A year into Rob Manfred's newly-implemented spread-out scheduling, which aims to have all 30 teams play each other each year by diluting divisional matchups. It has gone...relatively well. There's only a few truly tight divisional matchups, mostly O's-Rays and Astros-Ms-Rangers. At the same time, it's made a lot of records honest- the worst teams in the AL East are still over .500, while the 2nd place team in the AL Central is well under .500. Because teams don't have to play the majority of their games against division rivals, the majority of the season involves how well they match up to the rest of the league. Some teams are just miles better than the rest of the league, like the Braves. Some, like the Padres, are not.
The San Diego Padres were a playoff team last year, finished in 2nd though within earshot of LA, battled their way back and nearly made a World Series. Their 2023 offering doesn't have too many indicators of a drop-off; yes, a few weaker performances from Jake Cronenworth and Austin Nola, a few contracts wasted on people who weren't capable of anything this year, a few too many injured pitchers and Machado having his first okay year since arriving in SD, but a lot of this team has the same approach as last year. They've had a full year of Juan Soto at his peak and Josh Hader in his prime closing years, great seasons from Xander Bogaerts, Michael Wacha, Seth Lugo and Gary Sanchez, the long awaited return of Fernando Tatis Jr., a Cy Young-caliber year from Blake Snell, and Ha-Seong Kim surprising everybody in every facet of the game. If anything, the Padres have more OMG assets than they did last year, and should be able to build on that.
But I credit their season to the schedule redistricting. Because they don't have to play the Giants and Diamondbacks as often, they can't enact their superiority over them. Their biggest losses have come at the hands of the Astros, Brewers, Orioles, Phillies, Mariners, Cubs and Braves. Of late they've had productive series' against the Giants and Dodgers, even if the D-Backs seem to be their achilles heel this year. If they had more divisional matchups, they'd be a lot closer to .500, possibly over. But because it's less about divisional superiority and more about playing a wide range of teams, the Padres aren't playing well when compared to some of the titans of other divisions. And it sucks that this is the way we find out.
It's similar with the Cardinals as well. In addition to just a bad run of things leading up to the season, they also just couldn't match up to other divisional titans. I wonder how well they would have done if they had to play the Reds and Pirates more often.
We'll never know if the Padres would have struggled this much in a normal year, but I do connect a lot of their struggles, despite a lot of great performances, to this new schedule. This is a great Padres team that deserved better on a number of levels, even though there are obvious flaws that may have contributed as well. And I'm not even sure if next year will lead to an improvement, as the schedules will be split similarly to this year. The Padres need to work on getting around it. And with the potential for a departure in the coming years, they need to figure things out fast, or else they'll lose this opportunity they've come into.
Coming Tonight: He's unhittable. Absolutely unhittable. And my team had to play 4 games this week hoping to avoid him.
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