Good morning,
After another terrible night.
We’re going to let Jackson Merrill start things off as we seek perspective on what has become a bit of a quagmire for the Padres.
“We do our job every day and we come and we play as hard as we can,” Merrill said last night. “Nobody’s out there lollygagging, nobody’s out there thinking we’re going to win every day by doing nothing. We’re coming to the field, the goal is to play hard and represent each other, represent San Diego. And sometimes it doesn’t go right. Sometimes you have stretches like this, where it’s not too fun and not too productive at the plate. But it’s not like it’s in our heads that much, or we’re thinking about it. We rake over here, dude. We rake, period. Everybody in this clubhouse rakes. Even our pitchers rake, dude. The fact of the matter is, everybody’s got to be patient. Just be patient with us. We’re going to roll. You know it’s coming. Just got to be patient.”
The Padres keep contending they will be all right. And they probably will.
But that doesn’t change the fact that, at present, they are not executing and aren’t all that exciting.
You can read in my game story (here) from last night’s 5-0 loss to the Pirates about how the Padres were stymied by another good pitcher and have five hits in the past two games.
Just 27 times in the franchise’s previous 56 seasons had a Padres team failed to get at least six hits over two games. , there have been a lot of bad Padres teams.
And before the past two nights, this dubious feat had not been accomplished by a Padres team since 2015. , the Padres had the lowest batting average, lowest on-base percentage and scored the fewest runs in the major leagues from 2016 through ‘19.
So this is meager.
But we do continually seek to put events in perspective and strive for context in this space.
So we must not overlook that with a victory today, this team that isn’t playing all that well will have won its third consecutive series.
That is pretty good.
Still, we can’t deny there are some 2023 vibes here. That owes to the boring offense we saw many nights the last half of May. Last night’s game story details the Padres’ .203 batting average over their past 14 games and how they have scored two or fewer runs in half of those games.
And by some measures, it goes back further than that. For instance, last night was the 13th time in their past 25 games (dating to May 3) the Padres have gone at least six innings without scoring. They did so just six times in their first 31 games.
The difference between this year and 2023 — and it is significant — is that the Padres have also played some thrilling baseball in the past 14 games. And they played a lot of thrilling baseball through the season’s first five weeks. The ‘23 team was almost never thrilling.
The Padres came back to win a game in which they trailed by two or more runs eight times in 2023. They have done so seven times already this season, including three times in their past six games.
There are also some 2021 vibes happening too. That owes to the pitching depth having taken a hit with Michael King’s shoulder injury and Yu Darvish not yet being ready to return.
But this season also has some 2022 and ‘24 vibes. And the Padres made the playoffs both of those seasons.
The Padres were 28-28 after 56 games last year. They are 32-24 this morning. A loss in their first game after the All-Star break in 2024 dropped them to 50-50. From that point on, they went 43-19.
Mike Shildt’s winning percentage in the second half (the second 81 games, not the traditional post-All-Star break “second half”) is .614 over the four 162-game seasons he has managed. He has never started a season as a team’s manager and not finished it in the postseason. Until proven otherwise, assume a team managed by Shildt will close strong.
Part of the beauty of starting the season as the Padres did — winning their first seven games and being 12 games over .500 on May 10 — was the cushion it provided for the rough patches.
In 2022, the Padres were 17 games over .500 on June 16. They played the next three months (exactly) at five-under before winning enough over the season’s final two weeks to get the National League’s second wild-card spot.
Yes, the Padres were 14-3 on April 14. So yes, they are 18-21 since.
Over the past three seasons, 29 of the 36 teams that made the playoffs endured a 39-game stretch in which they lost at least 21 games. Of the past 25 World Series winners, 16 had 39-game stretches that bad or worse.
So maybe we listen to Merrill for now.
“I like to win every night, but you’re not gonna win every night,” he said. “That’s where I kind of just fall back to is like, yeah, I want to win, but we didn’t. Tomorrow’s a new day. It’s all about tomorrow, all about the next day and moving forward.”
Ceased: changeup & two-seamer
One of the most impressive things about the best players in the world is that they almost always want to get better
So it was that Padres starting pitcher Dylan Cease spent considerable time in the offseason and through spring training working on a revamped changeup and two-seam fastball.
Those pitches are essentially no more.
He has not thrown a changeup in his past four starts and has thrown four in his past seven starts. He threw his two-seam fastball once last night and has thrown it six times in his past seven starts.
“It’s more of, I kind of turned to some mechanical adjustments I wanted to work on,” Cease said of all but abandoning his secondary pitches. “I want to get those bread and butter (pitches) down before I really start adding anything else.”
