Goalie_Bob
1992 Vezina (2nd)
Had to go digging a while back for this, almost solely out of duty, but I was curious to glance through my "Looking ahead" because I knew it would read like it was from a different era.
Starting record: 55-53
Record over stretch: 1-11
Ending record: 56-64
We went 1-11 over the final part of the major gauntlet of this post-ASB stretch. The season is effectively over, and barring some kind of miracle turnaround or other angle I can find, I think so are my breakdown/recaps/previews.
The state of the team is so bad that I will confess to barely even being able to track the box scores while these games were on. Some of that was due to even less interest in being bothered with the west coast time difference, but it's also just not a fun watch for obvious reasons.
While many "what went wrongs" are flying, I think a simpler story within this set of games is that Colin Holderman and David Bednar cost us the entire season. We should have won the Arizona series and you can make an argument that we should have swept it. The home Padres series was very winnable and the Dodgers series should have at worst been 1-2.
Even this final Padres road series had two "baseball losses" in the first two games that were winnable, but the wheels had come off. For all the other faults of the team and ways that this current spell might continue (even if it's more of a 3-7 type 10-game stretch), the bullpen failed while the offense mostly held up its end of the bargain.
I haven't paid a lot of attention to the thread recently, but elsewhere I have seen some takes along the lines of Shelton losing the clubhouse, and I don't think that really holds up, unless it comes out that guys are getting in fights or other stuff like that. I think a part of the team just went to shit and the razor thin margin that everything was being held up by could not withstand it. Other, better teams were able to go for the throat in order to pile up very easy wins, even when the teams themselves weren't firing on all cylinders (I would exclude the Diamondbacks from this, but despite the Padres winning a lot, I don't think they have really been that imposing... we should have won 3-4 of the games, and they got gifted wins by Miami).
Looking ahead: 3 vs. SEA (3 home), 3 vs. TEX (3 road) + 4 vs. CIN, 3 vs. CHC (7 home)
I'm including this purely for perfunctory reasons and in case there's some kind of miracle turnaround that makes the Cleveland series at the turn of the month actually mean anything at all besides "will this be Skenes' last start of 2024"?
It's a weird yo-yoing of games, as we're home to maybe recuperate and then on the road quickly and back home again for a long stretch.
The only path to meaningful September games is an immediate turnaround. All four of these opponents are beatable, but it's more likely that we serve as fodder for the AL teams to try and claw back into it -- Seattle badly needs wins to keep pace, though Texas is basically out of it. Then it will be divisional dogfights against Chicago and Cincinnati who are both basically out of the race like us, but also like us, might be able to seize something by rattling off a ton of wins.
Basically what it looks like is that there's one WC spot up for grabs between Atlanta, SF, NYM, and then all of the NL Central non-Brewers teams, though we've shot ourselves in the foot by not being able to just lose some series instead of getting swept in all of them, as we have an extra 3 games to make up.
When you factor in the likelihood of Skenes just being ramped down, uncertainty around Jones, who knows around Keller... it all adds up to the logical thing being to just secure losses and recoup the best possible draft lottery position again, especially since some teams are gonna get screwed by the new rules, so if we finish where we are at or worse, there's a decent chance we hop into the top 6.
To put a pin in this, we need to completely turn our fate around, and then we'll have to do it again with a similar stretch afterwards. It's no exaggeration to say that it will basically take "best record in baseball" to dig out of the hole we dug in this last stretch. For the next 13, I think it would take something like this: win the Seattle series, run the table against Texas, and drop 1 game on the long homestand. That would be 11-2, i.e. a 67-66 record in two weeks on August 29th. If you do that, then there are 29 games left to maybe try and get to 85 wins or so, with 7 being against the Marlins and Nationals, and a good chunk against divisional teams.
It won't happen, and I am not sure there's much intrigue for 2025 to be seen in the coming weeks. I guess maybe we should shuffle some guys off the roster and get a look at guys like Yorke and Cook, and maybe we'll see Ashcraft get an MLB cup of coffee. What a shitshow everything turned into.
Always appreciate your writeups. They are level headed and succinct in terms of where the team is at that point in time and where they need to go.
Do you think they will bring up Chandler or Barco or Burrows for a start? Yorke and Cook should definitely come up. Gorski should be brought up though maybe he has already established himslef as a AAAA player.
My thought is they leave Davis in the minors in hopes it brings up his trade potential. I guess he has hit ok since being sent down with a slash line of .364/.491/.855.
