Good morning,

That hurt. For one night, at least. And maybe for a long time.

“Sorry about it,” Nationals manager Dave Martinez said. “They’re a Nat, right?  I mean, that’s how the game goes. They got a pretty good player in the trade. We got really good players in the trade. So it worked out for us. I mean, these guys are the cornerstones of our organization right now. They’re young. They’re full of energy. As you can see, they love to play the game.”

In his first major league game at Petco Park, James Wood was all that. CJ Abrams too.

They both had three hits and scored three runs. Wood had four RBIs, as well, three of them on a home run in the eighth inning that all but sealed the Nationals’ victory.

The home run also prompted this bit of trolling from the Nationals’ social media department.

You can read in my game story (here) about how the teams arrived at the deceivingly close 10-6 final margin.

Abrams, Wood and MacKenzie Gore (who will start tomorrow) coming to San Diego for this series had many Padres fans and some inside the organization wondering what might have been.

Those three players plus Robert Hassell III and pitcher Jarlin Susana comprised the haul of prospects and young major leaguers the Padres sent to Washington for Juan Soto and Josh Bell at the trade deadline in 2022.

Wood made his MLB debut last season and is batting .284 with a .948 OPS and 22 home runs this season. Abrams was one of two Nationals’ All-Stars in 2024 and is batting .284 with an .843 OPS this season. Gore leads the National League in strikeouts and ranks 12th with a 3.19 ERA. (No Padres player has an OPS as high as Wood’s, and Manny Machado is the only one with a higher OPS than Abrams’. No Padres pitcher who has made more than four starts has an ERA as low as Gore’s.)

Hassell debuted last month before being optioned back to Triple-A. Susana, who throws 100 mph, is on the injured list.

Trades are fun to relitigate from time to time. And this provides such an occasion.

It is easy to look at what the 22-year-old Wood, 24-year-old Abrams and 26-year-old Gore are doing and lament how they could help the Padres now and for years to come.

There is, actually, no denying they would help.

But that is too easy.

History may judge that the Padres lost the trade. However, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have made the trade.

To say that would be overlooking the fact Soto did help the Padres win two playoff series in 2022 and could have/should have been much more than he was during his time in San Diego.

The Padres felt they had a team that, with Soto, could seriously contend for a championship. So they went for it.

Tom Krasovic wrote (here) about this the other day.

There is also the matter of fact that Soto was flipped for Michael King, Randy Vásquez, Kyle Higashioka, Jhony Brito and Drew Thorpe. It was Thorpe who was the lynchpin in the trade for Dylan Cease. The Padres do not win 93 games last year without those players.

Sending Soto to the Yankees in December 2023 was perhaps A.J. Preller’s best trade since the swindle of the White Sox for a 16-year-old Fernando Tatis Jr.

You can read Jeff Sanders’ pregame notebook (here) from yesterday afternoon revisiting the trade through the eyes of Jackson Merrill, Preller and Martinez.

Yeah, but …

Mike Shildt was not wrong.

“The scoreboard is the ultimate lens,” the Padres manager said after last night’s game. “But it’s not absolute — the way I look at the game, at least. Our at-bat quality was fantastic throughout the game. If you look at the quality of at-bats and the hard hits throughout the game, you would say, ‘What else are you going to do?’ I mean, that’s  about all I can say.”

The Padres put 12 balls in play at 100 mph or greater. That was tied for their second most this season and tied for their most outside of Coors Field. (They had 14 balls with an exit velocity of 100-plus in their 24-0 victory over the Rockies on May 10.)

They also hit three home runs, which is the most they have hit in a game since May 25 and tied for their most this season outside of the five they hit on May 10 in Denver.

They struck out just three times and walked three times.

But they lost.

And should they keep doing so at the rate they have been, last night probably won’t be the last time this season the Padres are left to ponder what might have been.

They are 7-12 since June 4. If they continue at that rate for long, they will be .500 by the All-Star break and likely make Preller perpetrate a different kind of trade deadline.

We put things in context all the time in this space.

So we should remember the Nationals have a more explosive and productive offense than the Padres.

While many of their offensive numbers are similar, the Nationals are ranked higher in almost every category.

Last night was the 11th game in which they scored nine or more runs. The Padres have done that five times.

