Series Preview: San Diego Padres return home to face the Atlanta Braves

All the information you need to have to be ready for the San Diego Padres' home opening series against the Atlanta Braves.

Opening Day is finally here. The last time there was San Diego Padres baseball at Petco Park exactly 200 days ago, when they were swept by the future World Series champion Atlanta Braves.

This time, the boys open Petco Park without their star player and on a two-game losing streak, but with a lot more hope and optimism than they had at the end of the 2021 season. The bad news? The World Series champion Atlanta Braves are back.

A quick look back

San Diego Padres
4-3 overall
Last series: Lost 2-1 in San Francisco

Atlanta Braves
3-4 overall
Last series: Lost 2-1 to Washington

For as down as we might currently be on the Padres, they are over .500 (with an over .500 road record!). That’s more than the Braves can say, and they’ve yet to play a road game.

Pitching Matchups

Thursday: Joe Musgrove vs. Charlie Morton
Friday: ??? vs. Kyle Wright
Saturday: Nick Martinez vs. Ian Anderson
Sunday: Yu Darvish vs. Huascar Ynoa

The “local boy done good” story with Joe Musgrove never really gets old. I can’t help but think back to all of the time I spent as a kid, imagining being the opening day pitcher for the San Diego Padres, and how cool it must be for Musgrove to be living out his childhood dreams this way.

It’s early in the season after a shortened spring training, so it’s hard to get a grasp on what is real and who is ready, but this feels like a pretty even matchup of starting pitching in this series. Whatever advantage the Padres might have in the Darvish vs. Ynoa matchup is probably evened out by Darvish’s last outing or the mystery surrounding what we can expect from Friday’s starter.

Speaking of…

MacKenzie Gore’s (likely) MLB debut

The Padres have not yet officially said who will start for them on Friday night. Technically, I believe they’re waiting to see if Blake Snell is ready to go after not being able to pitch the last time his number was called.

The expectation is that Snell’s injury, which has seemingly been a problem for the last six months, hasn’t healed in five days. If that’s the case, it would appear that long-heralded prospect MacKenzie Gore would make his MLB debut against the Braves.

Gore has had one of the rockiest rides to the bigs that I can remember for someone who is still considered a top prospect. At different points in his journey, he lost his command and his confidence. Ruben Niebla and the Padres made “fixing” Gore a high priority in the offseason, and the early results in spring training and in Gore’s lone triple-A start seem to imply that they accomplished that goal.

If Snell starts on Friday and pitches well, that’s great news for all involved. If Gore starts instead, it will be an event that every Padres fan will want to be there for.

Offense vs. offense

Like most MLB teams to start the 2022 season, not everyone in the Braves lineup had enough time in spring training to find their swing. As a result, half of their lineup is hitting the crap out of the ball and half of it isn’t really hitting much at all. Yet.

Here’s what their lineup generally looks like:

When you throw a lefty pitcher at them, Dickerson gets subbed out for Orlando Arcia. This lineup isn’t exactly Dodgers-level scary, but it’s not far from that. Any one of these 9 hitters can make you pay for mistakes, making this series the biggest test of the Padres pitching so far this season.

This has roughly been the Padres lineup, two series into the season. Ha-Seong Kim starts at SS against lefties only, so far.

The bad news is that this lineup isn’t quite as good at Atlanta’s. It’ll get a lot better when Fernando Tatis Jr. returns from his wrist surgery (just like the Braves, who are waiting on Ronald Acuña Jr.), but right now the bottom third of the lineup has potential for failure in any given game.

San Diego doesn’t have any summer-like temperatures in the near future, so I imagine Petco Park will keep a lot of would-be HRs in the ballpark, but we don’t know how much the new humidors will affect how the baseball flies. That’s something to keep an eye out for on this first homestand of the season.