SAN DIEGO — Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” were playing at the home clubhouse at Petco Park when it finally opened to the media following Wednesday’s 4-3 loss to the Royals. The players of a $250 million team had just held a closed-door meeting after suffering a losing streak to a developing club with one of the lowest salaries (and one of the worst records) in the league. The Padres had been a difficult task for weeks, and the organization’s best-paid employees felt it themselves long before the boos were heard that agonizing afternoon.
“You can feel the fear of the fans and we feel it,” said Matt Carpenter. “It’s just a very unfortunate time at the clubhouse and with anyone who follows the team. You know, at that point we weren’t able to perform like we had hoped. So something has to be done.”
What can be done outside the walls surrounding Carpenter and his teammates isn’t entirely clear. Despite the Padres’ record – 20-24, good for fourth place in the National League West – sweeping personnel changes don’t seem imminent. Since General Manager AJ Preller took office in 2014, the franchise is the fifth full-time manager. Without advisors and other support personnel, the Padres have employed nearly three dozen coaches since Preller’s first full season in charge of the franchise in 2015. Many more perspectives have been swapped out of a farm system that now offers limited help at the upper levels. (The organization’s already questionable strength thinned even further on Wednesday when catcher Pedro Severino exercised his opt-out on his minor league deal.)
Even as the flaws in an expensive, star-studded roster have become glaring, people across the sport agree on at least one thing: A quarter of a billion dollars should buy you a lot more than fourth-place finish. The people who inhabit the sanctum in Petco Park feel it more than anyone else. The boos that rained down from the stands on Wednesday were just another memory.
“It’s not that we play better to deserve better. Were not. And that’s going to continue until we start playing better,” said Xander Bogaerts. “So we had to clean up all aspects of the game. All.”
San Diego’s ninth loss in 11 games brought another spate of indictments. The Padres had eight hits, nine walks and 12 runners on base. They went 2 of 9 with runners in goal position to improve their season average in those situations. They scored a run on a balk as the young royals tried to give them a win for the third straight season. They have repeatedly squandered that generosity while putting undue pressure on their pitching team.
The Padres have already played 23 games in which they scored three runs or fewer. They lost 21 of them. In comparison, the Royals have played 22 such games.
“The way we finish the game,” Fernando Tatis Jr. said, “I’d boo us too.”
After another embarrassing defeat, players on the team with the third-highest payroll in the majors tried to take responsibility with their words. Several veterans described a discrepancy between the club’s pre-game preparation – “That was spot on,” Bogaerts said – and his in-game results. They also agreed that it was high time to just keep talking about doing better.
“When you swing a fastball mid-center, you don’t have control over whether you hit it or shoot it up,” Bogaerts said. “But there are a lot of other things that you can really control in this game and those are the things that we need to pay close attention to.”
“I think you just have to start seeing better and better bats throughout the lineup,” Carpenter said. “We don’t do our job well enough. That’s the reality. And there’s an element in the game of baseball and in this job – good teams have to perform. So we have to find a way to make it happen.”
“If that makes sense, I think the expectations for the team were wrong,” said Joe Musgrove. “I think the expectations have to be related to the quality of the work and the expectation of what you bring to the team every day. Make sure you perform and do all these things right to look your best on the field. Don’t expect us to kick everyone’s ass and win 115 games every night. We’re expected to show up, do the work that we need to do and then implement it all on the pitch.”
Musgrove, a leader of the pitching team and the entire clubhouse, suggested a way for the Padres to alleviate some of the pressure that is obviously beginning to crush the team.
“We talked about maybe getting out here for a little bit and getting together as a group off the field,” Musgrove said. “You want to have fun as a group and we haven’t had much fun here lately.”
Thursday evening could bring an opportunity. Virtually the entire squad is expected to attend the Padres’ second annual “Dinner on the Diamond” benefit at Petco Park. Musgrove pointed out that this is probably not the best opportunity as the players are spread across different tables. “We’ll take our time along the way,” Musgrove said. “We have a few days off. We’ll try to get together and have some fun.”
Meanwhile, the pressure isn’t letting up, especially as the Padres may be without their other main leader for the coming days or weeks. After Wednesday’s loss, manager Bob Melvin said further scans on Manny Machado’s left hand — X-rays came back negative after the third baseman was hit by a pitch on Tuesday — revealed a small fracture in one of the metacarpals.
“We don’t think it’s an (injury) situation, but we’ll probably get through the day off (Thursday), see how he’s feeling and see where we’re at over the weekend,” Melvin said.
For his part, Machado said he wants to return as soon as his body allows, “if it’s two days, or if it’s a week, or two weeks, or six weeks, or whatever.” He noted that he’s never had a bone before had broken. When asked about the boos raining down from the stands, he gave a response similar to the one he said over the weekend following a Dodgers win.
“I don’t blame them. “We’re not playing well at the moment,” Machado said. “There was an expectation that we had at the start of the season and they expect us to go out there and win every single game. I think we have to go out together as a group and get better as a group. We have to trust the process. Things are really not going well for us at all at the moment.”
Machado was a spectator himself on Wednesday, his left hand was immobilized by a brace. And despite being one of the Padres’ most disappointing players this season, he watched their failings become more and more glaring, particularly at the end of a top-heavy lineup. Trent Grisham threw strikeouts on all four of his attacks and only managed 15 throws overall. Austin Nola went 4-0 with two strikeouts and lowered his average to .151, the third-lowest among major league hitters with at least 100 plate appearances.
The Royals, meanwhile, held San Diego on three runs while putting up a bullpen game. The Kansas City relievers started the afternoon with the fourth-highest earned run average in the majors. As Bob Marley’s voice rang through the clubhouse, assuring the audience that everything would be fine, the Padres again questioned their lackluster performance. And again just talking about what they could do to get better.
“We just have to win,” said Nola, who caught an unusual start from Yu Darvish in another loss. “There are no excuses. We have to come out and play harder, with more intensity and we can’t let the other team outplay us when it comes to the effort and what we bring every day.
“As you could see today, they outplayed us and that’s definitely a wake-up call.”
(Photo by Fernando Tatis Jr.: Orlando Ramirez / USA Today)