Changes Coming to Padres Position Players

For as good as the pitching has been for San Diego this season both in the starting rotation and especially in the bullpen, it has been the total opposite when it comes to their offense and lack of production form the lineup.  Their is no need to go into detail about how bad the offense has been this season especially compared to the rest of the league. Its safe to say that new General Manager A.J. Preller will have his hands full as he tries to upgrade and inject some power and consistency into this lineup during the upcoming off season.

Now I know I said I would not go into detail in terms of the stats when it comes to the Padres offense but here is one that sums up perfectly the faults and failures of the San Diego bats this season. Coming into play this past Wednesday , they had scored a grand total of 515 runs as a team, dead last in the major leagues as you imagine but not just by a few runs, it is by  a healthy margin. The next closest team to them in terms of this stat is the Atlanta Braves with 567 runs scored. That is a  52 run differential, which is quite a cause for concern for the entire Padres organization.

One of the major reasons why this offense went so ice cold most of the season is the key position players in the lineup had incredibly bad seasons in contrast to what the team was expecting to get out of them coming out of spring training. Players like Jedd Gyorko, Everth Cabrera and Will Venable were just some of the important pieces to this Padres puzzle that did not fit into place at all this season.

Teams have players that have off seasons every year. That has been happening since the early days of the game, but to have a bulk of the lineup collectively be so bereft of production was hard to fathom and see play out this season.

Injuries did play a role, as Gyorko and Cabrera did spend a good amount of time on the disabled list, which did slow down their ability to put up better overall numbers. Injuries not withstanding, this is something that you can only hope occurs for this season and can be remedied next season.  That will take some amount of work by Preller and his baseball people as they begin to implement their blueprint for this organization.

The type of players Preller and his staff will be looking for is anyone’s guess at this point, but we should be able to get  a better glimpse into that as the off season draws near. He has had  a good amount of time to evaluate the current lineup and bench of this roster to draw some solid concussions as to who he can envision being part of  the team moving forward and who needs to go.

There will be plenty of players on the free agent market for the Padres to mull over and look at as potential targets. As to if they can fit into the budget of the team will be another question to ask for another day but for now the work to turnaround this offense has just gotten started in San Diego.