Do the Padres have enough pitching? (2022 edition)

A yearly look to see if the San Diego Padres have enough starting pitching to make it through the upcoming season.

One of the more popular posts I wrote last year on Bandwagon Beach was called Do the Padres have enough pitching? I started with the premise that the San Diego Padres needed to, conservatively, find 900 innings out of their starting pitching. I was concerned that they wouldn’t get there, and would have to go outside the organization to find (probably not great) options to throw many of those innings.

How did they do?

It would have be difficult (if not impossible) for the Padres to get to 900 innings thrown by their starters because they had so few starters to begin with. To compare, the Dodgers had 8 pitchers starter 5 or more games. The Giants had 7, as did the Padres, but San Diego only got there by including Dinelson Lamet. Lamet wasn’t a starter last year, as much as he was an opener.

Even when you include Lamet, the Padres got just 755.1 innings from their starting pitching last year. That is about 52% of the total number of innings the team threw in total in 2021, meaning the starting rotation was asking a ton of both the bullpen and spot starters (like Jake Arrieta and Vince Velasquez). It didn’t work out well for either.

By comparison, the Dodgers lost one starting pitcher to Tommy John surgery (Dustin May) and another to off-field issues (Trevor Bauer) and still got 841 innings out of their starting rotation. The Giants got 835 from their top 7 starting pitchers and seemed just fine, so maybe we can adjust our goals here for San Diego.

New goal for 2022

Instead of trying to get the Padres to 900 innings from their top 7 or 8 starters, we can aim for 835. If it was good enough for the Dodgers and Giants last year, that’s good enough for me.

Yu Darvish threw 166.1 innings last season. Could he do the same this year? Sure, but it would probably require some injury luck. Let’s be conservative here and say we get 150 innings from Darvish. Off to a great start!

Joe Musgrove was the innings-eater for last year’s team, throwing a career high 181.1 innings. I think there’s a good chance he doesn’t repeat that number, but he’s just 29 years old so it’s possible. Let’s meet in the middle and say he can be expected to throw 170 innings this year.

Blake Snell’s Cy Young season is starting to look more and more like an aberration, both in terms of performance (1.89 ERA) and durability (180.2 IP). I don’t think we can expect anything close to that.

As far as innings go, the 128.2 IP from Snell last year is probably about what his ceiling is these days. Especially when you consider he got that out of making 27 starts last season, for an average of less than 5 innings per start. Let’s put him at 120 innings for the season and hope he blows that number away.

Sean Manaea might be the key to this whole thing. He’s been an innings-eater for most of his career, is just 30 years old and headed toward unrestricted free agency next offseason. He threw 179.1 innings last year and I think he can do something like that again.

It doesn’t matter who the 5th starter is

We’re at over 600 innings for the season with just our top four guys, which is great news. Even though we’re trying to get to 835, we can include more than five starting pitchers in our evaluation. Hell, anyone that wouldn’t be a prayer the way Arrieta and/or Daniel Camarena were is accepted here. And if there’s one thing this starting rotation has, it’s depth.

MacKenzie Gore threw just over 50 innings last season, didn’t throw any in 2020, and was at just about 100 innings in 2019. No matter how great he is, I think his innings will be capped at about 100.

Chris Paddack threw just over 100 innings last season and finished the season with a torn UCL. Not sure what we can expect from him this year, but I’m going to downgrade him the same way I did with Dinelson Lamet last year. Let’s cap him at 50 innings and hope we’re wrong.

Ryan Weathers threw just under 100 innings in 2021, some of which with a broken ankle, and should be ready to do more than that in 2022, if needed. I think this is going to be an important year for Weathers, where he either proves himself to be a rubber-arm innings-eater as a starter or makes a transition into relief pitcher. For right now, I like having the depth in the rotation. He can easily do 100 innings but I doubt he gets more than that in terms of opportunity.

Nick Martinez is a bit harder to pin down. He threw about 150 innings last year, 83 the year before, 160 the year before that, and 111 the year before that. And who knows how any of that compares to MLB innings. I think getting 100 innings out of him would be both a success and not a surprise.

Mike Clevinger exists, I suppose? He’s coming back from a second Tommy John surgery and is starting the season on the injured-list. Let’s count any innings from him as a special bonus.

The good news

We made it over 835 innings.

Now, obviously not all of these guys will hit these marks. There will be injuries and guys who underperform and guys who just don’t get enough chances to get to their innings mark, but this is a fantastic start.

Even if Paddack is out for the season after his first start, the team can still easily throw over 900 innings before running out of starting pitching. I think the days of washed up veterans being signed to start games because there’s nobody else left to do it are over, at least for this season.

The San Diego Padres have enough pitching to make it through the 2022 season without asking clearly injured players to pitch through their hip pain or broken ankle or whatever else they were asking of guys last year. For whatever that’s worth, it’s a much better spot than they were in heading into the 2021 season.