The 2022 season is over for the San Diego Padres. They lost all three games in Philadelphia to drop the NLCS to the Phillies, four games to one. All-Star closer Josh Hader was not used.
Hader worked his way back to being a human cheat code and struck out the last eight batters he faced. He was fresh for Game 5 and the Padres had a lead in the eighth inning, but setup man Robert Suarez gave up the home run to Bryce Harper that would prove to be the game-winner.
Harper is left-handed, of course, and so is Hader. The lefty-lefty matchup is a popular one late in games. Harper’s splits suggest the Padres would have been better suited to go with a Southpaw than Suarez. His regular-season numbers:
- Harper vs. RHP: .300/.371/.553
- Harper vs. LHP: .256/.348/.427
That’s fairly drastic. Harper came to the plate with no outs and a runner on first in the eighth. Padres manager Bob Melvin said they were planning on using Hader for a four-out save.
“We were going to look for four outs,” Melvin said. “We were trying to split it up with he and Suarez. But, look, we’ve got a lot of confidence in Suarez, came in and did a great job the inning before. We just fell a little bit short there.”
“He wasn’t even ready at that point,” Melvin said of Hader possibly facing Harper. “We would have tried to get through the inning with him. At that point in time, I had confidence in Suarez.”
Melvin also correctly pointed out that Suarez had been incredibly tough on lefties this season. In fact, he hadn’t allowed a home run to a left-handed hitter all year. He held lefties to a .181 batting average and .250 slugging percentage.
The reality of sports is that sometimes things just don’t go as planned. The Padres thought they had things set up well to get through the game and force a Game 6 back in San Diego. Bryce Harper had other plans. Still, it has to sting that right when Hader fully locked in as his old self, he didn’t see action in his team’s last three games.