This is why Bob Melvin is here

The San Diego Padres need their manager to take control and pull the team out of its spiral of sloppy, unfocused play.

Whew, okay. There’s a lot to tackle in last night’s Padres loss to the Rockies in Colorado. Esteury Ruiz had a great debut with a terrible finish. Luke Voit continues to be both bad and mistake-prone. Clevinger was once again brilliant until about pitch 85, when it all fell apart.

The overriding discussion topic after the game was how sloppy the Padres have gotten. Sloppy on defense (looking at you, Grisham), sloppy on the basepaths (what the hell was Luke Voit doing?), and probably sloppy about pulling starters when they’re obviously getting wobbly on the mound.

I want to dig into these things a little further down, and yell a little bit about Ha-Seong Kim, but first I want to tell you why I’m not freaking out.

Does this feel reminiscent of last season? Sure does! But that team fell apart due to a lack of starting pitching depth and a manager that couldn’t right the ship when things started going wrong. The Padres have Bob Melvin.

I know Bob hasn’t won or done anything with the Padres, so it’s easy to say “What is Bob Melvin going to do?” But Bob Melvin has won the Manager of the Year award three times, including twice in the last decade. He is certifiably and provably one of the 2-3 best managers in all of baseball. If there’s an issue to be solved by the manager here, he’s going to solve it.

I have a friend that used to tell me that the pros get paid to do the hard stuff, not the easy stuff. Anyone can put together a lineup and manage a bullpen, but can you get everyone back on the same page after they’ve lost 11 of their last 16 games? They best ones can. And if he can’t, it’s a sign that the roster needs to be changed.

I, for one, wasn’t expecting smooth sailing for Bob Melvin’s entire career with the Padres. There was going to be some instances in which he showed why the team invested in him, and why they went away from their model of hiring only first-time managers, and this is an opportunity to show that.

You could go a step further, and say that the sloppy play and lack of focus built up while Melvin was missing this year, either when he had surgery or when he had COVID. There’s probably some truth to that, but it’s also in the past. Now, he has to get them back to the team that spent the first month of the season playing error-free baseball. And, just like watching a new player walk through the doors in the offseason, I can’t wait to see what he’s got and how he can help the Padres defeat some of these demons they’ve been wrestling with for a while.