Bradgley Rodriguez Is the Padres’ Next Indomitable Reliever

Fifty-one weeks ago, the San Diego Padres traded a king’s ransom in prospects to the Athletics in exchange for depth starter JP Sears and hard-throwing relief ace Mason Miller.

Ordinarily, I would’ve abhorred such a move. The top prospect who went the other way, Leo De Vries, came in at no. 6 overall in the Preseason Top 100 Prospects list, and in my mind there’s no more overrated commodity in baseball than team control for a reliever. What the Phillies gave up for two and a half years of Jhoan Duran, immense a haul as it seemed at the time, was a fraction of what four and a half years of Miller cost.

Still, I kind of got it.

Duran is a tremendous pitcher; Miller is special. In 62 relief appearances for the Padres, he’s allowed just six earned runs in 65 regular-season innings, which comes to an ERA of 0.83. He’s struck out 123 batters while allowing just 54 total baserunners. That’s 3.7 WAR and a WPA of 4.59 in one year.

I don’t think that’s literally the best 365-day run any single-inning reliever has ever put on, but it’s close enough that it made me check Eric Gagne’s player page. Anyway, you put that guy in a bullpen that already had Adrian Morejon, Jeremiah Estrada, and Robert Suarez, and all of a sudden you can win a playoff series even if you only get five decent innings a game from the other nine pitchers on your roster.

I was sold. I thought the Padres’ bullpen was good enough to roll over the Cubs in the NL Wild Card Series. I think I even picked San Diego to win the pennant.

I wasn’t wrong about the bullpen; Miller not only retired eight of the nine batters he faced, he got all of those outs by strikeout. The Padres devoted 15 2/3 out of 25 total innings to the bullpen, and their relievers combined to allow just two runs in that time. The San Diego pitching staff on the whole gave up just six runs, total, over three games.

Here’s where I (and A.J. Preller, it turns out) went wrong: The Padres only scored five runs in three games, and lost the series. Even a team with a great bullpen needs to do other stuff.

So it’s proved in 2026 for San Diego. The Padres have the top bullpen in the league, by WAR, but they’re 27th in ERA- from the rotation, 23rd in wRC+, and 25th in runs scored. That shakes out to (as of Thursday afternoon) a 50-53 record with a -30 run differential. And to be honest, Preller and his merry men are lucky it doesn’t shake out to something worse.

The Padres are still very much in the Wild Card race, but the vibes around the team are so shot that trade rumors are starting to swirl around Miller again. Years of wheeling and dealing have left the Padres’ farm system as denuded as if it had been set upon by a plague of locusts; their top prospect list only went 25 deep in players with a FV grade of 35+ or better. The Mariners also had 25 such players. The 28 other teams all had at least 30 — including a few clubs with draft lists more depressing than a college bar that’s notorious for not checking IDs at the door. Given his performance over the past year, Miller’s trade value is probably just as high now as it was last July. Maybe Preller doesn’t get another De Vries-like prospect back (insofar as any prospects that good ever get traded), but it’s one way to reload the farm system quickly without touching any of the key position players.

If Miller does go, this vaunted Padres bullpen could be recording its last studio album as a unit. Suarez already left for Atlanta as a free agent last winter. Morejon and Jason Adam are eligible to follow him out the door after this season. Ron Marinaccio just got traded to Pittsburgh this week. Even Wandy Peralta’s trade rumor Geiger counter is clicking.

So who does that leave? Or more to the point: Who could come in to pick up the slack if the Padres suddenly find themselves without Miller and a number of other elite relievers?

I give you Bradgley Rodriguez, a bespectacled 22-year-old rookie from Venezuela. As I write, he’s second among Padres relievers in ERA (behind Miller), third in WAR (behind Miller and Morejon), and fourth in appearances (behind Morejon, Peralta, and Miller).

Being the third- or fourth-best reliever on most teams isn’t something to brag about, but this is San Diego. In his 43 innings this year (including three one-inning opener stints), Rodriguez has an ERA of 2.09, an xERA of 2.31, and a FIP of 2.80.

Rodriguez signed with the Padres in 2021, and thanks to his age and a torn UCL, he didn’t make his debut in full-season minor league ball until April 2024. But from there he moved exceptionally quickly; less than 14 months elapsed between his first competitive pitch on American soil and his major league debut. Rodriguez spent most of last year in Triple-A, but he made seven appearances across two big league stints, posting a 1.17 ERA.

That laid the groundwork for the 6-foot-1 righty to leap right into high usage and high leverage at the start of this season. And, as I said earlier, he’s more than held his own.

