Column: Padres starting pitching appears poised for rebound, should lead team to winning season

It won’t happen a third time in a row, will it?

The past two years, the Padres ran out of starting pitching when it mattered most.

A.J. Preller, entering his eighth full year as the Padres’ team-builder, should have it figured out by now. No crying the small-market blues. Same as last year, Preller’s player payroll, fifth of 30, ranks higher than any other Padres team. Preller has been afforded more years to build a World Series contender than the talent men who assembled the 1984 and 1998 World Series teams, to say nothing of San Diego’s other West winners in 1996, 2005 and 2006.

So, it’s time — and with Preller having made apparent upgrades, not only to the rotation’s depth, but at manager and pitching coach, the starting pitching has gone from disappointing to respectable.

Some favorable Padres precedent to consider: the starting pitching bounced way back in 1998, the last year the franchise won both a playoff berth and a postseason series after a 162-game season.

A year after finishing next-to-last in ERA, the Padres climbed to third.

The victory total soared 21 games.

Better health played a role, but it was Kevin Brown, the new ace, who drove most of it. A few holdovers who rebounded in 1998 gave Dave Stewart, the new pitching coach, some credit. Similar to Stewart, who descended from the front office to take the job while knowing he stood to inherit a talented rotation, new pitching coach Ruben Niebla may be the right man at the right time.

“Home run hire by A.J. Preller,” said an executive with another team.

Because he’d added three frontline pitchers the previous year, Preller this offseason didn’t need to pursue an ace and could focus more on less-expensive additions to address the subpar depth. Nick Martinez and lefty Sean Manaea improve the odds the rotation won’t wither on the vine like last summer, when the supply chain got exposed and Preller found no worthy reinforcements.

Beneficiaries of new manager Bob Melvin’s wisdom will include the starting pitchers.

Same as Bruce Bochy, the Hall of Fame-bound manager who directed the 1998 Padres, Melvin is a former big-league catcher who can read pitchers, hitters and umpires as each game evolves and make appropriate adjustments.

Melvin knows how to use analytics, having managed the Moneyball A’s the past 11 years. His boss was feisty, brilliant Billy Beane.

Bottom line: Melvin has the baseball chops to hold his own with Preller and any Padres player. He won’t be a yes man.

The rotation isn’t without question marks.

Can Joe Musgrove, the unit’s top performer last year, do it again? One of his former Pirates coaches fretted two offseasons ago that Musgrove’s increased usage of cut fastballs could cause problems downstream. Does Blake Snell’s late-season dominance portend more consistency from the lefty one former Padres slugger likened to a poor man’s Randy Johnson? Can Yu Darvish, 35, weather a full season? (Shame on the Padres if they don’t find Darvish prolonged rest before the All-Star break.)

A year ago, no one was counting on contributions from lefty MacKenzie Gore. This time around, a bright Cactus League season has put him near the rotation. Gore, 23, rising from Triple-A and managing a successful comeback from stubborn control problems wouldn’t be as farfetched as what lefty Tyler Matzek, a contributor to Atlanta’s World Series run last year, pulled off following vexing detours as a top Rockies prospect.

Health permitting, if the starting pitching isn’t somewhat improved from last year, when it was 10th of 15 in ERA and last in innings pitched, the comparison would be buying a Cracker Jack box without finding anything sweet or crunchy.

Analytics site FanGraphs is cautiously impressed, rating the Padres’ pool of starting pitchers the best in the NL West and fifth in the majors, while projecting that Manaea — whom Melvin surely recommended — will match Musgrove for rotation honors in win shares, while logging 175 innings and a 3.76 ERA.

Commending Preller’s volume approach, an NL scout said on the eve of Thursday’s season opener at Phoenix: “The Padres have so many starting pitching options, somebody has to have a good year.”

So, there’s some hope here, if not for a pitching-driven jump of 21 victories, a nice bump from last year’s 79 wins. (Yes, optimism prevailed last April, too, when oddsmakers set the Padres’ over-under line at 94-95 wins.)

These guys don’t need to pitch like Kevin Brown. The new labor pact added a sixth team to each league’s playoff field. A few NL team owners have already raised a white flag. Behind Padres starters, the defense should be no worse than average.

It’s fair to expect the franchise’s first winning 162-game season since the $38.6-million club won 90 games in 2010, and it’s realistic to (lightly) pencil the franchise’s first playoff berth off a full season since Bochy’s final Pads team edged the Dodgers in 2006.