'He's coming at you': Lamet a budding ace

The Padres’ rotation outlook was dire when they promoted Dinelson Lamet, a largely unheralded prospect, in May 2017. They had not yet drafted MacKenzie Gore. Chris Paddack would miss the season following Tommy John surgery. Luis Patiño was an unknown commodity.

Lamet arrived in a rotation that was spinning its tires, giving regular starts to struggling veterans like Trevor Cahill and Clayton Richard. The Padres needed young starting pitching, and they needed it badly. Lamet wasn’t asked to be the savior. But he was something.

Three years later, that rotation has been overhauled. Paddack has established himself. Patiño arrived last week. Gore might follow later this season. The Padres envision that under-25 trio anchoring their rotation for years.

Yet it's Lamet who currently paces that group. He has the most electric stuff on the Padres’ staff and has carried a no-hitter into the sixth inning in consecutive starts. Entering his start Friday night against the D-backs, his ERA sits at 1.61 through four outings.

Lamet might be the least heralded ace-caliber starter in baseball. That’s partially because his ascent took place on some bad Padres teams before he was sidelined in 2018 due to Tommy John surgery. But Lamet has returned in a big way, with a fastball that now touches 100 mph and what catcher Austin Hedges calls "the best slider in the game right now."

"The guy missed basically a full season, plus," Hedges said. "That's just time that he didn't get to use to learn at the big league level. Had he been healthy during that time, he'd be a household name around the league -- like he's starting to be now."

The formula for Lamet's success is simple: Whatever the pitch, throw it hard. He has seemingly abandoned the low-80s breaking pitch he'd used in the past, a slurvy mix that resembled his slider but had a tendency to float.

The way Lamet sees it, if his high-80s slider is unhittable, why not just pair that with his upper-90s fastballs? It’s working. Lamet is getting whiffs on 48 percent of swings against his slider, and hitters are batting just .118 against it.

"When I'm coming to the plate with the same aggressiveness and throwing those two pitches, it's hard to identify," Lamet said. "I think sometimes when I laid a slider in there, threw it more easy, it just gave hitters a chance to identify it."

No one in baseball has thrown more sliders than Lamet's 173 this season. He's throwing it for 51.2 percent of all his pitches -- well ahead of the Nationals' Patrick Corbin, who is second in that category at 40.5 percent. Despite throwing breaking balls on more than half of his pitches, Lamet still averages 91.8 mph on all pitches.

"Obviously guys have to respect that he's throwing in the upper 90s, so you've got to get ready early," Hedges said. "Once you have to respect that fastball, with a slider that breaks that late and moves that much, it just makes it tough."

Here's a perfect example of what Hedges is referring to. An 0-2 slider Lamet threw to Carson Kelly was nowhere close to the strike zone. But because Kelly was gearing up for 99 mph, and because the pitch moves late, he couldn't check his swing.

"[His stuff] is pretty special," said Padres manager Jayce Tingler. "The one thing I like about Lamet the most is probably just the bulldog in him. He's no nonsense, he's all business, and he's coming at you. Combined with the pitches and the weapons he has, he can be pretty mean out there. That's a good identity to have."

That identity is steadily growing. Lamet held the Dodgers hitless through 5 2/3 innings last week. He followed that by holding the D-backs hitless through six. A night before that start, Lamet even predicted that he'd dominate the D-backs, telling Manny Machado, "I'm coming with gas."

Despite his success, however, Lamet is often overlooked. He didn't debut until he was 24, and he's already 28 with barely 200 big league innings under his belt.

"Some things like that take time," Hedges said. "With an arm and a person as special as him, you have to learn who you want to be. ... He's developing who he is. The thing that he knows is at the very least, he's got two of the best pitches in baseball."

When the Padres embarked on their rotation overhaul, they hoped that Lamet might be a part of it. But they certainly didn't envision him at the forefront.

Yet here he is, with the other young rotation pieces falling into place around him. It’s a stark contrast from the state of the franchise when Lamet arrived in 2017.

"It's completely different,” Lamet said. “For the better.”

And his emergence is one of the biggest reasons why.