Padres address weakness, add 2 starting pitchers

The San Diego Padres started Spring Training by addressing their lack of starting pitching depth.

Hey there! Here’s a thing I wrote yesterday:

The Padres might be hamstrung by Joe Musgrove’s injury or Jay Groome’s gambling habit or the $12.2M they are still paying to Eric Hosmer, but nobody will be thinking of that when the bullpen is being asked to save the day in back-to-back games each week. This is the thing, even more than the catching spot, that is likely to sink the team’s playoff chances in 2025.

And, wouldn’t you know it, A.J. Preller reads Bandwagon Beach! Because he immediately picked up the phone and added two (maybe three?) new starting pitchers to the rotation to make the depth less worrisome.

Let’s go through the new guys, one-by-one…

Nick Pivetta

Nick Pivetta signed a 4-year, $55M deal with the San Diego Padres yesterday. The deal pays him little in 2025 ($4M in cash, but he also got a $3M signing bonus) but the numbers jump after that to $19M, $14M and $18M. He has opt-outs after the 2026 and 2027 seasons, should he want to jump back into free agency.

Pivetta has never made an all-star team and has never received any votes for year-end awards, but that’s fine. What the Padres needed was depth and competence, and Pivetta helps with both.

To start, he has thrown over 140 innings in each of the last four seasons. He is usually a starter, but spent some time in the Boston Red Sox bullpen in 2023. Just having that amount of innings and that kind of flexibility added to this group is much-needed.

If we’re still going off yesterday’s assumption that each WAR is worth about $8M on the open market, and Pivetta is projected to continue being a roughly 2 WAR player (at least this season), this feels like good value for A.J. Preller and the Padres.

A quick look at his StatCast numbers show that his pitches move a ton (thanks to a high spin rate) and he has great control, leading to almost 5 strikeouts per every walk allowed.

Oh, also, he might be an Ohtani killer:

Kyle Hart

Do not look at Kyle Hart’s StatCast numbers. His previous MLB journey ended with a cup of a coffee on the 2020 Boston Red Sox. He threw 11 awful innings and was quickly demoted.

In five college seasons, Hart pitched to a 2.87 ERA. In seven minor league seasons, his combined ERA is 3.72. But neither of those are the reasons that A.J. Preller signed him.

A.J. Preller likes to find guys that MLB chewed up and spit out, who then find new life playing baseball in another country. The easiest one to remember is Nick Martinez, who was mediocre for the Texas Rangers before remaking himself in Japan.

Kyle Hart joined the Korean Baseball Organization last year and went 13-3 with a 2.69 ERA in 157 innings. What’s the exchange rate for that in MLB? I guess we’ll find out.

The Padres signed him to a one-year deal with a club option for 2026, in case it turns out those KBO numbers were a sign of future MLB success.

Stephen Kolek?

You might remember Stephen Kolek as something of a human gascan on the Padres last season. He threw 46.2 innings out of the bullpen and finished with an ERA of 5.21. The assumption was that he would battle in Spring Training for one of the last spots in the San Diego bullpen…

Or not!

It would appear that Kolek’s best chance to make the team might be as a long reliever and spot starter. He was an okay starter in college and worse than that in the minors before being converted to a relief pitcher.

The StatCast numbers on Kolek says that hitters have a hard time making good contact against him, potentially making him a solid groundball pitcher. Maybe he’s Luis Perdomo? There’s value in that!

We’ll see if the stretching out process leads to less velocity, more or less movement and what happens if and when he tops 100 innings pitched for the first time in three years.

Stupid aside: Stephen has an older brother named Tyler Kolek, who was the #2 overall pick in the 2014 MLB Draft. That draft is famous because neither of the top 2 picks ever made the majors. These Kolek brothers are, somehow, unrelated to the Tyler Kolek currently playing on the New York Knicks.