The San Diego Padres have been baseball’s most stable team on the field over the last eight years. In each of those seasons, the club’s winning percentage has stayed stuck in the tight window between .420 and .475—nowhere near good enough to contend for the postseason, yet not quite bad enough to be truly terrible. This is, maybe, baseball’s best impression of purgatory. It’s not hell. It’s just an awfully unpleasant waiting period. Well, that’s what a rebuild is, you might say. But look at it this way: San Diego has posted baseball’s smallest standard deviation in win total since 2011, at just 4.
By Signing Manny Machado, Padres Have Foundation to Get Rebuild Off the Ground
