How Will the Padres Manage Their Pitching Depth in the Years to Come?

Along with a strong farm system, the Padres have many talented young arms within that same pipeline.

From lower-level pitchers such as MacKenzie Gore, Luis Patino, and Osvaldo Hernandez , to guys in higher levels like Adrian Morejon, Michel Baez, and Logan Allen, it’s clear the organization is brimming with talented hurlers.

With so much depth in pitching, how are the Padres going to deal with a potential overflow of deserving pitchers to be in their rotation, or roster for that matter?

Towards the end of this season, the team doesn’t have much reason to be concerned about this kind of thing happening.

Come next season, and the years to come, though, the Padres will very likely have some dilemmas on their hands as far as distributing playing time among their pitchers.

Take a look at the pitchers who figure to be available to the team in the rotation.

More specifically, lets look at the 2019 and 2020 seasons:

2019:

• Clayton Richard
• Dinelson Lamet
• Bryan Mitchell
• Luis Perdomo
• Brett Kennedy
• Robbie Erlin
• Joey Lucchesi
• Eric Lauer
• Jacob Nix
• Matt Strahm
• Logan Allen
• Chris Paddack

2020:

• Brett Kennedy
• Dinelson Lamet
• Bryan Mitchell
• Luis Perdomo
• Robbie Erlin
• Joey Lucchesi
• Eric Lauer
• Jacob Nix
• Matt Strahm
• Logan Allen
• Chris Paddack
• Adrian Morejon
• Michel Baez

That’s twelve pitchers available for use in the 2019 rotation, and thirteen that would have a good case for being starting pitchers during 2020.

Even if the team was using a six-man rotation, what would they do with the other pitchers? These things have a way of working themselves out, and injuries are inevitable. That’s somewhat of a cop-out, though — figuring out how the team may handle the situation is important.

First of all, the young arms who have been listed, such as Chris Paddack and Logan Allen, have yet to prove themselves in the major leagues. Jacob Nix has only made one start, so he still needs to pitch for longer to lay claim to a start every five or six days. The same can be said of Adrian Morejon and Michel Baez, who are the furthest of the pitchers listed above from the major leagues. Matt Strahm has made some starts this year, but has spent the majority of the season in the bullpen. Perhaps he stays there long-term, but his stuff is good enough to start and the Padres seem keen on giving him that chance. We’ve included him as a candidate to be in the rotation, but he may end up in the bullpen.

The most obvious way to deal with this kind of dilemma would be to simply trade some of the pitching depth to other teams in return for hitters that could beef up the lineup for the Padres. That’s the simplest way to deal with a surplus of anything in life — getting rid of it in exchange for something else that one probably needs more of.

That’s no fun to think about though, and too difficult to project because we’re dealing with pitchers who are naturally more volatile, along with the fact that predicting events a year to two years in advance is quite difficult. So let’s imagine some ways the Padres may deal with such a dilemma more creatively.

Below are some ideas for how the team could utilize all the pitchers listed above in various roles in 2019:

1. Six-man rotation with some pitchers making piggy-back starts:

Here’s the rotation:

1. Joey Lucchesi
2. Jacob Nix
3. Dinelson Lamet / Logan Allen —  Piggy-Back
4. Matt Strahm / Brett Kennedy — Piggy-Back
5. Chris Paddack
6. Robbie Erlin

The idea here is to utilize more pitchers in the rotation to decrease the workloads of all the starters. Doing this also mitigates certain pitchers’ issues of facing hitters multiple times through the order. Dinelson Lamet is a classic example of this, because his ERA last year when facing hitters the third time was 8.86. Having shorter outings from the pitchers who are piggy-backed together also allows their stuff to play up, as they’d only be throwing three or four innings at a time. Furthermore, we’ve specifically paired pitchers together to piggy-back who throw with opposite arms, so opposing teams will only be able to exploit pitchers’ splits against righties or lefties while one of the Padres’ pitchers is throwing.

Bullpen

Closer:

Kirby Yates

Setup:

Robert Stock

Craig Stammen

Middle Relief:

Trey Wingenter

Jose Castillo

Luis Perdomo

This Bullpen is looking pretty strong, right? From top to bottom, we should feel pretty comfortable with any of these guys pitching the late innings. Luis Perdomo is included because he seems like the kind of pitcher who might be really good if he only had to throw an inning or two at a time. His fastball could be in the upper nineties, and he’d only really have to throw one other secondary pitch to be successful out of the bullpen.

There are a multitude of ways in which the Padres could handle a situation like this in the years to come, and time will likely remove the necessity of the team implementing a creative solution like the one above. Injuries and decreases in performance usually mitigate the severity of dilemmas such as this. At the moment though, it’s looking increasingly likely the Padres have to at least decide which five or six pitchers they end up placing in their rotation at some point next year. It’s always good to have seven or eight pitchers in the rotation because of the frequency with which pitchers get injured. Whatever happens, the Padres figure to have a highly impressive pitching staff in the years to come.

Conrad Parrish

A sophomore at Willamette University in Oregon, Conrad is majoring in Spanish but is also a writing center assistant for other students at Willamette. He has been a Padres die-hard his whole life and hopes to bring comprehensible statistical analysis to the site.