It\u2019s official. Nick Pivetta will start for the San Diego Padres this Thursday. They\u2019ll put up their best fight on Opening Day against fearsome lefty Tarik Skubal and the Detroit Tigers as they seek to return to the postseason for the third year in a row.<\/p>\n
Pivetta will be the fourth starting pitcher in as many years to take the mound for San Diego\u2019s Opening Day.<\/p>\n
Pivetta will pitch on March 26 for the Friars after having the best season of his career last year. Pivetta and Padres fans were waiting for manager Craig Stammen to announce the Opening Day starter. If Pivetta can retain anything from last year, the starting rotation will be a lot closer to elite than it is now.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s obviously upside, tremendously so, but it\u2019s shaky. Pivetta has never had an ERA below 4.00 until last year\u2019s 2.87 mark. Michael King and Joe Musgrove are coming back from injury, and the back end of the rotation looks a little messy.<\/p>\n
Pivetta was a workhorse last year. He pitched 181 \u2154 innings and almost topped 200 strikeouts across 31 starts.<\/p>\n
The Padres desperately needed him then and they may need him even more now.<\/p>\n
Concerning news out of camp<\/p>\n
A few weeks ago, Pivetta missed a start in Spring Training due to arm fatigue. Immediately questions of depth sprang up and San Diego fans everywhere lost their collective minds.<\/p>\n
But then he started against the Cleveland Guardians with his fastball sitting around 94-96 mph and all was well again.<\/p>\n
The hope is that even if Pivetta isn\u2019t as much of a surprise ace pitcher as he turned out to be last season, he\u2019ll still be serviceable and eat innings this season. There\u2019s plenty of underlying metrics to suggest the turnaround he had will continue to be the case, but nothing will be sure until it\u2019s proved on the mound this season.<\/p>\n
However Pivetta\u2019s season shakes out, the Friar Faithful can be excited to watch him duel it out against one of the best pitchers on the planet this Thursday. He has the stuff to dominate this Tigers lineup. And this Padres lineup has the ability to take Skubal out.<\/p>\n
With Opening Day finally here, one thing\u2019s certain: we\u2019ll all be cheering for a San Diego win Thursday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s official. Nick Pivetta will start for the San Diego Padres this Thursday. They\u2019ll put up their best…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":639618,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2407],"tags":[5,4,43,137,18,78960,79510,2230,4339,4338],"class_list":{"0":"post-639617","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego-padres","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-mlb","10":"tag-padres","11":"tag-san-diego","12":"tag-san-diego-padres","13":"tag-san-diego-padres-analysis","14":"tag-san-diego-padres-roster","15":"tag-san-diego-padres-news","16":"tag-sandiego","17":"tag-sandiegopadres"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116280672522945888","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=639617"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639617\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/639618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=639617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=639617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=639617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}