A.J. Preller and the Padres are rediscovering how hard baseball can be, when you’re hunting a playoff berth in a 162-game season.
Take the recent summer trade market.
Preller said starting pitching was too costly. GMs of other contenders chose to brave those choppy waters.
For the time being, three veteran starting pitchers who were dealt in late July — Tyler Anderson, J.A. Happ and Kyle Gibson — have provided their contender good results for a trade price that media analysts graded as not steep.
Preller decided to double down on rookie pitcher Ryan Weathers. So far, not so good. The 21-year-old lefty — who never pitched a full season above Single-A before this year — posted four bad starts that slammed MLB’s most-used bullpen. The Padres dropped all four games.
It’s too soon to read deeply into the trade season’s fallout.
The Padres still have a shot at the second wild card, though the Cincinnati Reds have a huge edge in schedule.
We’ll see what becomes of the prospects who were dealt. See, Corey Kluber.
When Padres rookie GM Jed Hoyer traded him in July 2010, Kluber was widely projected as a second-tier starter.
Even executives with Cleveland, which obtained him in a three-team trade that sent slugger Ryan Ludwick to Petco Park — whose vastness Ludwick said messed with his head — said years later they didn’t foresee Kluber becoming the two-time Cy Young winner he became.
This is the Padres’ first “full season” playoff race since the Ludwick-Kluber trade.
It won’t matter that Preller didn’t trade for starting pitching last month if Yu Darvish doesn’t regain his form of the season’s first half when he returns from injury.
Sure, if they’d received a pitching infusion such as Anderson, Happ and Gibson have provided their new teams, the Padres might have an additional victory or two. Certainly their bullpen would be less weary. And maybe their attitude as well: Comments by veterans in that ‘pen, Mark Melancon and Craig Stammen, have implied that improved starting pitching would be as welcomed as water in Death Valley.
Trading for pitchers who aren’t frontline starters isn’t without risk. Jon Lester, for one, has struggled since the Cardinals took a chance on him last month. But the Padres would gladly take the results the other three veterans mentioned have provided their new clubs.
Anderson, dealt July 27 to the DH league, has pitched to a 3.00 ERA in five starts with Seattle. As he had in all 18 starts with Pittsburgh, he went five innings or more each time.
The price was two prospects, neither among Seattle’s top 20, per media analysts.
“The fact that he’s a free agent at the end of this year means the price would have been way lower than for Gibson on his own,” said Baseball America’s Kyle Glaser. “The Padres could have matched what the Mariners gave up for Anderson pretty easily.”
Happ, 38, has delivered a stunning 1.99 ERA — nearly five runs below his pre-trade mark (6.77) — in four games since St. Louis sent a swingman and a relief prospect to Minnesota. Glaser likened that Double-A reliever to Padres prospect Tom Cosgrove, 25. The swingman, John Gant, 29, has a career ERA of 3.79.
Philadelphia’s trade for Gibson brought two other big leaguers, decreasing odds Preller could’ve lined up a deal with Texas, a franchise he knows well. Gibson has posted a 2.36 ERA in the four Phillies games apart from a bad outing against the Dodgers. He’s under contract next year for $7 million.
Explaining how trades work, MLB personnel struck a cautionary note: Sometimes, the acquiring team believes — rightly — it can fix a player’s flaw or otherwise enhance his game.
“It can happen just like that,” said a scout, snapping his fingers. “Someone in the organization knows something about that player and the results are immediate.”
The Cardinals have a long history of tweaking veterans to good effect.
For example: After seeing pitcher Woody Williams blossom after a summer trade in 2001, Padres personnel asked him if coach Dave Duncan had untracked him. They weren’t sure they got a satisfactory answer.
Commenting on Kluber soon after the 2010 trade, Cleveland execs said they liked his simple delivery, accuracy and clean medical history. Later, Kluber added velocity and a lethal cut fastball.
This year from afar, the Padres have seen their 2016 first-round draftee Cal Quantrill, 26, pitch to a 3.04 ERA in 34 games (16 starts) with Cleveland. His inning count of 109 2/3 would rank third on the Padres.
Quantrill, dealt last summer in the package that brought Mike Clevinger, has evolved more of a “north-south” approach. He’s thrown more four-seam fastballs and introduced a curveball.
Giving Cleveland an outing Sunday like one the Padres desperately have needed, Quantrill blanked the Los Angeles Angels on two hits for seven innings.
The Padres had many successes this year under pitching coach Larry Rothschild, who, 186 games into his tenure, was fired sometime after Sunday’s game. Just two months ago, on June 14, the Padres led MLB in ERA.
A scout who knows Rothschild’s replacement, Ben Fritz, suggested he’ll be more “numbers driven” than Rothschild.
The number the Padres have in mind now is five. It denotes the final playoff spot in the 15-team National League.
