Padres’ Playing Time Battles: Pitchers

Last week inaugurated what will likely be several weeks of depth chart discussions in the form of playing time battles. RotoGraphs staff will discuss and assess noteworthy battles for playing time and/or starting gigs for position players and, separately, pitchers. Here, specifically, this author will investigate the San Diego Padres‘ pitching situations.

#4 and #5 Starters

Behind James Shields, Tyson Ross and Andrew Cashner, the Padres’ rotation looks feeble. At least six arms could see a handful of starts — and, to avoid burying the lede, few warrant attention in standard mixed leagues. But, alas, playing time battles are playing time battles. In order according to FanGraphs’ depth charts:

Colin Rea made only six starts but did well enough. Poised to erase his rookie status, Rea flashed solid command in the lower minors but has seen little time above Double-A. Alas, he’s far from conquering any kind of learning curve, and his middling strikeout rate (K%) won’t do him additional favors. In fact, his 5.3% swinging strike rate (SwStr%) ranked 6th-lowest among all pitchers who threw at least 30 innings last year. The near-50% ground ball rate (GB%) is nice, but he projects to be a 4.00-FIP guy at best. Still, despite being the Padres’ 4th-best prospect in 2015, according to MLB.com, he wasn’t expected to be much more than a #3 or #4 starter anyway, and that’s exactly what the Padres will ask of him.

Robbie Erlin and Odrisamer Despaigne are the resident Mark Buehrles of San Diego: low-strikeout, solid-control guys who rely on weak contact to drive success. Buehrle is something of a unicorn, though. And with the league loaded up on young live arms, pitchers who profile like Buehrle don’t generate much value anymore. Six to seven K’s and two to two-and-a-half walks per nine innings are reasonable expectations but, again, nothing worth rostering in shallow formats.

Brandon Morrow scored a minor league contract with an invite to spring training, which he deserves from some desperate team looking to recapture his 2012 glory (or extrapolate his small-sample 2015 numbers). Morrow should be happy to (1) strike out more than 20% of the hitters he faces and (2) pitch more than 50 innings. In his defense, however, he did limit contact in an admirable way in a scant 33 inning last year. If he makes the 25-man roster, he could be the team’s fourth-best starter, but he should only be drafted with the expectation that he’ll need to undergo maintenance — and, thus, be replaced — at some point during the season.

If you’re bad at enunciating, this could get confusing really quickly. Brandon Maurer actually made solid progress underneath the dashboard thanks in large part to a much-improved slider. That the improvements didn’t manifest in actual outcomes is disappointing, but it merely sets Maurer up to be a sleeper (or resembling one, at least) for 2016. It will depend on his usage, though. General manager A.J. Preller indicated a couple of weeks ago that Maurer will enter spring training as a starter, but that guarantees little about how he will leave spring training. The possibility of an 8 K/9 is real, though, making him a nice upside play on the cheap in deeper formats.

Drew Pomeranz has been used amply in relief and it will likely remain that way. But with 19 starts the last two seasons, he’ll get the call to fill in rotation gaps when necessary (which, frankly, could be often). He looks much better in relief, though — his K-BB% more than doubles from a meager 8.9% as a starter to 18.0% in relief, good for almost an entire run’s difference between his xFIP splits (4.35 starter, 3.36 reliever).

If you’re into the whole “tl;dr” thing: Maurer is your best bet to pay dividends on his draft price. Rea, Erlin and Despaigne have much lower ceilings; the former two could see big chunks of time, though, making them more valuable than Despaigne via quantity. Morrow is a wild card, but not in the Charlie Kelly sense of the term. Pomeranz functions better as a reliever.

Who deserves to be the Fernando Rodney contingency plan?

Because the Padres should definitely consider one.

This puts Maurer in a bit of a bind because whatever gains he may capture with his refined arsenal will play up more in short work. Alas, the Padres may ultimately choose to unleash Maurer in a setup role, but it appears a starting gig is the primary preoccupation.

In the meantime, the Padres have a couple of solid, if not unexceptional, options in Kevin Quackenbush, Nick Vincent, Jon Edwards and Buddy Baumann.

Quackenbush has been fairly consistent in his first two seasons with admirable but not astounding plate discipline metrics. Despite a worse sophomore season in terms of outcomes, The Duck (not a real nickname) made some minor improvements that could help propel him to a career year in 2016, although I use the term “career year” here a bit loosely. Should Rodney gift-wrap the closer role for him, Quackenbush is stable enough to hold on to it for the rest of the season and, perhaps, thereafter.

Vincent, on the other hand, has demonstrated elite strike zone control, albeit only prior to 2015. Because all of his proficiencies vanished last year, as he lost almost seven percentage points off his strikeout rate and his walk rate doubled. Couple that with troubling fly ball tendencies and Vincent is a more volatile bet to usurp the 9th-inning role. The walk rate seems like a bit of a fluke, but hitters made more contact on pitches they chased. Should he make the appropriate adjustments, Vincent can be a “handcuff” bullpen arm that bolsters strikeouts and ratios on the cheap.

Edwards and Baumann are both in the same boat: they’re older non-prospects with huge strikeout potential but awful command. Which, at times, has been exactly who Rodney is. So maybe that’s what he Padres are into. We’ll see. Either way, both are long-shots at a setup role and will likely serve in middle relief. But you never know.