Dodgers’ 2019 NL West Outlook: San Diego Padres

In the final installment of “Dodgers: 2019 NL West Outlooks” I’ll look into the San Diego Padres. The Padres are poised to join the elite teams in the National League in a season or two.

2019 shouldn’t be their year, but it should at least be a season of growth for their young core. Fernando Tatis Jr., Luis Urias, and Francisco Mejia all should play significant roles for the Padres this season

In the first three installments of this series, I talked about the three top teams in the NL West after the Dodgers last season, the Dbacks, Rockies, and Giants. The Padres were connected to some of the players the Dodgers have been rumored to be going after, notably J.T. Realmuto and Corey Kluber, but the team ended up with one of the biggest prizes on the free agent market in Manny Machado.

In this series, I went through each team in the NL West and recapping their 2018 (overall and against the Dodgers), analyzing their off-season thus far, and “Dodger Killers” on their rosters.

2018 Results

The Padres went 66-96 last season, finishing 7 games behind the lowly Giants in the NL West standings. The team was largely in rebuilding mode last season, though in the latter stages, as they mostly rotated in prospects at every position. The outfield saw five major contributors and the infield saw position battles and swaps all season long.

Only the highest paid player from last season’s roster, first basemen Eric Hosmer, was kept out of the rotational fray, though his performance was far below his career norms in his first season hitting at Petco Park, a stadium known to suppress left-handed power.

Hosmer hit just .253 last season, the lowest mark of his career, to go along with his 18 home runs. Most alarmingly the slugger had a career-high strikeout rate of 21.0%, more than 3% higher than his career average. If Hosmer can’t turn things around in year two of his megadeal, the team will struggle to put up runs, even with the additions of a new wave of highly-touted prospects and of course Manny Machado.

Last season, the Padres had trouble not only plating runs but also in keeping their opponents from scoring. The team finished 28th in baseball in runs scored last seasons, ahead of only the Giants and the Miami Marlins.

Their pitching wasn’t much better. The team’s 4.40 team ERA and 71 quality starts ranked the staff 21st in all of baseball. The one area the Padres’ pitchers did relatively well in was in strikeouts. The “Pad Squad” pitching staff racked up 1399 strikeouts in 2018, good for 14th in the MLB, placing them in the top half of the league.

All of this being said, it is obvious that the Padres did poorly in 2018. But with new pitching and hitting prospects on the way, and free agent signings all offseason long, the team should win more than 66 games in 2019. But that’s for a later section.

Dodger Killers

While he may not be a Dodger killer in the traditional sense, Manny Machado will definitely be a player that receives boos from Dodger fans whenever he and the Padres make the short trip up the coast to Chavez Ravine. But beyond the former-Dodger, there are a few true standout Dodger Killers on the current San Diego roster.

Eric Lauer

One of the biggest standouts from the starting rotation in general, Lauer more than held his own against the Dodgers. The 6’3 right-hander pitched to a .192 batting average against the Dodgers last season, striking out 20 and walking just 5 over the course of 78 at-bats, allowing just five extra-base hits and two runs over that span.

Overall, the 23-year old rookie went 6-7 with a 4.34 ERA in his first big league season, tossing 112.1 innings for San Diego. If he can build on his highly-rated fastball-slider combo, Lauer could break out in 2019.

Wil Myers 

Arguably the Padres’ face of the franchise even with the addition of Hosmer (though Machado by far supersedes him), Myers has been an All-Star-caliber hitter in the past, and even though injuries kept him down in 2018, he saw just 83 games, he still managed to rake against the Dodgers.

In his 41 at-bats against LA, Myers hit .342 with 2 homers, 6 doubles, and 6 RBIs. The right-handed slugger has struggled to stay on the field in the past, as he’s played in over 90 games just twice in his five-year MLB career, but when he plays he is one of the best in the NL.

Hunter Renfroe

Another big right-handed power hitter, Renfroe handled the Dodgers’ heavily-left handed starting rotation quite well in 2018. Renfroe hit .302 with 3 homers, 3 doubles, and 5 RBIs in his 43 ABs against the Dodgers, though unlike Myers Renfroe was vulnerable to the strikeout. Renfroe was set down on strikes 13 times, three times by Hyun-Jin Ryu and twice each by Kenta Maeda and Clayton Kershaw.

Renfroe is battling for a spot in the very crowded Padres outfield in 2019, but his power, manifested in his ability to hit 26 homers in back-to-back seasons without reaching 500 PAs, should earn him a spot.