Padres’ shaky opening stretch is already stressing the wrong unit

Nobody needs to start planning a funeral for the Padres in late March. It’s a long, grindy season, weird stuff happens in the first week, and teams almost never look fully settled this early. But if you were trying to script the most Padres possible way to open a season, this was awfully close: shaky starting pitching, messy mistakes, and a bullpen already being asked to clean up more than it probably should. 

This isn’t really about two losses by themselves. It’s about the way the losses happened. On Opening Day, Nick Pivetta lasted only three innings, walked three in the first, and threw just 42 strikes in 69 pitches. The Padres were down four runs before they even came to bat, and outside of Xander Bogaerts, who had two hits and hit everything hard, the offense got swallowed up by Tarik Skubal. 

There should be some grace built into that. Skubal is not an ordinary early-season test. It’s March 26 and this offense still has plenty of time to find its identity. That part is true. Nobody should be pretending the bats are doomed because they ran into one of the nastiest pitchers on the planet. 

Padres’ early-season mess is already testing a bullpen built to carry too much

But the larger Padres concern showed up anyway, and it has a lot less to do with one bad day against Skubal. The biggest area of concern on this roster was always the rotation. Joe Musgrove still hasn’t resumed throwing off a mound, Germán Márquez and Walker Buehler come with obvious questions at the back end, and even Michael King hasn’t fully looked like himself dating back to last May. The Padres don’t just need decent outings from this group. They need length and stability. 

March 27 pushed the same anxiety in a different direction. The bullpen blew two leads in a 5-2 loss, but even that doesn’t fully capture the problem. Craig Stammen managed that game like someone who understands the season is a marathon. Mason Miller was not available for a multi-inning role, which is completely reasonable, and Adrian Morejon was used aggressively for six outs. Jason Adam, meanwhile, is still on a rehab stint after quad surgery. All of that is sensible. All of that also showed how quickly even a loaded bullpen can start looking a lot more ordinary when the perfect version of the plan isn’t available. 

The Padres built this thing knowing the bullpen was one of the roster’s biggest strengths. A year ago they sent three relievers to the All-Star Game, and they added Mason Miller after that. They chose to trust that relief group rather than peel off pieces to patch the rotation. On paper, that sounds bold. In practice, it means the margin for error gets thin in a hurry. When Jeremiah Estrada walks three straight hitters, when a Manny Machado error helps extend trouble, when a defensive alignment leaves Bogaerts with no play, suddenly the bullpen isn’t just protecting leads. It’s trying to survive the fallout from everything else. 

The Padres aren’t cooked. The bullpen doesn’t suddenly stink. It’s that two games in, they’ve already lost in the kind of messy, overcomplicated, self-inflicted way that tends to follow this team around when the formula gets stretched too thin. It’s absolutely early. But even in a long season, you can still recognize a familiar warning sign when it shows up this fast.