Do the Padres have enough pitching?

The San Diego Padres may have lost another starting pitcher in Dinelson Lamet yesterday, and are dangerously close to running out of options to pitch the non-bullpen innings.

The question/title of this post is not meant in the way that some people might take it. Years of sports media coverage has lead to a lot of people saying things like “Do the Padres have enough pitching?” when what they actually mean is “Do the Padres have enough good pitchers?”

What I want to try and figure out today is a much more basic math problem: How many pitchers do the Padres need and how many do they have?

I’m going to be focusing on starting pitchers here because that’s where I see the potential issue, and also because I don’t want to get into the game of trying to pretend that Johnny Wholestaff is a real pitcher during a season of regular length.

How many innings are needed?

I’m going to use 2019 as a baseline, at least to start, when trying to drum up some targets.

1,449 innings pitched was the average, per team, in 2019. However, that doesn’t tell us how many innings were pitched by starters. I supposed I could do some really rough math and say 2/3 of that should be starters innings, but we can do better than that.

Things get complicated when trying to figure out how manny innings a team got from its starting pitchers because….some pitchers occasionally start but also come out of the bullpen, and nobody really keeps track of which innings belong where unless you want to go digging through game logs (I don’t).

If you look at the top 9 pitchers, in terms of number of games started, on the 2019 Dodgers and add up their innings (some of them are definitely out of the bullpen), you get about 1,000 innings.

Do the same math for the Padres’ top 8 in 2019 and you get about 825 innings. So, we’re already dealing with a range of sorts. I’d love to throw out the Padres as an example here because their rotation featured a ton of mediocre pitchers that couldn’t go late into games and even a guy that transitioned to the bullpen during the season (miss you, Matt Strahm).

The 2019 World Champion Nationals might be the best example for us to use. They didn’t have many guys that pitched both as starters and as bullpen guys and, due to some luck, their rotation mostly stayed the same all year. Their top 8 starters finished the season with about 975 innings pitched, in total. They reached that goal by having four of their starters go over 165 innings.

Let’s be somewhat conservative and say that the Padres will need at least 900 innings from their starting pitchers in 2021, and then we’ll see if we can get there.

Top of the rotation

With Mike Clevinger on the IL for the season, and Dinelson Lamet potentially joining him despite taking 6+ months off to rest his arm instead of going in for his second Tommy John surgery, I’m leaving them both off of this project. If either of them becomes a major factor later, we’ll call it a blessing.

It’s worth briefly mentioning that we don’t really know how starting pitchers are going to hold up this season, after a shortened season. Some guys have already talked about feeling fresh as a result, but we won’t know if there is an increase in arm injuries until later this year.

Yu Darvish has pitched over 200 innings just once in his career, but he has pretty consistently finished around 175 innings pitched in seasons where he stays healthy. I think we can put him down for that, even if he is starting to get a little long in the tooth.

Blake Snell is something of a wild card here. He threw 180 innings in his Cy Young season (2018) but hasn’t really approached that in any other year, but he is relatively young. Let’s put him down for 150 innings this year.

Joe Musgrove is similar to Snell, one year at about 170 innings and a handful of others that aren’t close to that. The difference being that Musgrove hit his high-water mark in 2019 and seemed to be building towards a 200-inning season in 2020 before things went sideways with COVID-19. I don’t think he hits it this year, but I think he can hit 170 again.

That’s nearly 500 innings from the top three guys in the rotation, assuming none of them get hurt. Not a terrible start! The bad news is that we need 400+ more innings from the last two spots on the rotation.

Everyone else

With the injury to Dinelson Lamet, the Padres need innings from Chris Paddack more than ever before. He threw 140 innings in 2019, his rookie season, and was definitely on an innings restriction coming off Tommy John surgery. He could probably be stretched out to 170, if you need him to, so we’ll put him down for that and hope for the best.

That leaves us with needing about 250 more innings from starting pitchers. This is where things get a little dicey.

Ryan Weathers threw 96 innings in 2019. The Padres would love to have him finish with less than 125 innings this year, but they will probably need that much or more from him. Let’s put him down for 125.

So, through five starters and we now have 790 total innings. We need about 100 more, but that’s okay. As I stated earlier, most teams finish the season with 8 or so pitchers getting at least a handful of starts, so we can build. The problem is a lack of depth.

MacKenzie Gore is, at this point, not ready to pitch at the MLB level. However, he’s not far off! A little more control and Gore could get up here, but when he comes up could determine how many innings he can go for the Padres. He combined (A+ and AA) for almost exactly 100 innings in 2019, so we’ll do what we did with Weathers and say he throws 125 innings this season. However, I think it’s fair to assume half of those will come in El Paso, so I’m putting him down for 65 inning towards the cause in San Diego.

We’re almost there

First, a reminder that I was very optimistic with these estimates. This is assuming no major time missed by any of the top 6 pitchers:

855 innings is, simply, not enough. For the Padres to be a contending team that relies heavily on its pitching, they’re probably going to need about 100 more innings from their starting pitching.

The good news is that we’re only looking at 6 guys here, and we were looking at a top 8 or 9 when viewing the Dodgers, Padres, and Nationals in 2019. More guys will have to start some games for the Padres this season. The question is who?

After a season without minor leagues, it’s nearly impossible to figure who starters number 7 and 8 would be for San Diego. This is undoubtedly an issue that A.J. Preller is keeping his eye on, knowing that he might need to sign or trade for some starting options just to get through this season.

This math problem would’ve been a lot easier if Dinelson Lamet pitched yesterday without getting injured. Or if Adrian Morejon didn’t have Tommy John surgery this week. Or if Mike Clevinger didn’t have Tommy John surgery about six months ago.

It’s already a difficult one to solve and it’s going to get exponentially more difficult if anyone else in the rotation faces an injury. The Padres need every one of those guys to pitch a lot of innings, which is one reason why Chris Paddack will get plenty of opportunities to right himself as a starter this season.

Now, the only question left is if the Padres’ training staff and pitching coach are somehow contributing to the rash of Tommy John surgeries needed by the pitchers within the organization. That one will have to wait for another day.