What was expected?

Coming off a season in which they were one of the most spectacular disappointments in all of MLB, the Padres were largely expected to take a step back after trading superstar Juan Soto to the New York Yankees in December for a package headlined by RHP Michael King.

But as Padres GM A.J. Preller is often wont to do, he decided to make a few splashes of his own by stealing away Dylan Cease from the basement dwelling White Sox in return for an assortment of minor leaguers, providing some much-needed depth in the rotation.

Still, projection systems pegged the Padres’ moves as essentially a wash – with their expected record (per FanGraphs) sitting at 83-79 entering the season after finishing 2023 with a record of 82-80.

How did it go?

Preller wasn’t done there though, also acquiring 80-grade hitter Luis Arraez from the Marlins (after the season began) for a three prospects and reliever Woo-Suk Go in order to shore up the infield lineup and provide an upgrade over the scuffling Jake Cronenworth.

Turns out the nerds got it wrong (for once)!

The Padres soared to a playoff spot once more in 2024, finishing 14 games above .500 with 93 wins and 69 losses – even managing to win their Wild Card matchup against the Atlanta Braves, before falling to the (eventual champion) Dodgers in a tough-fought six-game series.

Despite the big swings on the trade market during the preseason, it was once again a young, electric outfielder who led the way for the Friars. This time though, rather than an outside mercenary, it was a homegrown talent – NL Rookie of the Year winner Jackson Merrill. We’ll dig into Merill more in the player section but to beat out the potentially generational talent of Paul Skenes for the award is certainly impressive no matter which way you slice things, let alone when that ROTY performance comes with a 130 wRC+ and 5.3 fWAR in your first taste of the majors.

It wasn’t all rainbows and butterflies in beautiful San Diego however – particularly on the pitching side.

The acquisitions of Cease and King paid immediate dividends, as the duo racked up 45% (8.7) of the entire pitching staff’s 19.3 fWAR for the season. Why such a high percentage? Injuries, of course. Both Yu Darvish and Joe Musgrove – the presumptive #1 and #2 starters entering the year – missed extensive time, each pitching fewer than 100 innings.

For Musgrove, his elbow started barking early in the season, with a brief stint on the injured list for elbow inflammation occurring in May. He managed to quickly return and would battle through until a second IL placement that took him out of action from the start of June until the middle of August. Unfortunately, however, his second return didn’t last much longer than the first, as he required another trip to the infirmary after being removed from the game in the middle of his start during Game 2 of the NL Wild Card. Naturally, the concern revolved around a potential Tommy John surgery and that came to fruition in the end, taking Musgrove out of action for the entire 2025 season.

Darvish was a slightly different story, though he too required three IL stints of his own throughout the year for a neck injury, then a groin injury. Those two stints were followed by a somewhat unusual stretch in which Darvish was initially placed on the IL for elbow inflammation, but then extended the timeline for his return due to a personal matter he was dealing with. It’s difficult to parse out exactly how much time was missed due to each cause but in the end, Darvish totaled just 81.2 innings in 2024.

Fantasy Stud?

The consistent excellency of Manny Machado should be studied by scholars – which I guess is kind of exactly what we’re doing here.

Since 2019, Machado has been (+/-) two home runs from 30 each season except for the Covid shortened year, where he still managed 16 across 60 games.

Now entering his age-32 season, we’re starting to see some small cracks beginning to appear as he hits the back half of his career but that has only dropped him from roughly a top-25 player to somewhere closer to the top-50 going forward. He still smokes the ball at an elite clip (48.8% Hard-Hit; 92.5 MPH average EV) and his bat speed has certainly not fallen off, sitting in the 93rd percentile.

He even managed to chip in 11 steals after totaling 12 across the previous two years combined, so his leg speed has yet to completely abandon him, though he’s perhaps getting by on veteran savvy more than anything, as evidenced by his 15th-percentile score in sprint speed.

When picking studs at the top of drafts, my personal strategy revolves around the idea that you can’t win your league with your first pick – but you can lose it, so make sure you pick someone you can trust. At the beginning of the season, Machado was ranked 30th on Yahoo. At the end of the season, Machado was ranked 30th on Yahoo.

As I said up top, his consistent excellency is consistently excellent.