Cease’s “bread and butter” are his slider and four-seam fastball. Command of the latter has been elusive much of the season. Command of the slider was spotty last night.
My game story talked about how Cease was not horrible but that the Padres need better from him than the 4.66 ERA and not quite 5⅓ innings per start he is giving them.
Three of Cease’s four quality starts came in succession earlier this month. He seemed in that span to have found the slider shape and command that has made him as good as any pitcher in the game for stretches of the past three seasons. But his past two starts have seen him struggle to consistently have the feel for his two best offerings, and his pitch count has been too high for him to work deep into either game.
“I definitely started off slow,” Cease said. “I’ve made some good adjustments. But it’s just one of those things where I’ve got to keep fighting it and keep figuring it out. I haven’t pitched really great, to be honest. But there’s still a lot of season left, and I’m gonna keep putting in the work.
“I think the biggest issue is just I haven’t really mechanically got into rhythm. I’ve made some good strides. I’ve shown kind of more of who I had been. … I’ve kind of shown some glimpses, but it hasn’t been consistent. So to me, that’s just figuring out my rhythm — mechanics and rhythm.”
Cease denied there was any correlation between his having focused on the two extra pitches and his getting mechanically off kilter.
But he is clearly focused now on his two main offerings.
“If I take care what I’m supposed to I really don’t need more,” he said. “So I’m just trying to focus on the basics, get back to the basics.”
Nice start
Bradgley Rodriguez’s second pitch as a major leaguer was a 98 mph fastball hit back to him at 38 mph. He picked it up on the second hop and turned and fired a throw to second base to begin a double play that ended the top of the seventh inning.
¡Debuta el venezolano Bradgley Rodríguez en Grandes Ligas!
Vino con hombres en 1B y 2B con un out. Consiguió los últimos dos outs del inning por la vía del doble play. pic.twitter.com/77gU2lMZDR
— El Extrabase ⚾️ (@ElExtrabase) June 1, 2025
That set off a celebration in the dugout, as his new teammates exulted and rushed to congratulate Rodriguez as he returned from the mound.
“That’s one thing I love about our group, is we pull for each other,” Shildt said. “They care about each other. They pull like heck for each other. And all our players in that dugout have had their first big league moment. … Everybody was just really happy for him. It’s quite an accomplishment.”
The 21-year-old Rodriguez didn’t notice how excited the rest of the Padres were.
“It all kind of happened so quickly,” he said through interpret Jorge Merlos.
Rodriguez,who was called up from Double-A on Friday, did not appear nervous. But like virtually every one of the fewer than 23,500 players who have ever made their MLB debut, he felt it.
“I definitely got those attacks of nervousness out there on the mound,” he said. “But I felt like I was able to manage it, control it, just come to myself and know that I had to go out there and just throw my pitches.”
Rodriguez walked one batter in a scoreless eighth inning, which he ended with a strikeout of Oneil Cruz.
Another Crone Zone
Jake Cronenworth walked in the eighth inning last night to extend his on-base streak to nine games.
Since his rookie season in 2020, Cronenworth’s 17 on-base streaks of at least nine games are tied with Manny Machado for the most on the team.
Cronenworth is batting .240 with a .394 on-base percentage during his current streak and is batting .247 with a .385 OBP on the season.
Tidbits
- Fernando Tatis Jr. was 1-for-4 and finished May batting .184 (19-for-103) with a .626 OPS. Both numbers are his worst in any calendar month in his career.
- Tatis stole third base for the fifth time this season, tied for second most in the major leagues.
- Martín Maldonado’s single in last night’s third inning stopped a hitless streak at 13 at-bats.
- Machado (seven games) and Merrill (six games) had hitting streaks end last night.
- Luis Campusano was 0-for-2 last night and is hitless in 13 big-league at-bats this season. He does have six walks.
- Please check out the Q&A Annie Heilbrunn did with Nick Pivetta (here). Pivetta doesn’t offer much for public consumption, so this provides some rare insight into the man who has been the Padres’ best starting pitcher.
- A day-old tidbit: The Padres won Friday night despite getting just three hits. They are 3-0 when doing so this season. They had never won more than two games in a season when getting three hits. Since 1901, just 32 teams have won three or more games in a season when getting exactly three hits.
All right, that’s it for me.
Today’s game is scheduled to start at 2:10 p.m., an hour later than the usual home Sunday. That is an accommodation to the traffic and road closures for this morning’s Rock ‘n Roll Marathon.
Talk to you tomorrow from San Francisco.
P.S. Sorry I did not do a newsletter yesterday. I had something come up at home.
