Padres see progress, like the process with their offense
ARLINGTON, Texas - The Padres have examined and refined, questioned and listened.
Again and again and over and over.
It was the second week of the season when they began looking into their offensive operation, immediately upon seeing that it wasn't good in the first week.
Then the hitting got a lot better. Then it got worse than almost any team has been in quite some time. Now it is a little better.
Through the evaluations and the evolution and the ups and the downs, manager Craig Stammen has become convinced the Padres are on the right track, that the information hitters are getting is good and the messaging is clear.
"If you sat in a hitters meeting and you listened to it, you’d be like, ‘Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense,'" Stammen said. "And you’d be like, ‘All right, I’m gonna go do that in the game.' Now, doing it in the game is way different than thinking about it on paper."
That has been the disconnect for the Padres for much of the season under first-year hitting coach Steven Souza Jr.
They enter this weekend's series against the Rangers ranked last in the major leagues in virtually every significant offensive category.
Yet, there has been no wavering in Stammen's belief that the message and the messengers are the correct ones.
Stammen has approached every facet of his new job - from pregame preparation to in-game machinations - with the belief that he knows what is right but with the knowledge he could be wrong. It is confidence with an openness to correction. And he has become convinced that there must be conviction.
"That’s what we found out - me as a first-year manager, probably him as a first-year hitting coach - we just can’t chase the new idea of the day," Stammen said. "It’s almost like we've just got to double down on what we know is right and just live that out as long as we can, the whole season. It’s kind of like the sabermetric point of view - if we do it consistently for the whole season, we think these should be the results. If we try to move and weave, then we’re just guessing."
Status check
Souza has, by all accounts, never been in danger of losing his job.
Padres president of baseball operations A.J. Preller and his lieutenants have looked into what information is being disseminated and how it is being disseminated, and he has expressed confidence in the process. But the call regarding coaching personnel at this point is Stammen's.
There can be no guarantee about what will happen at some point if Stammen is wrong and the season careens off a cliff.
But every time he is asked about it - and even sometimes when he has not been asked about it - Stammen has offered a similar testimony of his faith in Souza being the one steering the offense.
"I have a belief that he’s good," Stammen said on Wednesday. "It’s the hardest position in all of sports. You name any coaching spot, hitting coach is the toughest thing to tackle, because it’s probably the hardest thing to do in sports. … I believe his confidence that he instills in these guys is eventually going to break through (and result) in the consistency, and his belief is gonna be what turns the tide for us."
There have already been more ebbs and flows than many people might realize.
The Padres' .218 batting average is the sixth lowest and their .652 OPS is 17th lowest by any team 73 games into a season since at least 1996.
What is stunning is that there was a significant period - more than a quarter of the season so far - in which the Padres had one of the best offenses in the major leagues.
From April 5 through April 27, a span of 20 games, they ranked in the top eight in batting average (.260), OPS (.762) and runs per game (5.4). They hit the ball hard more frequently than all teams but the Athletics during that stretch. Using the metric wRC+, which purports to measure hitters' value compared to league average, the Padres' 114 mark was sixth-highest among MLB's 30 teams.
And then …
Over the next 35 games, they had what by one measure was the second-worst stretch that long in 53 seasons. The Padres hit .192 from April 28 through June 7. The 2021 Texas Rangers were the only team since 1973 to have a lower batting average over any 35-game stretch.
The Padres had a .594 OPS and a wRC+ of 69 in the 35 games from April 28 through June 7, marks that were lowest in the major leagues by a large margin over that span. Their hard-hit rate was 22nd.
The Padres have rebounded, albeit with a two-game slumber this week against the Cardinals in which they had seven total baserunners.
But even with the pair of duds playing an outsized role in dragging down a small sample size, the Padres are a significantly better offense of late. Over the past nine games, they are tied for 19th in MLB in batting average (.245), 21st in OPS (.705) and 20th in wRC+ (97). They are again hitting the ball hard with frequency, ranking 10th in the majors.
The sequence is a bit confounding.
"If April was bad and May was what April was, we'd be like, ‘Man, they're getting going. Here they come,'” Souza said. “It's my job to get us back to April and to get our superstars to be superstars."
Top, on bottom
The bottom line, the top line and most lines in between is that Manny Machado, Jackson Merrill and Fernando Tatis Jr. have to varying degrees had highly disappointing seasons.
To decry the entire Padres offense as being horrible this season is to be ignorant of that fact.
We can excuse Tatis from the conversation to some extent, given that he has hit .368 and reached base at a .419 clip over the past 26 games. But still, he has hit just two home runs and has a .701 OPS even as his batting average has risen to .284 for the season.
Machado is batting .177 with a .615 OPS this season. His batting average ranks 155th out of 157 qualifying players. His OPS is 145th. Merrill is eight spots above Machado in the rankings with a .636 OPS and 13 spots above him with a .213 average.
Two of the three players expected to do the heavy lifting are instead bogging down the Padres.
If Machado and Merrill were even league average in average and OPS and Tatis had even a half-dozen more home runs - all of which would still be considered them underachieving - we would not be talking about the Padres' offense struggling with anywhere near the obsession we presently have.
(All this is ignoring Xander Bogaerts, who after a strong first month has hit .181 with a .524 OPS since April 29. Among the three MLB players worse than him in that span is Machado, at .145 and .538.)
This is not a new revelation, and neither is the fact that Machado and Merrill have been missing pitches they normally do extensive damage on.
Machado is batting .234 with a .434 slugging percentage on fastballs in the zone, which is down from .311 and .517 over the previous five seasons. Merrill is batting .262 with a .393 slugging percentage on fastballs in the zone, down from .322 and .561 his first two seasons.
Their struggles are not limited to those pitches, but they begin there and could be largely fixed there.
Machado has acknowledged work he did in the winter set him back. Merrill, who turned 23 in April, has been all over the place in his approach.
Both have shown signs of emerging from their abysmal starts.
Machado is batting .258 (8-for-31) with five doubles and a home run over the past eight games. Merrill is batting .306 (11-for-36) with two homers, a triple and two doubles in that same span.
Souza has never been quick to accept praise this season, even when the Padres were hitting. A former major leaguer who put up a .729 OPS over eight seasons in a career impacted by injuries, he is well acquainted with hitting as a torturous vocation and that the discipline he teaches can never be mastered. He knows that even if he is correct and the Padres heat up in the summer, he and his staff will always be working with one or two or five hitters who just don't feel right.
But as he considered the past two weeks and the rising metrics for certain players, Souza expressed confidence.
"I think we're on the right track," he said Wednesday. "I think it's coming together."
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