We've been here before

The 2022 San Diego Padres are showing a lot of signs that they're following the same path as the 2021 Padres, and that's bad news.

Last night’s 12-4 loss to the Detroit Tigers, who have the 4th worst record in all of baseball, is an embarrassing as it gets.

Let’s look at it from another angle: The Tigers have scored 312 runs this season, including the 12 they scored yesterday. It’s the lowest in baseball by a lot. The next most putrid offense is that of the Oakland A’s, who barely field a baseball team at all and have still scored 24 more runs than the Tigers.

There is no world in which a team with real playoff aspirations should be giving up more than 1 or 2 runs per game to the Tigers. The Padres gave up TWELVE.

That’s two games in a row where the Padres were trailing by a score of 8-1 in the middle innings. This team isn’t built to do anything with a 7 run deficit.

As a matter of fact, the Padres aren’t built to do much of anything. They have one specific path to victory, and instead of telling you what it is, I’m going to let Padres manager Bob Melvin tell you what it is:

“We need to clean it up and play focused baseball every day,” Bob Melvin said. “Every time we play like that we lose. Every time we play clean baseball and focused, we put ourselves in a position to win. … We need to quit talking about it we need to do it.”

Other players in the clubhouse echoed the manager’s sentiment: This team’s best chance of winning is with pitching and defense. This team needs to win low-scoring games.

I think that probably worked better earlier in the year before summer heat turned on and baseballs starting flying out of ballparks again. I also think it worked better when the team was crisper with their defense. Between Hosmer and Grisham and the rookie outfielders, you can all but guarantee a miscue or two in every Padres game these days.

This feels like a moment I’ve experienced before, almost exactly a year ago. The Padres couldn’t beat the Rockies (sound familiar?) and then went to Miami to take on the hapless Marlins. They split that series, including a 9-3 drubbing to finish the Padres off in the final game.

San Diego was 59-44 at that point, better than the 54-44 they are now, but it felt like the wheels were starting to get wobbly and that the team needed an injection of talent and excitement to maintain the pace they had set for themselves in the first half of the season.

That’s when they traded for Adam Frazier. And rumors started to fly that Eric Hosmer was on the next bus out of town, and that the Padres were in line to complete a mega-deal with the Washington Nationals (sound familiar?) for Max Scherzer and Trea Turner.

And that’s where we sit now: waiting for a trade to hopefully turn things around. It’s obvious that Bob Melvin has soured on Eric Hosmer and the team can’t succeed with him playing first base. There’s rumors of a mega-deal with for Juan Soto. Wil Myers is setting up to take over first base.

If you were hoping that this year wouldn’t feel like last year, when the Padres experienced one of the worst collapses in baseball history and ended up missing out on the playoffs, then this exact scenario on July 26th is not what you were looking to see.