To Err Is Human; To Acknowledge is Preller

The story of redemption is as old as, well, stories. It's even more compelling than the story of success, because of the added intrigue of the fall.

If A.J. Preller's signing and trading binge preceding the 2015 season had catapulted the San Diego Padres to the playoffs, that would have been noteworthy: A "small market" team with a history of mediocrity (or worse) opens the vault and imports a division title.

Instead, what Matt Kemp, Justin Upton, Craig Kimbrel, Andrew Cashner, James Shields and Derek Norris delivered was the familiar stench of ineptitude, three games worse than the previous year's 85-loss season.

The recent head-scratching trade of Matt Kemp to Atlanta for Hector Olivera -- a 31-year-old washout with a domestic abuse suspension -- amounts to the final unconditional surrender following that brief episode, which unraveled less than halfway through its first season. With Kemp's departure -- a pure salary dump; Olivera was designated for assignment immediately -- and not withstanding the continued employment in SoCal of catcher Norris and his .191 BA, the slate has been wiped clean.

The Padres have banked some prospects in the process, saved some cash to allocate elsewhere and continue their merry prance through the bottom of the NL West, 15 games under .500.

So the future is next year for the Padres, as it almost always has been, except for one thing: the speed with which GM Preller acknowledged the failure of his plan and pivoted to a new one. In the space of a year-and-a-half he has course-corrected 180 degrees. That demonstrates remarkable maturity and aptitude, even in a business where your successes and failures are displayed publicly in the standings every day.

Which Nice Teams Are Starting Out Naughty?

Welcome to Atlanta, where your 8-25 Braves stand as the 2016 poster boys for mortgaging the present. It's hard to believe now, but the Cincinnati Reds have to wish they were the Braves.

The Reds tried to play both ends against the middle two off-seasons ago and ended up getting toasted both ways. After a 76-86 campaign in '14, they unloaded their second and third best starters but left the rest of the team intact, en route to a 98-loss season.

Having flipped ace Johnny Cueto for some future chips at last year's trading deadline, GM Walt Jocketty sent Todd Frazier to Chicago for more prospect goodies this off-season. And that was it.

Hanging on to middling veterans like Brandon Phillips, Jay Bruce (getting tagged out, left) and Zack Cozart, he left Joey Votto and the Seven Dwarfs to compete this year against the likes of Pittsburgh, St. Louis and the Cubs. By failing to convert veterans into promising youth, the Reds lack the prospect-laden farm system that hints at a brighter future.

At least the residents of Marietta, Georgia have a future to look forward to.

Others Worthy of Relegation
In short, neither Atlanta nor Cincinnati is surprising anyone with their wretchedness so far this season. Nor are the Twins, who blinded themselves into a false sense of hope with a moment of incandescence last season, nor the Padres, a basket case of a different weave, nor the A's, whose management seems to have run out of ideas about how to convert trash into energy. The Brewers are sowing the bad karma that building around Ryan Braun reaps, not to mention a pitching staff of the following luminaries: Taylor Jungeman, Jimmy Nelson, Willy Peralta, Chase Anderson and Zach Davies.

Then there's the Angels, despite a gargantuan payroll and two inner-ring Hall of Famers, who can't buy a run and whose best starter, now that Garret Richards got laid up is...um...the smoldering ruins of Jered Weaver? Dude hasn't fanned a Major Leaguer batter since 2014.*

It's possible we'll see some dead cat bounce out of Minnesota this year, but that's about the best this pile of owl upchuck can hope for. The real question for these franchises is whether they are on the way up or the way down, or whether they even have a way.

One of These Things Is Not Like the Other
All that leaves us with one head-scratcher, the Houston Astros. If ever a team was tailor-made for a season in which runs are being scored off big flies, it's this ultimate three true outcome team. Houston finished second in homers and fifth in walks last season, and first in whiffs, with seven batters accumulating 100+ Ks, including Colby Rasmus and Chris Carter, who fanned more than 300 times between them. (They also led the league in steals. Go figure.)

They're doing it again this year -- first in strikeouts, first in walks and fourth in going yard. The problem for the Astros is that the guys throwing the most innings are their worst pitchers. Starters 1-4, including last year's Cy Young, have been scorched fora combined 4.87 ERA. Starters #5 and #6 rock a combined 2.48 ERA and the bullpen has neither added nor subtracted.

