The Padres’ Bullpen, and the Potential of Selling Relief Help at the Deadline in Bulk

Before the start of the season, back in late March, I wrote an article on three Padres relievers who I thought had a chance to form a triumvirate worthy of comparison to that of the Yankees’ 2016 trio of Chapman, Miller, and Betances. While I was wrong about Kazuhisa Makita, two of those three pitchers have indeed turned in impressive campaigns, and their fellow teammates in the ‘pen for San Diego must be commended for being quite good as well. The Padres bullpen has made what is otherwise a pretty lackluster team, a lot more interesting.

With a variety of different looks and approaches to getting hitters out in the late innings, this bullpen has performed really well this season. Their FIP, or fielding independent pitching, ranks fifth in the league at 3.47. This is a metric that is on the same scale as ERA, and can be interpreted in the same way. What makes it more useful than ERA is the fact that it tells you what a pitcher’s ERA would be if he had average luck on batted balls. The idea is that some pitchers have a higher or lower ERA because of their good or bad defense, or luck, etc.

Going back to the Padres — The team is rebuilding, and one would think GM A.J. Preller would be open to discussing a trade for any of his relievers. Though there are a number of questions he’s going to have to answer before making any moves, because the Padres are in an interesting situation at the moment. Is the team close enough to contention, to justify trading valuable relievers under team control for multiple years beyond this season? Does it make sense to trade for a prospect who wouldn’t necessarily be ready to contribute to the major league team in 2019? These questions will clearly have to be addressed, yet the most intriguing part about the whole situation is envisioning the return San Diego could get in return for some of their prized bullpen arms.

The price of relievers on the free-agent market has continued to rise in the last few years, so a team could see trading for relievers under team control for multiple years — as a cheaper alternative to shelling out money for older relievers in free agency. If a team had the chance to give up a big prospect but knew they were getting, say, three quality relievers in their prime from the Padres for the next three years, wouldn’t that be better than breaking the bank to sign a veteran this offseason? It would at least be a strong alternative solution to the problem of having a mediocre bullpen.

Furthermore, the Padres could actually trade multiple hurlers in their bullpen to try and get a significant haul back for them in a trade. Of course any trade of this nature, potentially involving one of the “super-teams” in the league — Could end up having significant ramifications throughout the final stretch of the season and in the playoffs. These are the likely trade candidates for the Padres:

Their resumes above basically speak for themselves.

It seems like the only player the Padres would be less interested in trading would be Brad Hand, considering that he’s signed to a team-friendly long-term deal and has become the anchor of their bullpen. The question then becomes, what teams should be looking for relief help? The teams that come to mind are the Nationals, Phillies, Cardinals, and Indians. The depth of quality pitchers in the San Diego ‘pen should allow the team to possibly make a trade for a true impact player if they include multiple hurlers in a deal.

More likely to make a trade with the Padres than the aforementioned teams, are the Nationals. Seeking to maximize the last guaranteed season with Bryce Harper around, the franchise probably has very legitimate motivation to go all-in on trying to win a championship. Max Scherzer and Stephen Strasburg won’t be in their respective primes forever, which is another reason for the team to really go for it now! The Nationals seem like a team that would make sense to trade with.

The Nationals don’t have a very deep system, and their top prospects would likely be untouchable. That doesn’t mean they couldn’t give the Padres a number of decent prospects, though. A package centering around Carter Kieboom, and perhaps Seth Romero or Yasel Antuna could be had by San Diego. A deal with DC would likely be more about quantity over quality in prospects received by the Padres. Other teams, however, could send fewer, yet more individually talented prospects.

If the Cardinals feel like they have a chance at the Wild Card, they could realistically trade for some relief help to use in the playoffs. Their system isn’t very impressive, but Adolis Garcia and Conner Greene could net them one of the Padres pitchers.

The Phillies’ bullpen has been fine so far, though they just demoted their closer Hector Neris to Triple-A. It would seem like they’d want to feel more secure about their bullpen, so maybe the Padres could trade a few of their relievers for blue-chip prospect Sixto Sanchez. More likely, they could take Adonis Medina, Franklyn Kilome, and buy low on hometown outfielder Mickey Moniak. Those three latter prospects would be a nice return even if Sanchez is unavailable.

The Indians have a horrendous bullpen situation, so they would be the most obvious candidate as a team interested in making a deal with A.J. Preller. Getting multiple talented relievers in one trade likely seems very attractive to the Indians at this point in time. While Francisco Mejia is likely off limits in trades, it would be reasonable for the Padres to get some combination of Shane Bieber, Nolan Jones, and Will Benson in return for some of their relief aces.

All of the pitchers being dealt are under team control beyond this season, too:

Pitcher	Last Year of Team Control
Brad Hand	2021
Kirby Yates	2020
Craig Stammen	2019
Adam Cimber	2023

The years of control on all the pitchers are what should excite contending teams —  As much as their talents likely already do. The Padres are still rebuilding, and they have plenty of arms in the system to fill out this bullpen in the years to come.

Not all of the starting pitchers in the system will pan out completely, so expecting some of them to be in the bullpen is realistic. While it is tempting to say that the team should hold onto their star relievers, the team simply isn’t close enough to contention for that to be a viable excuse to keep them around. Add on the fact that reliever performance is volatile, and you can see that trading some of these guys now would make sense while their value is so high.

Considering the number of quality relievers the Padres possess, it would be surprising if none of them were traded at the deadline in the coming weeks. Hopefully, for the Padres, they’ll be able to continue to build for the future in exchange for some of the quality bullpen arms they have.

This post was originally posted on https://fathomablefriarfactsresearch.wordpress.com — Check out the site for more Padres related posts.