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The Padres added some sorely needed starting pitching on deadline day, bringing in left-hander Robbie Ray from the Giants in exchange for a pair of prospects, right-hander Miguel Mendez and shortstop Joniel Hernandez. Ray, 34, has put up a 3.08 ERA and a 4.36 FIP across 21 starts in 2026, with 15 homers allowed, 57 walks, and 107 strikeouts over 122 2/3 innings. In 11 Double-A starts this year, Mendez has a 4.93 ERA but a 3.21 FIP with more than a strikeout per game. He’s yet to allow a home run in 2026. Hernandez signed out of Cuba back in January as an international free agent and, at age 17, is running a .927 OPS in the Dominican Summer League.

The 2021 AL Cy Young winner is not the only coveted starter heading to San Diego. In addition to Ray, the Padres also acquired right-hander Casey Mize from the Tigers just minutes before the 6 PM ET deadline. (We’ll cover the Mize trade in a separate post.)

San Diego spent the first two months of the season pleasing most of the baseball world by sticking its thumbs in the eyes of the playground’s big dog, the Los Angeles Dodgers. Wresting first place for spells in the early going, the Padres hit their high-water mark on May 18, when they stood at 29-18 with a half-game lead earned by besting the Dodgers in the opener of a three-game series. Los Angeles took the final two games, though, and the Padres haven’t been serious threats for the NL West since then. After dropping 10 of 11 games in late May, they’ve been preoccupied just trying to keep above the .500 mark. But just as things looked their bleakest, the Friars turned things around. Having won eight of their last nine games, the Padres entered Monday just a game behind both the Diamondbacks and Phillies for the final wild card spot, quieting any whispers that they’d be sellers at the deadline.

So, what happened? The offense hasn’t exactly been enthralling, but it has at least been adequate in recent months, with a 103 wRC+, enough to place the Padres firmly toward the top of the middling offenses. That actually represents an improvement from the early part of the season; even when they were in first place, they were near the bottom of the league in scoring. The bullpen — anchored by Mason Miller, Adrian Morejon, and Bradgley Rodriguez — has remained in the elite tier. Where the Padres have struggled immensely is in the rotation, with the starting pitching combining for a 4.87 ERA and ranking 29th in FIP, WAR, and xERA since the team’s last day in first place. San Diego’s starters are not even eating innings effectively; their total of 275 1/3 innings over this span is the fewest in baseball, and that’s not just due to openers. The non-Michael King members of the rotation have frequently failed to complete three innings, whether at the start of a game or as the bulk guy.

Internal reinforcements might be on the way, but the Padres weren’t in a position to wait given they’re one of six teams currently fighting for the final two wild card spots. Nick Pivetta (out most of the season with elbow pain) and Joe Musgrove (still working back from Tommy John surgery) have thrown bullpen sessions, but the team can’t count on them as anything more than question marks until they’re back in the rotation and pitching effectively. Lucas Giolito is in the same boat.

So getting a pitcher is a real no-brainer, and Robbie Ray is a reasonable pitcher to target. The Padres these days are quite vocal about wanting to keep the payroll down, and Ray isn’t a big hit to the pocketbook, with the Giants paying $4 million, about half his remaining salary for 2026. He’s in the last year of the five-year, $115 million contract he originally signed with the Mariners after the 2021 season.

Ray’s 3.08 ERA is solid, but as is so frequently the case, the ERA obscures part of the story. During the peak of his career, let’s say 2017-2021, he was a pitcher who missed bats, and of the 76 pitchers with 500 innings pitched over that span, he had the fourth-lowest contact rate.

He is not that guy anymore. He used to strikeout 12 batters per nine, but that was down to nine last year and just under eight in 2026. He still walks too many batters, allowing the most in the National League in 2025 and the second most this season. While he always walked more than one would like at his peak, it was a lot more palatable when he gave up a lot fewer balls in play. Ray’s FIP of 4.43 is really unimpressive for Oracle Park in 2026. Don’t look to xERA for succor, as he’s at 4.43 there, so it’s not as if he’s defying FIP by allowing a lot of weak contact. His fastball hasn’t lost velocity, but his breaking balls simply don’t fool hitters like they used to, nor does his revived sinker keep balls on the ground as reliably as it has in the past.

Of the two players sent to San Francisco, Miguel Mendez is by far the closer of the two to making an impact in the majors. As noted by our very own Brendan Gawlowski when ranking Mendez as San Diego’s third-best prospect back in April, Mendez is a rather polarizing player in the scouting community. It’s not hard to see why, as he’s a very raw, slender pitcher with command issues who can hit triple-digits on the radar gun. Sometimes these guys work out spectacularly, sometimes you see them walk eight batters a game at Triple-A and you never hear of them again, and sometimes the Marlins acquire them and they spend the next six years mostly injured. Mendez is no guarantee — if he were, the Giants wouldn’t have gotten him for two months of Robbie Ray — but he’s the type of pitcher a rebuilding team should have around. I’m not quite sure if the Giants realize it yet, but they are a rebuilding team now.

It’s very early in Joniel Hernandez’s career, so any arrival date or role (or ZiPS projections) is still quite a ways off. A toolsy shortstop with a lot of speed, he ranked 21st on the aforementioned Padres Top 25 Prospects list this spring. When I talked with Brendan this afternoon, he was quite happy with the progress Hernandez has made in the power department, and he’s going to have his FV bumped to a 40+. The general feeling around Hernandez is that he has an excellent shot to stick at shortstop, but as always, you may want to check back in on that in a year or two as he progresses through the low minors.

All in all, I think this is a pretty solid return for the Giants.

Is this trade a success for the Padres? I’m going to chicken out a bit and answer both yes and no. If San Diego is hoping for Ray to be another ace-level pitcher to go along with King, and to a lesser extent Mize, I think more likely than not, the club will be disappointed with the results. But if the Padres see their new lefty as a dependable mid-rotation pitcher who will keep them in games and turn things over to their excellent bullpen in the seventh, I think they’ll be quite happy when all is said and done. Sure, Mendez and Hernandez might give some people cause for serious second-guessing come 2029 or 2030, but the Padres have to worry about 2026 right now, and they still have yet to get past the NLCS in the 21st century.