Rodriguez makes an interesting contrast with Miller. As hard as Miller is to hit, he’s incredibly easy to understand as a pitcher: He’s 6-foot-5, with a 101-mph fastball and a slider that breaks six inches more than comparable pitches in each direction. As a result, he strikes out nearly half of the batters he faces. There may not be an elite athlete in any sport whose game is more obviously legible to casual observers.

Rodriguez is a bit more complicated. He throws not one but two upper-90s fastballs — a four-seamer and a sinker — with a loose, snappy three-quarters delivery.

As you can see, Rodriguez is short and stocky for a power pitcher, but his listed dimensions don’t tell the story. He is proportioned like the Tasmanian Devil. It’s kind of like what they used to say about Elton Brand: Despite only being 6-foot-8, he was plenty big enough to play center in the NBA, because you don’t rebound and block shots with your neck.

Rodriguez isn’t really a bat-misser. His strikeout rate, 23.6%, is in the 55th percentile. His whiff rate is in the 74th percentile. That’s perfectly fine, but it’s not elite high-leverage reliever territory on its own.

That’s because he’s got a breaking ball, but it’s kind of whatever. It’s a hard upper-80s cutter-slider type thing with unremarkable horizontal movement and less vertical drop than comparable pitches. It’s his fourth-most-common pitch against right-handed batters, and he uses it not at all against lefties.

Like, it’s not bad; opponents are whiffing on a third of swings (which would be a little below average if he’d thrown enough sliders to qualify for Baseball Savant’s leaderboard) and xwOBAing just .220 against the pitch. But the Mason Miller Scythe of Cosmic Wrath Slider this is not.

Rodriguez’s best secondary pitch is his changeup, and that pitch is fun. He throws it 42.3% of the time; only five pitchers in the league throw offspeed pitches more frequently. One of them is Devin Williams.

This changeup isn’t an 800-rpm dead duck or anything. It just comes in around 90 mph, and where the four-seamer rises and cuts and the sinker runs, the changeup dips and fades. That allows Rodriguez to sneak it in under the hands of right-handed power hitters like, say, Austin Riley.

That’s pretty nifty.

Now, this changeup isn’t really a bat-misser either. Rodriguez is getting a 37.7% whiff rate, which is the 10th-highest mark out of 56 qualified changeups, according to Baseball Savant. Tarik Skubal, for instance, is getting whiffs on a league-high 50.3% of his changeup swings.

But no one can hit Rodriguez’s changeup squarely. Opponents are hitting .121 off his changeup with a .131 xBA, and they’re slugging .182 with a .186 xSLG — those figures rank first, first, second, and first in the majors. Rodriguez and Skubal have thrown about the same number of changeups this year. Baseball Savant has Rodriguez’s as worth seven runs; Skubal’s, only four.

And it’s not just that opponents can’t hit Rodriguez’s changeup hard, but that the existence of that changeup keeps hitters off his four-seamer. He’s been in the majors for all of 30 seconds, but he already looks like an elite quality-of-contact suppressor.

He has the seventh-lowest xwOBA in the league, and remember, xwOBA takes into account not just quality of contact but also strikeout and walk rate, both of which are pretty pedestrian in Rodriguez’s case. The six guys ahead of Rodriguez on that leaderboard are Miller, Dylan Lee, Louis Varland, Jacob Misiorowski, Grant Taylor, and Duran. All of those guys have higher strikeout rates (way higher strikeout rates, in fact) and lower walk rates than Rodriguez.

If you isolate Rodriguez’s numbers to what opponents do on contact, they get even more impressive.

So what’s next? Well, I’m glad I’ve had occasion to mention Duran a few times, because that’s who I’d draw inspiration from. Duran has a much better strikeout rate than Rodriguez, but at his core he’s another hard-changeup/soft-contact guy. (An extremely hard changeup, I’ll concede, if it’s even a changeup at all.)

Duran has two things Rodriguez lacks: First, above-average command. Rodriguez is only 22, but he has kind of a messy delivery. His command might get better, but if it doesn’t, that’s fine. It’s not like he’s running a double-digit walk rate or anything.

The second thing Duran has is a legit power breaking ball. Two of them, actually: a sweeper and a curveball. If Rodriguez can either replace or augment his cutterish slider with something that has real depth, he’ll go from bat-breaker to bat-misser. If that happens, Preller could trade Miller, plug Rodriguez into the ninth-inning role, and barely miss a beat.

Wow, I really got ahead of myself there. Rodriguez’s potential is huge, but we should see what happens to the rest of the Padres’ bullpen first.