It's very odd how this Padres team worked out. It would have been hard for me to predict back in March that in a rotation consisting of Yu Darvish, Joe Musgrove, Michael Wacha, Blake Snell and Seth Lugo, that Snell would be having the best season.
By one metric it'd be an easy assumption- Snell has a Cy Young, the rest don't. Tell that to the Mets, they have like 6 Cy Youngs in that rotation and are still behind Philly. Awards don't always mean something when indicating future success. And so while Snell was excellent with the Rays, for a while I just thought he caught his peak at the right time and with the right team, and would be fairly serviceable in all other roles. And for the last few years, that's what Blake Snell has been, serviceable. He improved slightly last year by getting his ERA back under 4, but it took an 8-10 record to do that. Snell has averaged 170 strikeouts in the last two seasons, which is a fine metric to simmer at considering he's only broken 200 once in his career.
Even now, as he leads the rotation in innings, has 121 strikeouts and a 3 ERA, he's got a negative W/L ratio. Snell has only finished a season with more wins than losses twice in his career, which is a weird thing to say about someone who was considered one of the best pitchers in the game a few years back. Even now he's 5-7, which you can chalk up to the Padres being something of a disappointment this year. Snell came to San Diego to compete, and now he's wound up in a similar place he was in back in Tampa, where it's really up to him to do the brunt of the work while the offense may or may not show up. And, like, it's going well for him, but I think they'd all prefer it if the team was better.
The Padres have been doing better lately, and have won 4 of their last 5, but it's looking like they'll be going into the ASG break with an under .500 record, which is not what a team that nearly made it to a World Series should want to look like the following year. It's not like the stars have exactly let this team down per se, as Tatis, Soto, Bogaerts and Hader are handing in great seasons, and now Manny Machado is catching up, with 20 RBIs and 6 homers since June 10th. This team also has Ha-Seong Kim, who might be one of the single best defensive players in baseball, and whose added offensive ability is making him even more valuable.
The problem is that this division is still one where so many teams want to get a word in edgewise, and though the Giants have returned to earth a bit, they still have more working starters and more lower-budget successes. The Padres have had expensive misfires, like Nelson Cruz, Matt Carpenter and Drew Pomeranz, who's still barely pitched for this team since signing a new contract. There have been successes on the buying front, but they won't be full successes unless this team does something, and it's getting to be likely that it might not even be this year. The Padres need to figure out if 2023 is a wash or not, and how to properly prepare for that.
Coming Tomorrow- Like his father before him, he annihilates baseballs.
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