With the start of spring training just over a week away, new manager Craig Stammen is squarely in the spotlight. He’s going to be running his first camp as a rookie, and former GM Jim Bowden made some interesting points about this in his piece in The Athletic, including the fact that the former San Diego Padres reliever will be managing a couple of ex-teammates in third baseman Manny Machado and second baseman Jake Cronenworth.
It’s going to be a fascinating chemistry experiment, but there’s more to it than that. Stammen will also have a pitching coach, Ruben Niebla, who vied for the manager’s job after successfully steering the Padres pitching staff for the last few seasons.
Stammen, meanwhile, hasn’t been on the field for quite a while, and it was GM A.J. Preller who actually talked the former reliever into taking the job after interviewing several other candidates. No one really knows if this is going to be a source of friction, especially after all the revelations from former manager Mike Shildt about some of the job problems he was up against before he suddenly “retired.”
Personalities aside, Stammen will face a broader challenge as a rookie manager. He’ll still have the strong bullpen that the Padres rode to a playoff berth last year, although the Opening Day status of key reliever Jason Adam may be in doubt after Adam’s surgery to repair a torn quad.
But Stammen will also be trying to win with a paper-thin rotation and a team that suffered a lot of key losses in free agency. The Padres have two key starters, Michael King and Joe Musgrove, coming off of serious injuries, and erstwhile ace Nick Pivetta has been on and off the trade block for a while now.
There are also offensive questions with this team. The Chicago Cubs completely shut down the Padres lineup during the Wild Card Series, and the lack of production for star outfielder Fernando Tatis Jr. was particularly noticeable as San Diego scored just five runs in three games.
Can Stammen fix all this? Most projections have the Padres around the. .500 mark going into this season, and if San Diego doesn’t start strong, the new manager will almost immediately be on the hot seat.
Seeing how Stammen runs his first camp will provide clues but no real answers. The one good piece of news for the Padres in recent weeks is that the lawsuit between the Seidler family has finally been resolved, which means the impending sale of the team should be accelerated, although it remains to be seen if Preller can make more actually baseball moves to help Stammen out.