But it is impossible to get around the fact the the Nationals entered last night’s game having lost 13 of their previous 15. They were swept by the Marlins last weekend and then lost three of four to the Rockies before going to Los Angeles and dropping two of three to the Dodgers.

We have established that the Nationals have some talent. But when you play a team is important, and the Nationals are not the kind of team right now that should come in and win a series against the Padres.

That is, if the Padres don’t want to be left wondering.

Tidbits

  • Read Jeff Sanders’ story (here) on the lawsuit filed by Tatis yesterday seeking to void the future-earnings contract he signed with a company while in the minor leagues.
  • Michael King played catch out to 105 feet yesterday. Jeff wrote about that in the notebook referenced earlier in the newsletter. There remains no timeline for King’s return, but yesterday seemed like a significant advancement. Also mentioned in Jeff’s notebook is that Yu Darvish will face hitters in some capacity (either a simulated game or rehab start) Wednesday.
  • Bryan Hoeing made his season debut after being sidelined since the start of spring training with a shoulder injury. Hoeing replaced Wandy Peralta with two out and two on in the sixth inning and stranded both runners. He then worked a scoreless seventh.
  • Machado’s home run in the fourth inning was the 355th of his career, tying him with Greg Vaugh for 93rd all-time. Next up is Joey Votto at 356. The homer also put Machado 10 hits away from 2,000.
  • Gavin Sheets went 2-for-4, extending his career-high on-base streak to 14 games. He is batting .327 with a .383 on-base percentage during the streak.
  • One of Sheets’ hits was against left-hander Mitchell Parker. Sheets has five hits in his past 14 at-bats against lefties after having two hits in his previous 23 at-bats against them. He is batting .219 against lefties this season.
  • Luis Arraez went 1-for-4 to extend his hitting streak to 10 games. He is batting .311 (14-for-45) during the streak.
  • Merrill was 2-for-4 with a walk and is batting .360 (9-for-25) with a .452 OBP during a seven-game hitting streak.
  • Of the seven balls Merrill has put in play in his two games since coming off the concussion injured list, five have had an exit velocity of at least 100.4 mph.
  • Tatis, who ended a career-high drought of 73 plate appearances without a home run on Saturday, has now homered two times in his past 10 plate appearances. His 435-foot homer last night was his longest of the season and the longest by a Padres player at Petco Park in 2025.
  • Jake Cronenworth has three hits in his past nine at-bats against lefties. He was 1-for-2 with a walk against Parker last night and is batting .208 against left-handers for the season. His home run off Parker was his first against a left-hander since the second game of the season.
  • The 15 hits by the Nationals were tied for the most Padres pitchers have allowed in a game this season. (The other time they allowed 15 was May 9 at Colorado.)

Another big loss

For the second time this season, there were flowers on the space a few seats down from mine in the press box.

The world lost a good man on Saturday when Scott Miller passed away after a battle with cancer.

Most of you know we lost Union-Tribune columnist Bryce Miller to cancer in March.

Bryce and Scott were not related. What they had in common was a surname, being genuinely nice human beings and an overlapping fight against cancer that took both of them too soon.

Their seats were next to each other in the Petco Park press box. It is unfathomable that they are both gone.

Scott was incredibly well liked. He was universally incredibly well liked. And in a business where that is rare. Baseball writers are not the most likeable people.

Many people around the game knew him better than I did. Scott covered MLB for three decades. He wrote two books, including  Skipper: Why Baseball Managers Matter and Always Will, which was published just last month.

What I can say is that I met Scott in the early 1990s before he was a baseball writer — both he and his wife, Kim, who was a sportswriter before she found something better to do. From the moment I met him to the last time I saw him, during spring training, he was only gracious.

A truly upbeat, caring, humble man.

He will be missed.

All right, that’s it for me.

Talk to you tomorrow.

P.S. To answer the questions of many who expressed concern at my absence over the weekend, I took time away for good reason.

I had parties to attend that I could not and would not miss, thrown in honor of a couple of my favorite people.

The first was for a friend who turned 80. Fred is old enough and experienced enough and has failed enough and succeeded enough that he is only genuine.

The second party was for my granddaughter, who turned 5. Evelyn is young enough to have not been disappointed by much of anything and is loved so fully that she is only genuine.