Fantasy Dud?

Few players have had their fantasy value inflated by the rule changes around stolen bases than Ha-Seong Kim.

The light-hitting middle infielder rose up the fantasy rankings last year after totaling 38 swipes in 152 games in 2023, good for the sixth highest total in the league. It was also a career-high, after tallying only 18 over the previous two seasons (267 GP), and he rode that wave to becoming a valuable fantasy contributor.

The problem with light-hitting middle infielders with speed is that they’re operating with less of a margin for error as a dip in batting average can throw off the entirety of their contributions as not getting on-base leads to fewer steals and runs. Whereas with a power hitter, even if you’re hitting .230, you’ll be rosterable as long as you contribute 30+ home runs.

That seemed to be the case for Kim in 2024, as he was the unfortunate recipient of some poor fortune on batted balls, posting an unusually low .261 BABIP compared to a .306 mark (closer to league average) the year prior. Kim’s batting average wasn’t able to overcome that anchor and he ended up hitting just .233 for the season. His Statcast metrics do suggest it was mostly bad luck on the average front (.249 xBA) but he actually overperformed his power numbers (.370 SLG / .360 xSLG) so BABIP isn’t the only culprit you can point your finger at here. He’ll likely need to find a way to get his 42.6 FB% back down towards his previous averages, closer to 39%, to reverse course on that.

It’s rare for a player to drop from a preseason ranking of 66th overall on Yahoo to ending up 310th by season’s end without a major injury involved, but that’s where we find ourselves with Kim at the moment. His stellar defense provides him plenty of leash heading into 2025 but he may end up a better real-life player than what was hoped for in fantasy circles just a year ago.

Fantasy Surprise?

Entering the year, Merrill was almost-universally regarded as a top-10 prospect, including a 6th overall placement in FanGraphs’ rankings, so expectations were already relatively elevated for the Padres’ top farmhand. In the end, all but the most unrealistic expectations came to fruition, with Merrill taking home NL Rookie of the Year honors by season’s end.

Merrill’s impressive batting line of .292/.326/.500 and 130 wRC+ as a 21-year-old in his first foray into the Major Leagues will certainly pop off the stat sheet, as will his 24 home runs and 16 steals. But the most impressive part of his season may have come on the defensive side.

Prior to getting promoted, Merrill played almost exclusively at shortstop in the minors but he didn’t end up playing a single inning there for the Padres in 2024. Instead, he was tasked with the difficult assignment of transitioning into a centerfielder role.

It would have been understandable to simply tread water at the position during his first bit of exposure to it, but Merrill once again bucked the odds and excelled on defense as well – by Outs Above Average (OOA), Merrill ranked sixth amongst all centerfielders. Defensive metrics are notoriously volatile and less “sticky” than your traditional batting metrics so let’s take a look at another. Statcast’s Fielding Run Value (FRV) also places Merrill as a top-10 defensive centerfielder, though he places slightly lower at eighth overall in that particular metric.

It certainly was an exciting beginning to the career of a potential perennial All-Star.

Player Breakdowns:

Hitters

Manny Machado – 3B

The face of the franchise for the past six seasons, Manny Machado may no longer be the MVP-caliber player he used to be but as highlighted above, he has maintained an incredible level of consistency even as his aging curve has slowly begun to catch up with him.

In fact, Machado actually exhibited somewhat of a bounceback year overall this past season.

That’s not usually how things progress for hitters over 30, so it’s a positive sign that perhaps Machado was hampered by injury instead of simply age.

I’m also including his bat speed on the chart despite not having metrics for it in 2023 to compare against simply because a 93rd percentile output tells us that he hasn’t lost the ability to catch up with fastballs yet, which is often the first precursor of an aging hitter falling off in a major way. He seems to instead be using his veteran ability to better discern pitches outside the zone, as evidenced by a career low in contact outside the zone – which tends to lead to a lower rate of soft outs on weak contact, which then in turn improves rate statistics.

I feel he’s still a safe bet for 25 home runs annually to go with roughly an .800 OPS the next few years before we really have to concern ourselves with Machado’s draft stock. Considering the dearth of quality hitters at the hot corner these days and that places him firmly in the top-50 of my personal ranks.

Jackson Merrill – OF

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