The all-or-nothing offense combined with a pitching rotation regressing well beyond the mean have spelled doom for Houston, but there is good news in both the immediate past and on the horizon. They've won seven of their last 11 in large part because scads of ill fortune foisted upon them in April is settling out in May. The Astros have played sub-.400 ball so far but Baseball Prospectus projects them to play .543 the rest of the way. Projection systems are for movie theaters, but at least this suggests that the underlying conditions are there for a real recovery.

The early bottom feeders really do appear to be the sport's worst, with one exception. But baseball is a funny game and five months is an awfully long time.

*mild hyperbole but his average pitch speed is 82.7, or roughly how fast I can spit.

Are the Padres the 2016 Blue Jays?

In 2013, the Toronto Blue Jays pushed their chips to the middle of the table, acquiring Jose Reyes, R.A. Dickey, Melky Cabrera, Mark Buehrle and others for a run at the sagging AL East. At 74-88, the gamble went bust, and it only improved a little the next year when the Jays finished 83-79.

The team stayed together, though, and with Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion anchoring the lineup, and of course the addition of MVP Josh Donaldson, Toronto catapulted to the top of the AL standings in 2015. The moves made by GM Alex Anthopoulos in the 2013 took two years to pay dividends.

Cross the continent and a similar scenario might appear to be playing out in San Diego. The Padres' new GM, A.J. Preller, collected a bulk set of spare parts -- Matt Kemp, Wil Myers, Justin Upton, Craig Kimbrel -- for renewed relevance in the NL West. The Friars were becoming MLB's version of the Premier League's Everton -- a perennial also-ran rarely good or bad enough to be noticed.

They got noticed -- for stinking up the joint, just as the Blue Jays had, skidding to the same 74-88 result. Kemp and Myers were mostly a disaster, Kimbrel suffered his worst season (he was merely brilliant) and Upton performed as advertised.

Now in 2016, are the Priests poised to become this year's Blue Jay? No, no they are not. Here's why.

Kemp and Myers did not stumble last season; they are both broken. Once the favorite toys in the chest -- Myers is a former Rookie of the Year and Kemp had his 2011 MVP stolen by Ryan Braun's doping -- neither is that anymore. Injuries have reduced Kemp to a replacement player -- 1.7 WAR the last two seasons -- and the league has caught on to Myers and his free-swinging ways. Each is a disaster in the field, Kemp yet more cringe-inducing than Myers.

Worse, Kimbrel is gone, traded for prospects, as are Joaquin Benoit and Ian Kennedy, with little on the farm to replace them. Upton, the team's lone salvation, has moved on too, and who can blame him? San Diego did ink reliever Ryan Madson to an overstuffed three-year deal, but is otherwise without much in the way of assets.

Worse, unlike the AL East, the NL West is ascendant. The Dodgers still have a pile of talent and money. The Giants are salivating at the even year with Johnny Cueto aboard. Arizona added Zack Greinke and Shelby Miller to a squad already showing signs of emergence. The Padres are toast in that crowd.

Where the Blue Jays took a step forward their second year after the big moves, the Padres are more likely to step back. This is a team that needs to admit it is in complete rebuild and get about jettisoning all the veteran talent it can. The alternative is to remain like Everton, neither champion nor relegation fodder, just there, filling up the standings.

Going For Broken: The San Diego Padres

Our dads love us unconditionally, no matter how messed up we are. Baseball's dads, the Padres, appear to be applying paternal love with a vengeance this Hot Stove season. The question is, will that make the team any better?

General Manager A.J. Preller took the reins of the franchise this winter and apparently has a mandate to compete in a division that includes the Brinks truck in Los Angeles and the defending champs in the Bay.

Last year, and seemingly every year prior, the Friars trailed all of baseball in plate crossings en route to another losing campaign. Preller has attempted to remedy that with a Tasmanian Devil imitation. He's made more moves than Allied Van Lines*, swapping out fringe players and farmhands for outfielders Matt Kemp, Wil Myers and Justin Upton, and catcher Derek Norris, then signing hurlers Josh Johnson and Brandon Morrow.

*This is an awesome reference to the seminal '80s parody band, Blotto, and their signature song, I Want To Be A Lifeguard. And by "reference" I mean "theft" of the line "Summer blonds revealing tan lines, I'll make more moves than Allied Van Lines." After you click on this link, listen to this and this and be schooled.

