Padres’ 2024 mission: bonding as a group
Team believes success this year depends on performance on field and closeness off it.
The shards of last season’s shattered expectations have been picked up and thoroughly examined.
And the cuts caused by those shards created scars, forged a bond, prompted change and initiated a battle cry for the Padres.
“Togetherness,” new manager Mike Shildt said. “It starts with that. There’s no guarantee [of success] if you’re together, but there’s a pretty good guarantee if you’re not.”
The choir to which he is preaching is coming off a season in which that was lived out. So the Padres are raising their hands, clasping hands and buying into an allhands mentality.
“Everything that we do should be done with an understanding that we’re only as good as the weakest man in the room,” starting pitcher Joe Musgrove said. “So when we talk about doing things as a group and having a standard and an expectation, that’s only as strong as the guy that’s the furthest from following it. So as much as it is about doing your own thing and making sure you’re pulling your weight, it’s about bringing the other guys along with you and making sure that everyone’s on that same page, because as good as you are at it, if the guy next to you is doing a [bad] job of it, then it doesn’t do a whole lot of good for us.”
It might sound trite. And make no mistake: The Padres know their success is largely dependent on actual performance and execution on the field.
But if there is a singular takeaway from last year, it is that a group of men knows it wasted an opportunity.
“Everybody just thought it was going to happen instead of making it happen,” third baseman Jake Cronenworth said.
And they seem determined to rectify that by coalescing into an actual group.
Of all the things the Padres are saying and doing differently this spring in their effort to bounce back from a monumentally disappointing season, it seems they consider “togetherness” their lifeblood.
Players came into this year’s spring training firing off quotes that were both determined and damning — saying what needs to happen with the underlying intimation being what had not happened.
“Just come together,” right fielder Fernando Tatis Jr. said. “I feel like that’s gonna be the bigger part. Play the right baseball game. Just do what the game is asking us to do. Just forget about our egos, and we can do better. It’s about the team and how can we perform together.”
A season to forget
This is the season after. It is a season of transition and a season of remembrance. It is a season that could decide who is making some key decisions in future seasons.
It is a season that is, at its outset, shrouded in the unknown.
Against the backdrop of a diminished payroll, the recent death of its beloved owner and the tenuous job status of its president of baseball operations, the Padres begin the season expecting to contend for a championship with a remade rotation, remodeled outfield and rebounding stars.
And maybe this uncertainty does not make for such a bad circumstance, because there were not all that many questions a year ago. And at season’s end, there was one giant one:
How in the world did it go so wrong?
By the time a sputtering, disharmonious campaign reached its 82-80 conclusion, the Padres knew the chief cause for the most disappointing season in franchise history and among the biggest letdowns by any MLB team in recent memory.
Simply put, their best players did not play their best.
Former Chairman Peter Seidler had authorized — and President of Baseball Operations A.J. Preller had carried out — the investing of some $256 million in salaries. And the third-highest payroll in the game had collapsed on itself.
Yu Darvish never truly was himself after missing all of spring training while pitching in the World Baseball Classic. Musgrove endured a series of mishaps and maladies that caused his season to start late and end early and be painful almost throughout. Reliever Robert Suarez missed the first 97 games. And more than anything, three-quarters of the so-called Big Four were about three-quarters of what their career numbers suggested they should be.
Manny Machado played through an elbow injury. Xander Bogaerts played through a wrist injury. Tatis played through the cobwebs lingering from a season lost to injury and suspension.
“Myself, Bogey and Tati,” Machado said last month, “we’ve got to perform better than we did last year.”
That is paramount for a return to the playoffs, and there isn’t a soul inside the organization who will deny it. The Padres are still a team built around a core of wellcompensated players who must mostly perform to expectations.
But Preller has had to pare the payroll even as he attempts to construct a roster that fares well enough to save his job.
He was essentially forced to trade Juan Soto, the only member of the Big Four that performed at his career norms last year. Budget restraints also compelled Preller to allow three-fifths of the starting rotation to depart via free agency. The Padres bolstered their bullpen in free agency, then traded three prospects and reliever Steven Wilson for White Sox ace Dylan Cease.
They open the season with the 14th-highest payroll in baseball — a steep drop in standing from the previous four seasons but higher than almost any season before that.
For that money — a projected opening day payroll of around $160 million — they have three of the top 25 players in cumulative Wins Above Replacement over the last five seasons and two of the top 24 starting pitchers. The Philadelphia Phillies are the only other team able to claim that, though the Dodgers did sign Japan’s top pitcher (Yoshinobu Yamamoto) and a player (Shohei Ohtani) who ranked 26th as a position player and 38th as a pitcher.
But there was clearly something missing from last year’s assemblage of highpriced talent.
And that was the goal for Preller, Shildt and the team’s core players to identify and rectify.
