Mason Miller decision hints at a puzzling new plan for the Padres’ pitching staff

Sometimes no news is good news. In this case, no news on Mason Miller changing roles just makes everything feel weirder.

The San Diego Padres are acting like a team in transition and contention at the same time, which is how you end up in this kind of gray area. They’ve already watched Dylan Cease walk. The odds of re-signing Michael King feel slimmer by the day. Yu Darvish is out for the year. So right now, you’re essentially talking about Nick Pivetta, Joe Musgrove coming off Tommy John, and Randy Vásquez as the front of the rotation. That’s not exactly the “sleep easy in March” group the fanbase was promised.

And it gets stranger.

Padres’ choice on Mason Miller only deepens the mystery around their rotation

From Alden Gonzalez of ESPN: ”Padres manager Craig Stammen said they’ll keep Mason Miller, Adrián Morejón, and David Morgan in the bullpen rather than stretching them out as starters.”

“It’s a risky proposition health-wise and performance-wise,” Stammen said.

So yes, the Padres are very much still in the market for starting pitching. They’re also, reportedly, listening to offers on Pivetta — their best healthy starter and the guy who just put together the season they were dreaming on when they signed him. Connect those dots and it starts to look less like a plan and more like a flow chart drawn in pencil.

On paper, this is where you’d expect Mason Miller to come in as the big swing. If you’re really open to moving Pivetta, the logical counterweight is converting Miller or Morejón into the rotation like many assumed was at least on the table. Especially after the recent bullpen adds: Ty Adcock and Daison Acosta, two fliers that scream “we’re building depth around something.”

But no. The Padres are doubling down on Miller as a relief weapon, keeping Morejón in the ‘pen, bolstering that group with more arms, and shopping for starters while listening on their best one. That’s a lot of plates spinning for a team that hasn’t actually answered the most basic question:

Who’s taking the ball every fifth day?

Maybe this all turns into a masterclass in resource allocation — Miller as a multi-inning cheat code or their closer, a reshaped rotation built via trade, and a bullpen that shortens every game to five innings. For now, though, it just feels like the Padres made their decision on Mason Miller… and left the rest of us trying to guess what the plan actually is.