Michael King sat on the stage in the Petco Park auditorium last December and explained why he was coming back to San Diego. Now he is back in the middle of a season that has turned into a test of whether the Padres can keep winning long enough to avoid looking ahead.
The Padres swept the Atlanta Braves on Monday at Petco Park, their first three-game winning streak in more than a month, and they now have 17 games left before the All-Star break, seven of them against the Dodgers. That is why Dodgers Vs Padres is the search phrase now: the next stretch is loaded, and it lands right on top of a trade deadline that will come into focus only after the games are played.
King said he liked his time in Southern California and trusted A.J. Preller to keep the Padres in a position to win. He also said he had been with the club for three years and had never been able to get into Preller’s head, adding that he believed the front office would know where things stood when the time came. For now, the standings and the schedule matter more than the speculation around the deadline.
The Padres have spent the season proving how quickly a good start can turn complicated. They opened 31-20, then went more than two weeks without winning back-to-back games and came close to two months between winning consecutive series. Monday’s sweep mattered because it interrupted that drift and gave the club something steadier to carry into the hardest part of the calendar.
The offense has helped. From the end of April through June 7, the Padres had the worst OPS in the majors at.594. Over the last 15 games, that number climbed to.717. Fernando Tatis Jr. was hitting.324/.370/.500 during an 18-game on-base streak, Manny Machado had two game-winning hits in the last week and led the Padres with 14 homers, and his.835 OPS over his last 15 games pointed to a lineup that is starting to look more like itself.
Even so, the cleanest storyline is not the whole one. Craig Stammen said the trade deadline was the last thing on his mind at the start of the homestand, and that is the right public posture for a club trying to win today. But the Padres also know their rotation may need help unless Nick Pivetta or Joe Musgrove returns in time to change the equation. That is the friction they cannot quite escape: the next 17 games include seven against the Dodgers, and every win or loss in that run will shape how loudly the deadline is heard afterward.
Jackson Merrill and Xander Bogaerts have not carried the offense at the same level, with OPS marks of.699 and.698 since June 8, but the club does not need a perfect lineup to keep moving. It needs enough offense, enough pitching, and enough calm to survive the stretch. After the Dodgers, the Padres still have the Cubs, then a homestand against the Diamondbacks and the Blue Jays, and only then does the trade deadline stop being background noise and become the next thing that can change the season.
