Padres may have to rethink a key plan after Triston McKenzie’s latest camp look

The Padres didn’t need Triston McKenzie to win a Cactus League inning. They needed him to answer one question that’s been hanging over his career for the last two years:

Is the arm actually back?

On the very first day he finally wore a Padres uniform in a game setting, McKenzie gave them the kind of signal that forces a front office to sit up straighter. His fastball climbed into territory he hasn’t lived in before, with multiple reports clocking him as high as 98.7 mph — a number that sits above his previous tracked career high of 96.5. 

Padres watched a fascinating Triston McKenzie clue flip the pitching conversation

The Padres’ early-spring pitching blueprint has been pretty easy to read: protect the innings, keep options open, and avoid chasing upside so hard that you lose stability. That’s why their rotation talk has lived in the land of workload management, depth stacking, and contingency planning. McKenzie was supposed to be a nice-to-have lottery ticket — a non-roster flier who might give you useful innings if the ceiling never reappears.

MLB.com even framed the signing around rekindling the 2020-22 version of McKenzie, with the added wrinkle of him crossing paths again with Padres pitching coach Ruben Niebla from their Cleveland days. 

But you don’t touch upper-90s this casually if you’re still pitching around your elbow.

McKenzie’s velocity dip in recent years has been the clearest evidence of how much the injuries sapped him. He dealt with a UCL sprain that derailed his 2023 and bled into the seasons after it, and by 2024 his average fastball had dropped to around 91.1 mph, which sparked plenty of concern about what was actually going on physically.  Even in 2025, the profile looked more like a pitcher trying to survive than one trying to dominate.

This changes the risk for San Diego. If the arm is lively again, then McKenzie isn’t just depth — he’s a legitimate swing piece who can push the Padres into harder decisions. Maybe that means the team doesn’t have to overextend a “safe” back-end starter. Maybe it means they can be more flexible with workload plans elsewhere. Maybe it means a spring competition that felt like it was about surviving the calendar suddenly becomes about chasing October impact.

And yes, the spring line itself wasn’t spotless — he got tagged in his debut — but that’s almost the point. The Padres can live with messy February results if the underlying ingredient is real. Velocity like that doesn’t guarantee a comeback, but it does force San Diego to take the possibility seriously.

For a club trying to thread the needle between stability and upside, McKenzie just made “plan A” a lot less comfortable.