Searching for Padres pitching depth
After injuries to Dinelson Lamet, Adrian Morejon and Ryan Weathers, the San Diego Padres are in need of external options to bolster their starting rotation.
An ongoing theme for this San Diego Padres season, at least the early part of it, is that the team does not have enough starting pitching to make it through the season. I’ve gone over this more than once, but it warrants more discussion because 1) Ryan Weathers was taken out of last night’s game with arm soreness after throwing just 19 pitches and 2) I never really offered any actual solutions.
That’s what we’re going to try and do today. Find reasonable solutions to the simple math problem that the Padres are facing: A need for more innings from pitchers that can handle those innings without breaking down.
Who are we looking for?
The Padres 2022 starting rotation probably looks something like this:
Yu Darvish
Blake Snell
Mike Clevinger
Ryan Weathers
Joe Musgrove
MacKenzie Gore
Chris Paddack?
So, anyone who is brought on to help the 2021 team either needs to be young (so they can be optioned down to AAA next season and act as depth) or needs to be a candidate to come out of the bullpen as a swingman.
Let’s start with the guys that are going to be free agents next season and are likely going to be playing on non-contending teams, because trading for a young guy with plans of demoting him next season is a plan rife with folly.
There’s a ton to work with when you are looking through pitchers that will be free agents after this season but most of these guys won’t get traded at all, or at the very least won’t get traded before July 31st and would require a lot being sent back:
Max Scherzer
Zach Greinke
Johnny Cueto
Marcus Stroman
etc.
Those are also the high-priced guys. What the Padres need is a 7th rotation arm that can eat innings. If that guy can pitch out of the bullpen and/or provide veteran leadership, even better. Spending a lot of money here would probably be wasting it, when you consider that the playoff rotation will almost certainly be Darvish-Snell-Musgrove.
So, there’s my target. A proven innings eater that’s about to hit free agency, doesn’t cost a lost (money and trade return), and could eventually be pushed into a bullpen role without missing a beat.
Quick: Free agents
To me, the list of current free agent starting pitchers can really be divvied up into three categories:
Remember when this guy was good? (Are we sure he’s not retired?)
I guess we could do worse
He’s going to cost you more than he’s probably worth
But, if you want to see the list yourself, here you go:
Again, my thoughts on this list is that the guys on it that would actually be good options are probably going to cost a lot more than they’re worth. I’d rather A.J. Preller go looking for an innings eater in a trade.
Which teams are potential trade partners?
It’s worth stating here that we’re quite early in the process. The Padres could wait until July to trade for an innings eater and the math would be fine. And they might have to wait, because most MLB teams aren’t going to decide to be sellers this early on in the season.
Still, we can make some assumptions about which teams are probably going to be bad and then go digging through their contracts. I’ll try and make this quick.
The Orioles are bad! Looking through their rotation, I see Matt Harvey (doesn’t really fit the bill) and guys that are either too bad or too young to work for what we’re targeting.
The Tigers are also bad! In their rotation, they have a perfect candidate in Julio Teheran. He throws over 175 innings per year without fail and it currently signed to a 1 year/$3M deal. One tiny little problem though: Teheran’s shoulder just exploded and he’s now on the 60-day IL and nobody knows when he’s coming back. Matt Boyd is an option but is arbitration eligible next year and doesn’t really fit what San Diego is looking for.
So far, the Minnesota Twins are bad. They also have two old inning-eaters in the final year of their contracts in Michael Pineda and J.A. Happ. These might be my two favorite targets.
Pineda makes $10M this year, which means he’ll take less prospect capital to get (assuming the Padres still enjoy eating contract money), and has pitched more than 170 innings twice in his career. He also worked with Larry Rothschild in New York, so the Padres will know what they’re getting if they do swing a deal.
The only issue I see with J.A. Happ is age. He makes $8M, which is the going rate if you want to get a 38-year old to spend half their year on the road, and has gone over 150 innings nine times in his career. He’s also appeared in 15 playoff games (starting 4), including helping the Phillies win the World Series in 2008. Like Pineda, he was with the Yankees recently and pitched for Larry Rothschild.
The Rangers are bad and Preller has a good history with them. They also have a couple of interesting trade targets in Mike Foltynewicz and Jordan Lyles. Both are something of reclamation projects, Lyles was moved to the Rockies bullpen and Foltynewicz was given up on by the Braves, and they’re both pitching pretty well in Texas. Lyles makes $8M compared to Foltynewicz’s $2M, which changes the math, but neither is a terrible option.
The Cubs are the only NL team (outside of the NL West, who I refuse to try a trade with) that I am confident will be bad this season. They also have one of my favorite, if not my favorite, trade targets: Zach Davies.
Davies only started 12 regular season games for the Padres but the fans, including myself, loved him and his 2.73 ERA. His 9.74 ERA leaves something to be desired in Chicago this season. He makes $8.6M this year, on a Cubs team that is looking to shed as much money as possible.
It’s not often you see a player get traded by a team and then get traded for by the same team within a few months, but I could honestly see it happening here. The Cubs don’t want to keep paying Davies to be bad and the Padres have to be confident that they can get similar performance from him this season that they got last year. He’s thrown over 150 innings three times in his career and would obviously be an easy fit in the clubhouse.
Let’s recap
The Padres need more starting pitching. The remaining free agents are not my favorite. Looking for veterans on expiring deals playing on bad teams, here is my list of favorite targets (in no particular order):
Michael Pineda
J.A. Happ
Mike Foltynewicz (would potentially cost a good prospect)
Jordan Lyles
Zach Davies
The note on Foltynewicz is because he’s so much cheaper than the other four guys on this list. The Rangers don’t need to trade him and might prefer to see if they can re-sign him to a reasonable contract after the season is up.
Let me know in the comments (or on Twitter) if you have any favorite targets that I haven’t mentioned here!