The San Diego Padres completed their longest homestand of the season by being swept. The Philadelphia Phillies, who had been in a slump of their own, got well against the Padres. There were no blowouts; the Phillies never scored more than four runs in any of the three games. It’s just that the Padres scored three runs total for the whole series, being shutout twice.
Over the nine home games, the Padres won the series against the A’s two games to one and lost the series against the Dodgers two games to one.
Finishing the home stand with a 3-6 record, the Friars went from being 0.5 games up on the Dodgers for the division lead to being four games back and tied for second/third with the Diamondbacks.
The poor stretch dropped them to a 31-24 overall record, which is still in the Wild Card hunt, but who cares in May?
Takeaways from the first third
It will not come as a shock to any Padres fan to state that the offense has been largely absent for the whole start of the season. We have watched the rare explosion followed by multiple runs of offensive mediocrity.
Everyone knows the struggles of Fernando Tatis Jr., Jackson Merrill, and Manny Machado are a large part of why this team has been so ineffective as a group. The best hitter on the team continues to be a guy who has been on the injured list since early May, in Luis Campusano. Semi-regular first baseman Ty France and most-of-the-time DH Miguel Andujar are the only other hitters with anything resembling normal numbers.
Over their last 10 games the Padres have a 4-6 record. They have played to a 16-16 record at home and a 15-8 record on the road. They are 9-15 against teams with a .500 or better win percentage.
For April, when they were winning multiple games with late-game heroics, the Padres played to an 18-7 record. In May, when those heroics have mostly failed to materialize, they are 12-13 with three games left to play on the road against the red-hot Washington Nationals.
The numbers don’t lie
The Padres, as a team, are hitting .215, last in MLB. Their OBP is .291, last in MLB. The team slug is .361, 29th in MLB (ironically, the New York Mets are the worst). The team OPS is .652, again only one off the worst (Mets again).
They have improved in the home run category, now sitting 18th with 55, and have 207 RBI, good for 24th. The run differential sits at -1 for the season.
Although the eye test tells us that the starting pitching is also an area of concern, it is far from the most concerning. The bullpen, which started the season with some clunkers, is back to being the best in baseball.
The team ERA sits at 3.83, 12th in MLB. Starters are responsible for a 4.47 ERA (19th), and the bullpen has a 3.07 ERA(1st).
One area that does not bode well for the starting corps is the strikeout ranking. The Padres starters have 234 strikeouts, good for 26th in MLB. The bullpen has 232 strikeouts; they rank fourth in MLB.
April was an illusion?
The amazing come-from-behind and final innings heroics of the Padres offense in April were an unsustainable fact. You can’t play a whole season like that, but it was fun while it lasted.
The Padres hitters chase too much, strike out too much, and hit a ton of ground balls. Many of those groundballs go directly to a defender. Much has been made of the fact that Fernando Tatis Jr. hasn’t hit a home run. That situation weighs on the minds of many fans, and probably Tatis himself.
It seems pretty easily explained if you look at his stats. He is not hitting the ball in the air to the pull side. His 25.8% pull rate in the air compares negatively to the 39.4% of the rest of the team and all of MLB. There is nothing wrong with his bat speed, or barrel rate, or his launch angle and sweet spot data. The only glaring issue is that he is hitting a ton of balls into the ground and fly balls to right field.
Apparently, this is not an easy problem to fix, or we wouldn’t still be obsessing over it.
But Tatis is not the only problem. Manny Machado is hitting .169. Amazingly, he is on track to come close to his season numbers for home runs and RBI as he currently sits at nine homers and 27 RBI, a third of the way through the season.
Jackson Merrill is hitting .200 with 19 RBI and a .271 OBP. He has struck out 55 times, second most to Ramón Laureano at 64 (he is hitting .211).
Primary catcher Freddy Fermin has a .140 average, which is worse than either Martin Maldonado or Elias Diaz in 2025. Rodolfo Durán has filled in great defensively but he is hitting .100.
The two main bench players, Sung-Mun Song and Bryce Johnson see very little playing time and are both hitting below .200.
The bench player getting the most playing time, Nick Castellanos, is hitting .186. He has four home runs and 19 RBI.
What is to come?
This can’t be the reality for this season, right? This many good baseball players can’t be this bad for a whole season. It just seems illogical to think that players who have track records and histories of success will stay this bad for months.
It should be obvious at this point, however, that the turnaround has to be soon. Before they dig themselves into a hole they can’t climb out of. The end of May is too soon to panic, but there has to be improvement. This kind of baseball is not only frustrating; it’s also boring.
The coming road trip to Washington and then to Philadelphia to play the Phillies could provide some clarity. The Nationals are playing above what was expected of them and the Phillies always play the Padres tough, especially at home.
We need a reverse course, and it needs to come soon.