What do all these players have in common? They all live in the Land of Lost Toys. Take Johnson, a once-upon-a-time Marlins star, who's twirled fewer than 82 innings in two of his last three seasons, posting ERAs ranging from 1.64 to 6.20. Or Norris, who busted out to a .292/.402/.477 first half of 2014 and then cratered to .245/.314/.324 second half as part of the team-wide collapse in Oakland.

Or Myers, who lit the AL on fire his first season en route to the Rookie of the Year award and then stunk up the joint during his sophomore campaign last year, bleeding 180 points of OPS before fracturing his wrist, along with much of his promise.

Of the above-named group, only Morrow, a fourth-starter type, has failed to post a sine-curve career, mostly because he's never really peaked, unless you consider his 10-save performance in '08 a crowning achievement.

Well, there is Upton, a certifiable star who's just 26. He's also a one-year rental who will be flipped to a contender if the experiment lurches out of the gate.

Padre fans could be forgiven for feeling like the glass is half full. First, the glass has been merely moist the last few years. Second, Preller has bought all of these shiny trinkets on sale. After all, the best player he's relinquished in these deals, by a wide margin, has been Yasmani Grandal, a good-looking young backstop with fledgling on-base skills and pop, but not exactly Buster Posey's profile.

While the Giants get stripped by the rest of MLB and the Dodgers throw money into the wind, Preller might just be on to something. Or he might be reprising the crash-and-burn Miami Marlins of 2012. If you're a San Diegan, have faith. After all, father knows best.

Pain for Padre Pitchers

The San Diego Padres busted out for a 10-1 home clobbering of Miami last night, increasing their total season scoring by 11%. 

The "Hitless Wonders" were positively Ruthian compared to the 2014 Friars, who are not just last in the Majors in scoring, batting average, on base percentage and OPS this year, but for half a century.

Pitcher Ian Kennedy smacked a home run earlier this season, tying him for fifth on the club. Of the nine Padres with 50 or more plate appearances, just three are batting over .230 or getting on base better than 28% of the time. Overall, the team is roughly replacement level at the plate and on the base paths. Considering that they've stolen 23 of 31 bases as a team, replacements might be warranted at bat.

Petco is partly to blame for their struggles. The park is baseball's leading run-killer. But going into yesterday's game, Baseball Prospectus's R.J. Anderson reports, "even park-adjusted numbers produce a bad odor, as the Padres' .219 True Average is more than 10 points below the worst offense on record since 1950: the 1981 Blue Jays, who were led in plate appearances by Alfredo Griffin, owner of a .243 on-base percentage." 

Injuries have robbed the team of some of its top performers. Center fielder Cameron Maybin has missed two thirds of the season with a torn bicep. His replacement, Will Venable, is hitting half of Maybin's .361/.410/.500. Utility infielder Alexi Amirista (.185/.267./.272) is no Chase Headley at third; then again, Headley hasn't been himself either (.186/.250/.314) when healthy.

It's hard to imagine the offense not improving, if only because the worst offenders will eventually be replaced. In the meantime, Padre pitching has done its part to keep the team within five games of .500. But without more of those 10-1 shellackings, some history is going to get make in San Diego this year.

Smelling A Rat

This is a scenario that's no longer possible, but it's fun to imagine. It's the kind of scam that Billy Beane used to perpetrate on the rest of baseball during the '90s, before front offices started realizing that scouts without stats -- that is, development without research --  is Laurel without Hardy.

The run-scoring environment in San Diego is so depressed that it distorts the value of hitters and pitchers. Wade LeBlanc, a skooch above average in the first half this year, sports a 3.30 ERA despite nearly four walks and just six strikeouts per nine frames. Catcher Nick Hundley has been one of the better backstops in the league this year, despite a .263 BA, 5 HR 26 RBI. His meager .337 OBA, with half his plate appearances coming at Petco, is actually a boon to the Pads.

Clinging to a tenuous lead in the NL West, how might GM Kevin Towers goose his lineup? How about by exploiting the reality of perception? If he could deal one of his red herring hurlers for a significant bat -- particularly in the outfield -- he could make his team significantly better.

The best trading partner would be one in a similarly dampened offensive environment, like the denizens of AT&T Park, Dodger Stadium or Citi Field. Their hitters' prowess is similarly understated by the numbers, so what looks like a fair trade statistically would vastly benefit San Diego. Or, they could upgrade their pitching by filching an under-rated arm from a homerdome like the BoB or Yankee Stadium.

