The perceived baseball IQ of a big-league manager correlates to his bullpen.
If the bullpen stinks, the manager is a dummy. If the bullpen shines, the manager is a genius.
Meet Mike Shildt, baseball’s leading Einstein through the first fifth of the 2025 MLB season.
The 10 runs allowed in the seventh inning Tuesday by two Padres relievers, against a Yankees offense that leads the big leagues in homefield slug rate, didn’t change that San Diego’s bullpen sat atop the big leagues in a dozen categories going into the game. The Padres took Major League Baseball’s second-best record (23-11) into the day in large part because of the bullpen’s brilliance.
Closer Robert Suarez and mates stared the day first in ERA (1.68), saves (15), batting average allowed (.181), WHIP (0.95), strand rate (89.6%) and strikeouts to walks (3.4). A bullpen that also leans on righties Jason Adam, Jeremiah Estrada and Alek Jacob and lefties Adrián Morejón, Yuki Matsui and Wandy Peralta sat atop the rankings in several advanced metrics, too.
Are Padres relievers simply bringing more heat than any of the other 29 relief corps?
Suarez often does. His average four-seam fastball could keep up with the Teslas that zoom like silent rockets on San Diego’s freeways.
The right-hander has clocked up to 101.5 miles per hour, and his average four-seam fastball velocity of 98.2 stands in MLB’s 96th percentile.
But as a whole, it’s not raw speed that’s fueling a Padres bullpen that’s just 19th in average velocity of its four-seam fastball (94.5).
The Padres bring all sort of nasty pitches, evidenced by a strikeout rate that ranks fourth of 30 teams. Most hitters would rather sniff pine tar than face Estrada’s blend of 97-mph fastball, a devastating splitter and a sharp slider. Efficient, too, Padres relievers went into Tuesday having thrown the fewest pitches per inning (15.3) in baseball; they were also tied for third in walk percentage. Adam commands three good pitches, and although the Yankees got to him and Peralta on Tuesday, Morejón has added a nifty cutter to his strong fastball-slider mix.
Let’s widen the lens and see a bold possibility, while keeping in mind that about 80% of the season remains.
It’s not nuts to suggest that this Padres bullpen overseen by Shildt, pitching coach Ruben Niebla and bullpen coach Ben Fritz has been the most dominant positional unit in the big leagues through the stretch of the season now behind us.
The MLB-best ERA was first by more than half a run over the runner-up Giants. It would take the Golden Gate Bridge to span that performance gap — 1.68 for the Padres, 2.51 for the Giants.
Win probability added (WPA) is a FanGraphs statistic that measures how much a player’s actions impact his team’s chance of winning. Winning the game being the point of playing the game, WPA is one of the better measures of bullpen performance.
Blowing away the WPA competition through 34 games, Padres relievers outpaced the runner-up Guardians 4.99 to 3.22. And they more than doubled the National League runner-up Giants’ 2.44.
When a Padres bullpen goes on a heater, it’s very rarely a surprise.
But this is a surprise: Through 34 games entering Tuesday, the ’25 Padres ‘pen has far outperformed several very good Padres bullpens.
Perhaps the best measuring stick of any Padres bullpen is the franchise’s 2010 unit that led a team with MLB’s lowest payroll to 90 wins.
“That was definitely the best bullpen I’ve been around — both in of late game (Luke Gregerson to Mike Adams to Heath Bell) and also in of depth,” Jed Hoyer said entering the 2020 season.
Hoyer was the Padres’ general manager in 2010. He owns World Series rings from his time with the Red Sox and Cubs.
Through 34 games in 2010, the Padres’ ‘pen posted a 2.70 ERA, which ranked third in baseball. The adjusted ERA, ing for pitcher-loving Old Petco, stood fifth. The ‘10 corps amassed an MLB-best WPA total of 2.91. Impressive stuff, and be sure to doff your cap to swing man Tim Stauffer, whose 0.49 ERA in 18 1/3 innings led the unit.
But those relievers weren’t lapping the field like these Padres relievers have. In researching several other Padres relief units, including those of the two World Series teams and the NL-leading unit in 1996, I didn’t find another Padres bullpen that came close to matching this group through the first 34 games.
Even if the torrid pace proves unsustainable, the bullpen’s excellence has dealt Shildt and A.J. Preller a strong hand in the wild-card race. I’m sure Shildt would agree that, in most games, it wasn’t like solving a calculus problem to find a Padres reliever who would do the job.
