Spring training is where teams pretend their plans are neat and linear. The Padres’ pitching plan already isn’t — and Ruben Niebla basically laid out why.
For starters, the top of the rotation is treated like it’s spoken for: Nick Pivetta, Michael King, and Joe Musgrove are the trio everyone in camp is building around. That’s the comforting part. The uncomfortable part is everything behind it — because the Padres have “so many arms, so few spots,” and a lot of them come with baggage.
Padres’ Ruben Niebla is juggling a tricky rotation workload plan with real roster fallout
Niebla ran through the back-end candidates — Triston McKenzie, Walker Buehler, Marco Gonzales, Germán Márquez, JP Sears, and Matt Waldron — and also noted Randy Vásquez is competing too, with what reads like an inside track for the No.