A leadership void
Shortly after his hiring became official in late November, Shildt set off on trips around the country with additional stops in the Caribbean to visit with players. He spent time with the large contingent that worked out at Petco Park. And all through the offseason, the team’s core group of players attempted in meetings and dinners and text chains to elucidate what (besides underperforming) doomed the 2023 team and set out a plan to prevent such colossal underachievement.
They pretty much knew what was wrong before last season was complete.
Practically from the start, in fact, the Padres identified a lack of cohesiveness. They addressed the issue via a string of clubhouse meetings and organized activities on the road meant to build camaraderie.
Nothing took. The season slipped away.
The Padres tried. Tried too hard, by most accounts.
But to a large extent, they tried in ways that diverged and clashed. Some of the team’s stars were viewed as not being engaged. Soto was perceived to be on his own program. Machado, whose accomplishments and strong personality make him the clubhouse’s dominant presence and tone-setter, was widely seen that way as well.
As was documented at the time, several players voiced frustration at the situation and at the inability to fix it.
There was, in short, a leadership void.
And that was among the chief issues addressed this offseason.
“It’s the group of older guys that have come together and kind of taken it upon ourselves ... like, ‘This is how we’re going to play,’ ” Cronenworth said. “I think last year we just, I mean, we didn’t do a great job of it. … I think everyone was so focused on trying to figure out what the heck was going on and trying to win that it just kind of went by the wayside.
“The group of us who have talked in the offseason — and we talked a lot — that’s been a main focus for us. It’s the standards we set. If the group of us are going out and we’re practicing, we’re giving 100% effort, we’re diving or we’re doing this or we’re doing that, the guys who are gonna hopefully come up this year and help the team, they have no excuse to not do the same.”
Action pitch
This is all words until it becomes sustained action.
Toward the end of 2022, coinciding with their push to the playoffs, the Padres began assembling on the field for the national anthem as a means of coming together and getting mentally ready for the game. Manager Bob Melvin said that would be the policy last year as well. But it did not take long for the Padres to get back to having no more than half the team on the field by the time the anthem was sung.
In the spring of 2021, players were singing the praises of manager Jayce Tingler and his staff for how they had pushed them during the COVID-shortened 2020 season and were coaching them up again. By that summer, something akin to a revolt was underway.
But to this point, there appears to be only enthusiastic cohesion.
The energy and efficiency of this spring training was markedly different. Some of that can be attributed to numerous key players missing time because of the WBC last year. But there was also a certain routine in the way Melvin and his closest coaches did things. And there was an implicit belief in the clubhouse last spring that the Padres were talented enough to win almost no matter what.
“Only if we don’t do the work,” Tatis said last March when asked how the Padres could fail.
Reflecting on that sentiment a year later, Tatis said: “We forgot what the game asked us to do on a daily basis to win. As much raw power as you have, I feel like in Petco and our division that’s just not gonna work. I feel like you need first to play the game the right way, and then the game will reward you with extra stuff. It’s what the game asks. In a long season, that’s what the game dictates. … At the end of the day, if you don’t come together as a team and do what the game is asking us to do, that is just going to show up in different ways, like how it did last year.”
Among the numerous philosophies over which Preller and Melvin clashed was the way to prompt the team to play better.
Melvin tried to address issues in ways that had worked for him over nearly two decades and eight playoff appearances as a manager. But he never had a team so full of stars and later acknowledged he didn’t have the answers.
When Melvin departed to manage the San Francisco Giants, many in the organization immediately identified Shildt as the leading candidate to replace him. Shildt had spent the previous two seasons as an adviser in player development and a de facto coach on the major league staff. Moreover, he had managed the St. Louis Cardinals and spent nearly two decades coaching in that organization, which for the bulk of this century has been a model of consistency and continuity.
At the end of a monthlong search, the candidate who practically was predestined was named. And he immediately began evangelizing about “alignment” in the organization.
And whether or not the discord between Preller and Melvin had a toxic effect on the clubhouse last season, the consonance between Preller and Shildt over coaching style, winning on the margins, relentlessness and other matters has spread through the organization like sunshine.
“I think a big difference this year is, there’s been an expectation and a foundation laid out about how we’re going to carry ourselves and how we’re going to do things as a group,” Musgrove said. “So I think it makes it easier for people to come in and know what the expectations are and know what’s expected of the group as a whole. As opposed to in the past, it felt like people had their own idea of how things should be run, and they would go off and start doing their own thing without that togetherness. It was like, ‘Hey, you’re not even talking to people about what you’re doing, you’re just doing what you feel is right and ignoring everything else everyone else is trying to do.’ ”
Some of what is happening now is as predictable as it was necessary. Getting embarrassed, after all, provides the right landing spot for a new message and the impetus for a renewed commitment.
That doesn’t mean it is not real or that it won’t work.
“I think the guys in here are a little bit more hungry,” Machado said. “It was devastating. We could have been a lot better last year. … We know we have it. It’s there. We’ve just got to take it out from within.”