How Carpenter situation has been handled is odd

One of the stranger chapters to this strange Padres season began when Matt Carpenter, a designated hitter/first baseman who joined the club on a two-year contract last winter, went ice cold after a fruitful first month to this season.

Early May began the deep freeze, from which the 37year-old lefty had not emerged going into Monday’s home contest against the Orioles.

Carpenter’s luck could change with one good swing — perhaps as soon as Monday night, when Ji-Man Choi’s injury moved him higher up the depth

Even so, the recent responses from Padres leaders A.J. Preller and Bob Melvin to Carpenter’s falloff stood out as extra curious.

They decided it’s OK to try to win games for three weeks without replacing Carpenter on the active roster or calling upon him in any of those past 17 games.

A 26th man on a roster doesn’t influence many contests, but the decision of Preller-Melvin to play a man down, in effect, for three weeks was weird for two reasons.

One, the Padres are trying to gain ground in the wild-card race. Two, the team’s depth had proved insufficient for much of the season even when Melvin was using the full allotment of players.

And as Carpenter continued to collect rust across those 17 games, following a nearly three-month stretch in which he batted .128 with a .459 on-base-plus-slugging percentage in 141 plate appearances, calling upon him made less sense.

One solution teams often resort to in these instances is to place the well-respected veteran on the injured list to keep him around the team.

A replacement arrives, and presumably the man

ager calls upon him every now and again.

Preller, the president of baseball operations, is the person who best knows what the farm system has to offer. In choosing to keep Carpenter on the active roster, Preller seemed to give the farm a thumbs-down.

It was the decision of Melvin, the fourth manager hired by Preller, not to enlist Carpenter in the past three weeks before Monday’s contest.

To his credit, Carpenter has continued to earn high marks for being a wise, supportive teammate. Sunday, for example, he gave Juan Soto a pat on the back soon after Soto persisted through a painful finger injury.

However, compounding his hitting decline, Carpenter wasn’t an option to boost the defense. In fact, he lacks the defensive versatility that today’s era values greatly.

Ex-Padres hitter Ian Kinsler went from a deep slump to joining Preller’s front office, once a money settlement was reached. Might Carpenter — who holds a $5.5 million player option for next season — do the same?

The bigger picture here is that Preller needs to improve at building versatile, productive depth and replenishing the roster with useful players throughout the season.

Not one of Preller’s teams has won 90 games in a season and none of the nine — including this one — has made noise in the NL West race.

Those are two neon signs that the depth hasn’t been up to snuff.

This year, despite a $250 million roster and Preller having had several years to ramp up to the current window of playoff contention, the Padres have been bleeding value deep in their lineup and on their bench. Related, just two-plus months into the season, Melvin said he was using his regulars more than he would’ve liked — a factor that has to be considered when the Padres have looked flat.

Apart from the Carpenter saga, this season has spun off two strange outcomes with depth players: in late May, Preller in effect ate $1 million of the club’s money on reserve outfielder Adam Engel after just six plate appearances; and, for most of the season’s first half, Preller-Melvin retained DH-corner fielder Brandon Dixon long enough for him to amass 33 strikeouts against just one walk.

Perhaps Dixon, 31, will make a breakthrough in the PCL that translates to the Padres — but the corner player/DH, like many others this year, wasn’t of much help to Melvin’s chess game, batting .203 with two home runs and 56 wRC+ in 86 plate appearances.

It was only last season that Preller and Melvin had the chops to guide the Padres through a challenging journey to the second wild card and the League Championship Series. That team excelled in close games, a sign of good chess pieces and tactics. And, for all their struggles this year, the Padres still have a mathematical shot at the third wild card.

But even in 2022 the depth was not great, and the far greater evidence shows a need for Preller, who is under contract through 2026, to step up his game in this area.