If the voting for the National League Rookie of the Year were held today, the choice would probably come down to two players who have quickly developed an odd rivalry, the Padres' Chris Paddack and the Mets' Pete Alonso. Paddack leads all rookie pitchers in WAR, and Alonso leads all position players.
But it seems likely this particular ballot showdown will be interrupted by that modern-day phenomenon known as an innings count -- and Paddack will be pulled off the field. And if the Padres aren't careful in their plans, they could veer into a situation that haunts the Nationals and Stephen Strasburg to this day.
Paddack is 23 years old, and although he was drafted in 2015, he has never pitched more than 90 innings in any professional season. He required Tommy John surgery early in the 2016 season, missed all of 2017, and then worked 52 1/3 innings in Class A last year before adding another 37 2/3 innings in Double-A.
Including his start against the Dodgers on Tuesday night, he has already accumulated 45 1/3 innings this year, with incredible success -- just 23 hits allowed, 11 walks and 49 strikeouts, with a 1.99 ERA.
But the Padres fully intend to protect him, and he's already used an enormous portion of the innings they might have planned for him. When handling young pitchers, teams will typically increase innings by 40 or so a year. The Padres could expand that a little to 50, and Paddack's unusual efficiency could be a factor, as well: his average of 15.4 pitches per inning ranks 16th among all qualified starters in the big leagues.
There is no universally accepted formula for how situations like this should be handled, no agreement on whether limiting innings is wholly effective, because every pitcher is different -- with different mechanics, different pitch history, and differing physiologies. The Nationals worked diligently to keep Strasburg healthy, famously sacrificing his participation in the 2012 postseason, and he blew out anyway.
Even if the Padres worked at the edges of industry norms, Paddack probably wouldn't extend much beyond 140 innings or so. That means the Padres' best starter, and one of the best starters in the NL, could have something in the range of 90 to 100 innings remaining. That's about 16 starts of about six innings, among San Diego's remaining 120 games.
One theoretical option for the Padres is to shut down Paddack for an extended stretch now, and save the innings for the second half, but this is not a route teams have taken in situations like this; there is no indication San Diego is considering it. The Padres could move him to a well-defined relief role in the next couple of months, restricting his innings in this way, before adding him to the rotation later in the year -- a little like how the Dodgers handled Walker Buehler last year. They could simply space out his work, skipping him in the rotation repeatedly or limiting him to four or five innings per start.
"It's fair to say that [the standings] will have an impact," Padres skipper Andy Green said after Tuesday night's loss to the Dodgers about managing Paddack's workload. "We want to win. I work for a general manager and an ownership group that want to win. And recognize pretty easily that Chris has been a big part in helping us win games. At the same time, we want to win for 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023. And we're not going to cash in our chips just to get a few extra innings this year."
For the Padres, this issue is not limited to Paddack. They also have to monitor the workload of Joey Lucchesi, Matt Strahm and others. San Diego appears to have a shot to make the playoffs for the first time since 2006, and sooner rather than later the Padres could probably use rotation help -- perhaps free agent Dallas Keuchel, or a trade for the Jays' Marcus Stroman, the Giants' Madison Bumgarner or the Indians' Trevor Bauer. They have the firepower to be aggressive, armed with what is roundly regarded as baseball's best and deepest farm system.
But whatever they do with Paddack, they need to be decisive, and they need to work to rescue him from the vortex Strasburg fell into in 2012. The Nationals were intent on protecting Strasburg and when he reached his prescribed limit of innings, they shut him down -- losing their most dominant pitcher for the most important games of the year.
That episode might have also damaged Strasburg's standing with his peers, because other players wondered why he would go along with the shutdown; they wondered why he didn't simply demand to pitch.
Nationals GM Mike Rizzo made the decision to hold out Strasburg -- Rizzo could not have been more transparent about that, from the start of that season to its bitter end -- but the industry perception of the pitcher has forever been shaped by how that played out.
Paddack is hypercompetitive and will undoubtedly want to pitch as much as he can. As the Padres aim to keep a talented pitcher healthy into the future and protect him from his own instincts, they must also be cognizant that one way or the other, he needs to be available for at least some work in September and October. They don't want Paddack merely sitting and watching what would be the most important games of the season -- and other players watching Paddack as he sits and watches.
ESPN's Alden Gonzalez contributed to this column.