Put on your rose colored glasses

After another win for the Padres last night, it struck me that the young team has been playing pretty good of late. But since I never trust my feelings on statements such as that, I dug into the numbers to see if they support that conclusion. Using MLB's sortable stats, I compared the Pads stats over the last 30 days to their results based on the entire season.

16-12 over the last 30 days, who woulda thunk it? Their runs scored equals their runs allowed, so you would expect them to go 14-14, but even still, .500 ball, even for a month, is a relief after these last two seasons!

Offensive stats comparison:
Season Last 30
AVG .240 .277
OBP .317 .352
SLG .382 .437

They have the second best OBP in the national league over the last 30 days, versus 14th for the season. Their SLG is up to 6th versus 15th on the season. Not too bad. Runs per game is 3.85 on the season, but 4.64 in the last 30 days, and they played 17 of the 28 games at home during that time frame as well. I can't factor that in, but they are well above average offensively for these last 30 days. (And I don't want to hear anything about sample sizes, just keep those rose colored glasses in place)

Pitching Stats comparison:

Season Last 30
OBA .337 .342
SLG .420 .396
WHIP 1.42 1.45
K/9 7.2 7.0
BB/9 3.7 4.1

Runs per game did drop for the last 30 days to 4.6 per game, versus 5.0 for the season, but still a below average staff across the board. I would guess the 17 home games helped the SLG drop. The strikeout and walk rates are still below average over the last 30 days, with the K rate decreasing versus the season rate. Not the prettiest picture here. I did not take the time to break it down between starters and the pen, and you can come to your own anecdotal conclusions there, but it really doesn't matter. The 2010 Padres will go as their pitching takes them, and they have a lot of work to do on the staff.

But, they did add a number of young arms the last couple of months, and will have some room to spend if the budget stays in the $40M range. (Rose colored glasses people!) If some of these arms can get plugged into the rotation next year (Gallagher, Poreda), at the very least we will have an exciting, young team with a decent chance at .500 ball. I'd take that. They can only go up, so we've got that going for us.