3 Padres players we'll be glad are gone in 2024 and 2 we will wish stayed

Losing Blake Snell is just a brutal blow to the Padres

There have been a lot of folks trying to justify the loss of Blake Snell from the Padres rotation. They say that he doesn't pitch deep enough into games, would cost more than he is worth, walks too many batters, and has an iffy track record of staying healthy. All of that is certainly true to an extent, but the fact remains that Snell is one of the best pitchers in baseball right now, and the odds are that he is going to be playing somewhere else in 2024. That stinks.

Sure, Snell is not a perfect pitcher whatsoever. However, he literally just won his second Cy Young award and hasn't struck out fewer than 11 batters per nine innings since 2017. All pitchers come with a degree of risk of injury or regression and Snell is no different, but starting pitchers are the one demographic where you just have to place your bets and hope for the best. In Snell's case, his presence at the top of the Padres' rotation, given how good his stuff is, will be sorely missed.

Josh Hader moving on may be a blessing in disguise for San Diego

This is a weird one because, again, Josh Hader is an absolute hammer out of the bullpen. Hader is on an historic pace when it comes to strikeouts for a reliever, and he has a 2.50 ERA and 2.73 FIP over the course of his seven-year career. On the surface, letting a guy who is THAT good go should be firmly in the "will be missed" category, but the situation isn't that simple.

Where things get tricky is that Hader is still a reliever, no matter how good he is, and the Astros had to give Hader a five-year, $95 million deal to bring him into the fold, which is a massive investment in a single bullpen arm. Letting Hader go get paid in Houston allowed the Padres to build a much deeper bullpen with the additions of Yuki Matsui, Wandy Peralta and Woo-Suk Go, while shifting Robert Suarez into a more prominent role. No single one of those guys is as good as Hader, but the Padres' bullpen may end up being better overall. The team protected against the risk that Hader gets hurt (again, he is still a reliever and has that risk), completely torpedoing the bullpen's depth in the process.