📰 NEWS FLASH: The Padres Keep Shopping for Certainty While One Answer Keeps Getting Louder Internally ⚡ .NL

For years, the Padres have treated certainty as something you buy.

Big contracts. Veteran arms. Short-term fixes meant to stabilize a rotation that never quite feels settled. But while the front office keeps scanning the market, something uncomfortable is happening closer to home.

Miguel Mendez is no longer behaving like a distant solution.

The warning signs aren’t dramatic. There’s no viral highlight or public declaration. Instead, it’s the quiet moves that matter—the kind teams make when they’re preparing for a scenario they don’t want to openly admit.

Minor League Player of the Year. A November addition to the 40-man roster. Protection from the Rule 5 Draft long before desperation sets in.

Those aren’t future-facing gestures. They’re insurance.

Mendez has always been tempting. The fastball sits in the high 90s and flirts with triple digits when he reaches back.

The slider isn’t just good—it’s the kind of pitch that makes hitters uncomfortable before they even swing. Evaluators talk about mid-rotation upside, sometimes more, when they’re feeling generous.

The problem, of course, is control.

An 11.2 percent walk rate isn’t a small footnote; it’s the dividing line between “starter” and “bullpen weapon.”

Big-league lineups don’t wait around for pitchers to find the zone, and October punishes anyone who can’t land strike one. The Padres know this. That’s why the plan has always been patience.

But patience has a shelf life.

At around 6-foot-3 and 175 pounds, Mendez is still labeled “lanky,” a word that sounds harmless until you realize it’s code for “still growing.”

If he adds strength and keeps his mechanics intact deeper into outings, another velocity bump isn’t unrealistic. Suddenly, his margin for error widens. Suddenly, the starter argument gets harder to dismiss.

That’s where the tension lives.

The likely plan is simple on paper: open 2026 in Double-A San Antonio, prove the strike-throwing is real, force a midseason decision.

In a perfect world, that timeline holds. But the Padres haven’t lived in a perfect world for a while.

Rotations wobble. Arms break. Workload limits appear out of nowhere. And when that happens, teams don’t promote pitchers because they’re ready—they promote them because they’re necessary.

Mendez is starting to feel necessary.

What’s striking is how little public noise surrounds him. No hype campaign. No “next man up” rhetoric. Just steady positioning behind the scenes. It suggests the Padres aren’t trying to rush him—but they’re also making sure he’s available if something breaks.

That’s not development. That’s contingency planning.

There’s also a subtle philosophical shift here. If Mendez steps into the rotation sooner than expected, it changes how the Padres allocate resources. Less urgency to overspend. Less pressure to chase certainty on the open market. More trust in internal growth—whether they intended to or not.

The risk is obvious. Push him too fast, and the walk issues get exposed. Confidence wavers. The bullpen door opens permanently. That’s the nightmare scenario every development staff tries to avoid.

But waiting too long has a cost, too.

Because if the rotation stumbles and Mendez is dominating in the minors, the question won’t be if he’s called—it’ll be why he wasn’t sooner.

The Padres may not be ready to say it out loud.

But the signs are there.

Miguel Mendez isn’t just a future problem anymore. He’s the kind of solution teams quietly prepare for—hoping they won’t need it, while knowing they probably will.