What’s the saying for when an avalanche of negatives starts to consume a team?
When one thing goes bad, it all goes bad?
Maybe. If it is, it would be an apt description for the plunging Padres, who followed losing three of four to the NL-worst Diamondbacks by getting swept by the Rockies.
Even if, by some chance, there was a momentary buoying of spirits Monday when the team signed Jake Arrieta — maybe, they thought, he could help them piece it together through this rough stretch — it evaporated by Wednesday as Arrieta went down with an injury after 3 ⅓ innings.
“I’d be very surprised if we didn’t make the playoffs,” pitcher Joe Musgrove said last week.
But what a difference a week can make. In the last seven days, the Padres’ odds to make the playoffs, per Fangraphs, have gone down by 44.1 percent. It raises the question, just how bad can the Padres be in the month of August and still make the playoffs?
History of NL Wild Card teams says not this bad.
Since MLB opened the field to two wild cards from each league in 2012, only three teams have earned a wild-card berth with a losing record in August.
Generally speaking, when looking at past wild-card teams representing the NL, the month of August is the time to make a push.
In the last decade, excluding the truncated season last year, the average number of wins for an NL wild-card team is a notch above 15. There have been three teams that hit 19 wins. A handful more have been around 18.
The Padres, projecting forward from their current 7-9 mark, are on pace to win 11. No team has ever made the playoffs as a wild card with fewer than 11.
The 2016 Giants, who finished the year winning the World Series, went 11-16 in August. However, that club benefited from being chased by the Cardinals, who had a pedestrian 14-13 month of August.
The Padres appear to have no such luck with the Reds this time around. So far, Cincinnati is 10-7 this month and has been 26-17 since July.
“The standings are what they are. But the standings will be different a month and a half from now,” Wil Myers said Wednesday after the Padres lost 7-5 to the Rockies. “So you can focus on who is behind you and ahead of you … but at the end of the day you always have to expect the unexpected.”
Myers is right and wrong. It’s true the standings change and the position of playoff spots change in the final month of the year.
But, in the last decade, it has become a general rule that the teams in the top two wild-card spots at the end of August go on to make the playoffs — 81 percent since 2012. Only three teams have made the playoffs in the NL while starting the final month of the year outside the playoff picture.
The Brewers in 2019 made the playoffs as a wild card after starting September four games behind the Cubs for the second spot. The Rockies did the same in 2018 from three games back.
But the rarity of those feats — where the Brewers had to go 20-7 in September and the Rockies went 19-9 — is not something the Padres can rely on right now. Not with the starting pitching as precarious as it is. And not with the way the offense has been so streaky.
While Myers is right the standings change, where a team finds itself at the end of August seems to matter. And the Padres are trending in the direction of being on the outside looking in by month’s end.
Their lead over the Reds is down to a game and a half. It was four games just a week ago.
So, to answer the original question, the Padres can’t afford to be this bad in the month of August. It is not a forgiving month.
