Padres show early improvement by quickly exorcizing 2024 demon

Early in the 2025 season, the San Diego Padres are showing they are among the best teams in the National League. They're also making an early statement by taking care of business against one of Major League Baseball's worst teams, something they didn't do in 2024.

Last season, the Colorado Rockies finished with more than 100 losses for the second consecutive campaign, ending with a 61-101 mark. While the Rockies struggled often during the season, they seemed to come to life against the Padres, going 8-5 overall (including 4-2 at Petco Park) against San Diego, a team that finished 93-69 and nearly knocked the eventual world champion Los Angeles Dodgers out of the NL Division Series.

This year, the Padres have already not only flexed their muscles against the Rockies but also proven that they can be dominant against them at home. With Sunday's 6-0 victory over Colorado, San Diego swept the three-game series, outscoring the Rockies 16-0 and limiting an anemic Colorado offense to just nine combined hits and 12 base runners.

In fact, outside of Colorado's Kyle Farmer, the Padres overmatched the Rockies in a stunning way in the first two games of the series. As Just Baseball's Patrick Lyons pointed out, Farmer went a combined 5-for-7 with a walk against Padres pitching on Friday and Saturday nights. The rest of the Rockies combined to go 2-for-53 with a walk for a .038 batting average.

Michael King continued the Padres' weekend pitching masterpiece on Sunday, throwing his first career complete game and allowing just two hits. It put the finishing touches on 27 consecutive scoreless innings posted by the Padres over their NL West rivals. 

The weekend scoreless sweep marked the first time in Colorado franchise history the Rockies had been shut out in three consecutive games, a bad sign for a team that has started the year 3-12 and has scored an MLB-low 40 runs this season.

While San Diego's pitching was lights out, the Padres also benefited from Brenton Doyle not being in the Rockies lineup throughout the weekend. Doyle, leading Colorado with three home runs and one of just three Rockies batting over .300 this season, missed all three games with left quad tightness.

Still, San Diego's ability to pound the Rockies into submission shows another facet to the team from 2024. That could well be a good sign for a Padres squad that is looking like a postseason contender, starting the season 10-0 at home in the wild-card era and becoming only the sixth team to do that (dating back to 1995).