Here is some fun facts about the Padres!
- SAN DIEGO PADRES
Watching Edinson Volquez get creamed by the Mets to start the season, a thought immediately crossed my mind: Is Volquez the worst Opening Day starter ever?
Turns out “ever” is a lofty standard.
Highest single-season ERA for Opening Day pitcher (Minimum 50 IP)
YEAR PLAYER TEAM INN ERA
1973 Steve Blass Pittsburgh Pirates 88.2 9.85
1923 Bill Hubbell Philadelphia Phillies 55.0 8.35
2004 Hideo Nomo Los Angeles Dodgers 84.0 8.25
1983 Brad Havens Minnesota Twins 80.1 8.18
1912 King Cole Chicago Cubs/Pittsburgh Pirates 68.0 7.68
Just a delightfully eclectic mix of pitchers here, headed by the legendary Steve Blass. Not familiar with the former Pirates hurler? Blass was one of the best pitchers in baseball in 1972, going 19-8 with a 2.49 ERA,4 249⅔ innings pitched, and a runner-up finish in the NL Cy Young race. The next season, the right-hander suffered the biggest collapse by a pitcher in baseball history, walking 84 batters, with 12 HBPs and nine wild pitches ? in just 88⅔ innings. That 9.85 ERA season was so iconic that whenever a pitcher completely loses his ability to find the strike zone over an extended period of time, we still call it Steve Blass disease.
So OK, Volquez probably isn’t going to plunge to such depths, not even after getting pounded for four runs and nine hits Sunday at Coors Field, leaving his ERA at 10.00 after two starts. He’s also got no shot to catch Steve Blass disease, because he already has worse control than maybe any other pitcher in the game, including a league-leading 105 walks last year.
That a pitcher of such dubious pedigree would be the Opening Day starter for the Padres tells you how far this pitching staff has fallen. Injuries have played a huge role in the rotation’s Volquezisation. Cory Luebke, who’d started to emerge as one of the best young lefties in the game in 2011, made just five starts in 2012 before going under the knife for Tommy John surgery. Joe Wieland, a promising young right-hander, hit the operating table himself two months later. Casey Kelly, one of the main pieces in the big Adrian Gonzalez trade with the Red Sox in 2010, had TJ himself just last week.
If the Padres’ only affliction were a string of pitching injuries, that’d be easy to understand, given how common major surgeries for young arms still are. But there’s a lot more going on in San Diego, some of it the result of bad luck, some of it due to lousy decision-making, some of it iffy public relations. The other major piece to the Gonzalez trade, Anthony Rizzo, looks like a potential top-10 first baseman ? but he’s now a Cub, having been dealt for right-hander Andrew Cashner. Cashner has an electric fastball with triple-digit velocity ? but he can’t stay healthy, and he’s languishing in middle relief while the Padres rotation burns, at least for now. Rizzo was deemed expendable because the Padres acquired first baseman Yonder Alonso (and three other players) for staff ace Mat Latos ? only there’s real question over whether Alonso will ever hit for power, while Latos anchors the rotation for a World Series contender in Cincinnati. The prize of the Latos deal was probably catcher Yasmani Grandal ? only he’s been suspended for PED use, casting doubt over his future.
There’s much more. Chase Headley had a career year in 2012, came into this offseason as either a prime contract extension candidate or prime trade candidate ? and neither happened. Now he’s got a fractured thumb that’ll keep him out for most if not all of April, and given the track record of thumb injuries for other players, could continue to eat into his value as the season goes on.5 The Padres have in fact been aggressive in signing other arbitration-eligible players to extensions, but those deals have yielded spotty results, with even Nick Hundley’s dirt-cheap three-year, $9 million deal somehow being a bust a year and change into it.
Slap a dollar sign on any Padres analysis and you can drop into a rabbit hole of financial mishaps, starting with John Moores and his partners walking away with a big chunk of the Padres’ lucrative new TV deal as a condition of last year’s franchise sale. Also, much of San Diego County can’t watch Padres games because of an ongoing cable dispute, one that froze out 42 percent of viewers in the county last year and 22 percent now. A Padres fan named David Marver made a documentary called Padres: The Sad Truth, which takes ownership and management to task for poor decision-making, promises allegedly made and broken, and the team’s perennially rock-bottom payrolls. The Padres can make several reasonable counterarguments, such as that winning tends to beget spending more than vice versa; that the free-agent market hasn’t been particularly attractive over the past couple years; or that making $17 million a year in stadium payments, along with needing to maintain an undisclosed amount of funds in available free cash flow to satisfy three different lenders, puts a big strain on the team’s ability to spend.
But even if both sides have a point,6 the bottom line is the Padres simply don’t have nearly enough good players in the majors, or even close to the majors. That’s a function of a farm system that has been terribly broken for much of the team’s existence. There’s a longer article to be written about how little top-shelf talent has been drafted, developed, and nurtured into big league stardom by the Padres, and how much moves like draftingMatt Bush over Justin Verlander (to save money) and Donavan Tate over Mike Minor, Shelby Miller, Mike Trout, and others (who the hell knows why) have hurt the team’s fortunes. Today, there’s hope in the lower minors, with a strong Class A Fort Wayne TinCaps rotation headed by last year’s first-round pick Max Fried the jewel of the system. But we’ve already established what can happen when you pin your hopes on young arms: Who knows what the big league team will look like when the highly touted next generation of pitchers finally makes The Show ? assuming more than one or two make it at all?
So sure, we shouldn’t overreact to any team’s first week, not even one in which a team with the worst starting rotation in baseball somehow doubles down by scoring only 14 runs in its first six games. But when you look at the Padres’ hopes for contention, they look pretty grim. Now, and for the foreseeable future.
