The Padres have shown an ability to bring out the best in veteran arms who come into their system. Could this former Nationals’ World Series champion have a second career renaissance in San Diego?

The Padres, under Ruben Niebla, have done a phenomenal job of helping pitchers find new ways to elevate their game.

Their staff has also been able to help pitchers with diminished stuff get the most out of their performance, as they did with Martin Perez in 2024 and even with Rich Hill in 2023. With the Padres in need of a veteran workhorse at the back of the rotation, one arm on the free agent market could be a sizable gamble with upside and playoff experience: Patrick Corbin. 

Corbin has already had one career rebirth throughout his time in the majors.

Once a highly touted prospect in the Angels system before being part of the Dan Haren-to-Los Angeles trade, Corbin had a tumultuous start to his career, posting up and down seasons with Tommy John surgery costing him all of the 2014 season. Corbin was something of a late bloomer at the MLB level, with his 2017 & 2018 seasons capping off the first renaissance of his career after Tommy John surgery.

This performance with Arizona earned him a six-year, $140 million contract from the Nationals, whom he helped to their first World Series title in team history. While Corbin didn’t have the best postseason numbers (albeit on a team that was essentially rolling out half a pitching staff), he was a crucial part of their win, earning the Game 7 win in relief with three scoreless innings. 

Unfortunately, the left-hander has seen a career downturn in the ensuing seasons. He led the majors in losses for two straight seasons and led the National League in losses from 2021-23. Over that stretch of games, Corbin allowed one of the highest rates of baserunners in the league, and the peripheral numbers were not keen at all on his performance. 

The 2024 season did not look much better on the surface, but when looking at both the conventional and advanced numbers, there begins to be reasons for optimism.

Corbin’s struggles over the last few seasons can be attributed to one major element: fastball usage.

Corbin has been eating innings as a sinkerballer with Washington over the past four seasons, averaging 5.1 innings per start. However, this same approach on the mound has been what hurt his performance. His sinker and four-seamer have been concentrated in the lower half of the strike zone, with the four-seaner seeing heavy usage up-and-in to right-handed batters. Philosophically, the sinker usage might be conducive to ground balls, but when batters are hitting .339 and slugging .567 against the pitch (as was the case in 2024), the search for a ground ball is essentially neutered.

That same sinker also had a brutal 9.1% whiff rate in 2024, and it doesn’t help that it was his most-used pitch. Corbin’s four-seamer also suffered from the contact-oriented style, as he wasn’t using it to its fullest potential. Fourteen inches of induced vertical break is good at providing a rising effect, and Corbin did use it near the top of the strike zone somewhat. However, he used it to “dot the corner” as opposed to generating swings and misses. 

Patrick Corbin had some changes to his game in 2024 that could make him an intriguing candidate for the Padres. He introduced a cutter in 2024 that became his third-most used pitch, thrown 19.2% of the time. That pitch had his third-highest whiff rate (22.3%) on the season, only behind his slider and changeup. The cutter also showcased an average of 2.1 inches of glove-side run while being located mainly in the low-and-inside quadrant of the strike zone. Again, pitch location was an issue, as the cutter landed in the swing paths of most batters. His slider continued to be his bread-and-butter pitch, being the only offering that rated positively on the run value scale at +2, and his changeup was effective when batters didn’t make contact. When batters did make contact, however, a .773 slugging percentage against says all one really needs to know (in simpler terms, the pitch was being torched). 

After all this analysis, there are some interesting raw materials with which the Padres can work with Corbin. Corbin still has above-average command, and his best pitches are ones the Padres have experience improving. Just looking back at Martin Perez’s tenure with the Padres, the team made his changeup go from borderline unusable to his strongest offering, sporting an unfathomable 52.4% whiff rate in August. San Diego was able to maximize Perez’s diminished stuff with a clever combination of sequencing and pitch location. Perez would live down in the zone with his changeup and curveball, but his fastball and cutter lived higher in the zone to allow the breaking/offspeed offerings to sequence in a manner that led to more swings and misses. As a result, Perez’s paltry 16.9% strikeout rate with the Pirates went up to a near MLB-average 20.3%. 

So what does all this analysis on Perez have to do with Corbin? Well, Corbin arguably has more upside on his offerings than Perez, and his pitches could play well off one another to rediscover some of their strikeout potential. His slider has great whiff rates and sufficient movements to make both right-handers and left-handers whiff on the pitch. There are some smaller mechanical adjustments the Padres could make with Corbin to really flesh out his arsenal, and they have the proper resources to help the southpaw see and adapt to them (i.e. the Point Loma biomechanics lab). Should the Padres expect to get a 2018 All-Star form from the now-35-year-old? No, that would be an unrealistic ask at this point in time. However, if San Diego is able to get production in line with his 2024 advanced numbers (4.41 FIP, 4.14 xFIP in 174.2 innings), they could have a veteran back-end starter with mid-rotation potential. 

The final question with Patrick Corbin comes down to how much it would cost San Diego to sign him. As the market for back-end rotation starters has mellowed out after the winter meetings, Trevor Williams and Michael Soroka have signed deals since then, with Soroka getting $9 million for a season and Williams getting $7 million a season for two years. Corbin has a longer track record than both, but he is heavily weighed down by his performance in the last four seasons.

If San Diego and Corbin engaged in contract talks, it would likely be after the Roki Sasaki sweepstakes. For contract value, a projectable idea is a contract similar to that of Trevor Williams. Fangraphs models project a value of 1 fWAR to be worth around $6.7 million, and Corbin produced the following values in his six-year deal: 4.7. 1.2, 0.2, 0.7, 0.8, and 1.7 fWAR, averaging out to 1.55 fWAR per season. Both Fangraphs and Steamer projections peg Corbin to be worth around 1.5 fWAR in 2025, so based on these values, a fair contract for Corbin in San Diego would start at around a $6-7 million AAV. Considering the Padres’ aim to be below the luxury tax threshold, a likely contract could be similar to the first Nick Martinez deal or the Michael Wacha deal; in this case, San Diego could sign Corbin to a one-year, $6.5 million contract with performance-based incentives, a multi-year club option, and season-by-season player options. Negotiating the contract this way could allow San Diego to shave off some money from the CBT value of the contract while allowing Corbin chances to make some extra cash along the way. 

The San Diego Padres have question marks at the back end of their rotation, and this pitching department has worked miracles with the arms that have entered. With the right adjustments, this team could have Patrick Corbin’s career rise from the ashes once more.

Diego Garcia

A born and raised San Diegan, Diego Garcia is a lifetime Padres fan and self-proclaimed baseball nerd. Diego wrote about baseball on his own site between 2021-22 before joining the East Village Times team in 2024. He also posts baseball content on his YouTube channel “Stat Nerd Baseball”, creating content around trades, hypotheticals, player analyses, the San Diego Padres, and MLB as a whole.

A 2024 graduate of San Diego State, Diego aims to grow as a writer and content creator in the baseball community.