This is what Beane did repeatedly for Oakland during the '90s, when only a handful of teams could distinguish Bill James from LeBron James. He swapped closers with big save numbers for hitters with low batting averages but high on-base percentages. He traded RBI collectors for pitchers with good walk-strikeout ratios and bad won-loss records. He cashed in speed merchant out-machines for discerning thieves with lower SB totals. In each case, the value of the former was overblown, the latter under-appreciated. (He did other things too, mostly involving payroll-depression, but that's not relevant here.)

A decade later, that just won't work. Every general manager in baseball understands the importance of context and luck, or has someone on staff who does. There isn't a team that can't see through that ruse. Today, the inefficiencies in the marketplace, which Beane drove a truck through in the 90s, are wafer-thin.

Still, it's a fun exercise. Imagine, for example, if Towers could induce Arizona to take LeBlanc and his .330 ERA for Ian Kennedy, mired in a 4-7, 4.12 season. Towers would know that at Bank One Ballpark, where strikeouts go to die and home runs live like kings, Kennedy and his eight Ks per nine are a highly valuable commodity.

Alas, at least for San Diegans (and Tijuanans), the baseball consumer protection board prohibits this sort of fraud. Front offices smell rats like this a mile away, even if their fans can't.

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Who Do They Use for Bobblehead Night?

There is a team in the National League that has one good hitter. One. That player has produced more value to the team than the batting order's next five best batsmen. Combined.

Of the 12 other everyday players with at least 100 at bats, not a single one has managed an OBP above .338. That particular player has a .348 SLG. Which puts him at about the midpoint on the team. Only two semi-regulars, besides the star, have SLG above .400. The second most prodigious offensive performer on this ragtag outfit is a platooned catcher with a .258/.337/.436 line, which fails to note that he's attempted five steals and slid into a tag each time.

The trio patrolling the outfield breaks out the big wood to the OPS tune of .730, .646 and .717. An average starting outfielder racks up a .790 OPS. Put into stats that your local sportswriter would understand, your standard outfield averages a .280 BA and 25 dingers. Our protaganists' triumvirate hits .230 with 12 homers.

Who are these goose egg collectors -- the chronically anemic Pirates? The feckless Orioles? Some Triple-A bottom feeders? The Detroit Lions? No, this battalion is in first place. By four games. With the leading run differential in the circuit.

Welcome to your 2010 San Diego Padres.

As you might imagine, Los Dads have some kinda pitching staff. Their top four starters, Mat Latos, Clayton Richard, Wade LeBlanc and Jon Garland are exploiting Petco's score-deadening qualities, with ERAs of .262, .274, .325 and .324 respectively. 

Defense, the park and luck are collaborating to dampen those ERAs. In fact, advanced measurement techniques suggest that Garland and LeBlanc particularly are swimming in water that's over their heads. It's affecting the whole mound corps: all but two hurlers on the entire squad sport ERAs over 3.30. But the defense is part of the team's equation and San Diego isn't moving to Denver anytime soon, so don't bet the house (or maybe you should, considering how much you owe on it) on those numbers fattening up much as the season marches on.

Still, if you want to know how Adrian Gonzalez's team is winning at season's midpoint with a lineup of defensive replacements, look to the relievers. One after another, the Priests send to the hill a parade of fire extinguishers. Tim Stauffer's ERA is 0.39. Ryan Webb, 1.72. Closer Heath Bell is at 1.82 and he's fanning 12 per nine innings. Luke Greggerson, the first reliever into the game most nights, is throwing golf balls. He's relinquished four hits and one walk and whiffed more than 11 batters per nine innings. His K/BB ratio is an otherworldly 8.5. That's Luke, not fLuke.

Certainly, Bud Black's charges operate in a low-run environment. Petco has proven itself the most run-suppressant park in baseball over the last six years, dampening run-scoring by 20%. That's a huge factor and it explains a lot of the numeric fun we've had above. Nonetheless, this is a wretched hitting team living in the dead-ball era and a pitching staff that's carrying the load. Even accounting for the park, four of the eight regulars produce offense below replacement level.

So the question is, can San Diego remain perched atop the NL West, and if so, how? This isn't new: they had the best record in baseball over the last 62 games last year. If GM Jed Hoyer doesn't secure a decent bat, in the outfield optimally, can the Deacons continue to win 2-1 at a .600 clip into October?  It's going to be interesting to see.

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