San Diego Padres nearing deal to acquire Max Scherzer, per report

While the San Diego Padres aren’t quite as close to the NL West division lead as they would like, they do find themselves in pretty decent shape. They have a healthy five game lead for the second wild card spot as of today and feature one of the most exciting young lineups in the entire league.

However, their starting pitching this year has only been middling which has hurt their ability to make up ground in the division against the Dodgers and Giants. Yu Darvish and Joe Musgrove have done well, but guys like Chris Paddack and Blake Snell have underperformed what the team was looking for out of them and none of their young arms have been able to latch on to a spot in the rotation.

Now, it looks like they could be adding one of the biggest names on the trade market.

No one...I repeat....no one can accuse the Padres of not trying to go for it while they have guys like Manny Machado and Fernando Tatis Jr. in the fold. That much is certain. If you are looking to bolster your rotation, you can’t do much better than grabbing one of the best pitchers of this generation (albeit not quite at his peak) in Max Scherzer. If anything, he will at least scare enough lineups into submission to get some wins San Diego otherwise wouldn’t.

While we don’t know the return for Washington just yet (in fact, we don’t know for sure if this is a done deal but multiple reports have things as “close”), the connection with San Diego makes a ton of sense. Not only are the Padres in the market for a starter, but Scherzer had indicated that he would prefer to be traded to a west coast team if he were to be traded. Sometimes, things just line up.

We will update this story as it develops.