers. They proceeded to win the next two of three against the Brew Crew, dropped a game, and then reeled off another five wins in a row. Though July featured a stint where they lost seven of eight (including two of three to the Braves), it was right after that skid that they pretty much went berserk. From July 20 through August 20, they never lost back-to-back games, and went 22-5 in the process. They even had a puncher’s chance of toppling the Dodgers from the NL West crown late, but failed, dropping two of three in Los Angeles. They even helped the Braves by taking two of three from the Diamondbacks in the season’s final series despite having nothing to play for. There’s a chance the Braves might make them regret that...
In any case, the point here is that the Padres finished very strong, and kept winning even as they eased off the gas in September.
Beating the Padres
There aren’t many obvious weaknesses to exploit here. The Braves aren’t exactly a team built around leveraging deficiencies in other teams’ defenses, and even if they were, the park they’re going to play in isn’t going to help that much with that. If you look back at the Padres’ “skids” — if you can even call them that, given how infrequent and brief they were down the stretch — the only real issues the team ever encountered was when a generally-good/great starter had a blow-up game. That might happen again, but there’s no reason to expect it to.
As such, there’s probably not much the Braves can do but play their own game and hope it works well enough: hit some bombs and hope that they sequence more on those bombs than their pitching ends up yielding. That would have been an easier ask if the Braves were able to line up their rotation, but absent that, well, hold on to your butts.
<img alt="MLB: SEP 26 Padres at Dodgers" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/oHS1Qy1m8w3xNOPve9TQQCO7Ef4=/0x549:3100x2616/1310x873/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73624500/2175077889.0.jpg">
Photo by Brian Rothmuller/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
The Braves draw one of the best teams in baseball in the first round. There’s no rest for the wicked, no rest for the weary, and no rest for a team that had to play a hurricane-induced doubleheader to clinch a playoff spot in Game 162. About 24 hours after their brief celebration, the Braves will start fighting for their postseason lives across the country, hosted by the Padres in Game One of a three-game set. But before we get there, let’s take in a brief refresher on who the Padres are, and how they got here.
The 2024 San Diego Padres
There’s no question that the 2024 San Diego Padres are a good team. They finished with MLB’s fourth-best record (93-69) and fifth-best BaseRuns record (92-70). Their run differential wasn’t actually all that great (ninth in MLB), but that doesn’t matter too much considering that projections based on their roster strength have them squarely in MLB’s top five.
The Padres finished seventh in position player fWAR and fourth in pitching fWAR, which is maybe slightly worse than you’d expect given their overall record and placement. Probably the biggest knock on them is their team defense, as everything else is squarely above average, and generally very good. They finished tied for the league’s fifth-highest wRC+ with 111, and the league’s fourth-highest xwOBA. They also play in a park that’s had some strange effects throughout the years: there’s no question that Petco Park suppresses batted ball distance and is generally one of the unfriendliest hitting environments in baseball, but especially this year, the effect seemed mostly limited to balls in play rather than would-be homers. To that end, their roster construction where defense is effectively a dump stat works in their favor — and especially in this series, which will take place entirely in San Diego.
At times in the past, the Padres have been accused of, or blamed for, a stars-and-scrubs roster construction that lacked sufficient depth or contribution beyond their standouts to withstand the rigors of a full season. Not surprising, then, that this hasn’t been the case this year. Jackson Merill, who should probably win the Rookie of the Year but won’t because there is no justice, finished the year with 5.3 fWAR and a 130 wRC+ that was the result of substantially underhitting his xwOBA. Jurickson Profar pulled off something wild, going from essentially the worst MLB regular last season to a 4.3 fWAR season that did not involve outhitting his inputs to any meaningful degree. Manny Machado and Fernando Tatis Jr. both finished in the 3-4 WAR range, even though Tatis missed about two months of action. Three others (Ha-Seong Kim, Jake Cronenworth, Xander Bogaerts) finished between 2-3 WAR. And then, you have all the guys pitching in — the Padres had solid performances from four others, in addition to the seven average-or-better producers already named. Pretty much the only drag on their team position player-wise was catcher Luis Campusano, who finished the season in the minors after some of the worst catching you’ll see anywhere.
Pitching-wise, the Padres appear somewhat top-heavy, though a lot of that is due to something that’s plagued pretty much every team’s staff: injuries. Both Dylan Cease and Michael King were awesome and made it the whole year, but Joe Musgrove only made 19 starts and finished one out shy of 100 innings. 38-year-old Yu Darvish is probably hitting the twilight of his career, finishing with his worst line and fWAR total stateside (excepting a a barely-there-due-to-injury campaign in 2018), but was still an average arm, as was pseudo-knuckleballer Matt Waldron.
Like most good teams, the Padres enjoyed a random bullpen breakout in the form of Adrian Morejon, who went from 75 total innings and 0.1 fWAR as a swingman over five seasons to a 1.1 fWAR, full-season relief campaign in 2024. Robert Suarez had a nice bounceback year, and the Padres will likely also lean heavily on Trade Deadline acquisitions Tanner Scott and Jason Adam, each of whom have been great down the stretch.
How they got here
Though they finished with 93 wins, it wasn’t smooth sailing all season for the Padres. They started the season 15-18, and were below .500 as late as June 20. That was the day they notched a walkoff win over the Brewers. They proceeded to win the next two of three against the Brew Crew, dropped a game, and then reeled off another five wins in a row. Though July featured a stint where they lost seven of eight (including two of three to the Braves), it was right after that skid that they pretty much went berserk. From July 20 through August 20, they never lost back-to-back games, and went 22-5 in the process. They even had a puncher’s chance of toppling the Dodgers from the NL West crown late, but failed, dropping two of three in Los Angeles. They even helped the Braves by taking two of three from the Diamondbacks in the season’s final series despite having nothing to play for. There’s a chance the Braves might make them regret that...
In any case, the point here is that the Padres finished very strong, and kept winning even as they eased off the gas in September.
Beating the Padres
There aren’t many obvious weaknesses to exploit here. The Braves aren’t exactly a team built around leveraging deficiencies in other teams’ defenses, and even if they were, the park they’re going to play in isn’t going to help that much with that. If you look back at the Padres’ “skids” — if you can even call them that, given how infrequent and brief they were down the stretch — the only real issues the team ever encountered was when a generally-good/great starter had a blow-up game. That might happen again, but there’s no reason to expect it to.
As such, there’s probably not much the Braves can do but play their own game and hope it works well enough: hit some bombs and hope that they sequence more on those bombs than their pitching ends up yielding. That would have been an easier ask if the Braves were able to line up their rotation, but absent that, well, hold on to your butts.
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