It’s hard to find a Padres player who knows the team’s track record.
“No idea,” Manny Machado said.
Jurickson Profar, who speaks five languages, gave a quizzical look, as if the question had been asked in one of the approximately 7,000 languages he does not speak fluently.
Fernando Tatis Jr. guessed correctly from .500, but he missed a few plays.
“What is this?” » said Xander Bogaerts after long seconds of reflection.
The Padres are 7-8 heading into Friday’s start of a three-game series against the Dodgers.
What they inadvertently made the point is that it doesn’t matter.
“Do I care right now? No,” Machado said of the Padres’ record. “I think we’re playing good baseball. And that’s all we can show at the end of the day.
Manny Machado (13) celebrates a double against the Giants.
(Meg McLaughlin/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Yes, their stated intention coming out of spring training was to get off to a good start.
“Obviously every team wants to get off to a fast start,” Jake Cronenworth said this week. “It gives you some flexibility. … A lot of times when you look at teams that start out really well, they often have great seasons. Usually (it’s) because they have cushions.
The Padres experienced that in 2022. They were 17 games above .500 through June 16, five games under .500 over the next three months and were able to find their footing in September and put together a solid run towards the National League Championship Series.
History shows that teams that are not in playoff position by the end of May generally see their season end before October. (Over the last 10 full seasons, 80 percent of teams that made the playoffs were within two games of a playoff spot on Memorial Day.)
So, with the Padres still having 18 games left in April and 41 games before the last Monday in May, why are we talking about this so early?
Because of what happened in 2023, when the Padres never managed to dig themselves out of the mud of an average April and ultimately ran out of time in their attempt to climb a mountain of expectations .
Nobody says 7-8 is great. But for the Padres, 15 games into a season, the most important metric is what happens in games to suggest they can get off to a good start and turn it into sustained success.
“If we want to be the best at getting better, we’re going to see continued improvement and learn from our experiences every day and learn from each other’s experiences as a collective group,” manager Mike Shildt said. “We do this every day, we will continue to improve. If we do this, we will feel good about where we are at the end of the year. There’s a bit of a learning curve with everything starting (at the) beginning of a season.
Padres third baseman Eguy Rosario (5) celebrates home run against the Cubs.
(Meg McLaughlin/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
What the Padres believe they see in themselves is a resilient team capable of stringing together hits and scoring a lot.
They scored four or more runs in seven different innings, which took up 76 games last year. They came back to win a game in which they were down in the seventh inning and another in which they were down in the eighth. They’ve done it a total of six times throughout 2023. They’re hitting .307 with runners in scoring position, ranking seventh in MLB after being in the bottom five virtually all of last season. They move runners with productive outs, put the ball in play more than most teams, generally hit the ball hard and – aside from a few recent gaffes from arguably their best defender – play reliable defense.
Their bullpen is as much a work in progress as it has been in several years, with only three relievers returning and two of them in different roles. Their starting rotation, with three new pitchers, may have taken the brunt of an inconsistent spring.
They believe they can do it.
“As the season goes on, you kind of find the things you want to get better at,” Profar said. “I feel like we’re doing a lot of things really well. We always want to be perfect, but you don’t want to be perfect in April.
Positive results early in the season can be gold. The quest for perfection follows a winding road.
That’s the balance between what the Padres know about how a baseball season plays out and what they experienced last season, when they kept thinking their season was going to change.
Padres manager Mike Shildt bursts a bubble during Wednesday’s game against the Cubs.
(KC Alfred/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
And this is where it could be beneficial for them to have a new voice at the helm. Shildt is familiar with what happened and how it happened in 2023, since he was on the team. But he was not the manager, neither directly nor indirectly responsible for this failure.
He can speak with authority and provide an outside perspective. It’s easy to hear a lot of his messages in what his players say after games and when it comes to the bigger picture.
“I think we’ve slowly gotten to what we are,” Cronenworth said. “And we will continue to build on that.”
It goes without saying that Shildt manages to win every day he hands out a roster card. But it couldn’t be clearer that at this stage of the season he’s not at all concerned about the results on any given day. As he walked down the hallway toward the clubhouse after the Padres came back from an eight-run deficit earlier this week, he was asked if the win against the Cubs was validation of what he preached.
“It is all validation,” he said.
He then talked about the positive aspects of some of the team’s losses, including what tend to be seen from the outside only as failures or mistakes, such as a player being sent off while aggressively trying to take an additional base.
“There is an awareness of the record and then you have to be a slave to it,” he said a few days later. “My mental energy and focus will be focused on the principles necessary to win baseball games. … Functional victory. Functionals work together and are process-oriented and work and collaborate, and I feel really comfortable with the fact that we’re getting buy-in and we’re doing it.
