Expanding The Zone: Part 2

Please stop

Leading up to Thursday’s series finale in Toronto the Padres offense and defense/pitching has been in one of the most futile stretches in the history of the game:

Reading this immediately raises the unanswerable question of whether being the only team in MLB history to have such a futile stretch twice says something about the team’s DNA. Hopefully not? A more fruitful line of inquiry starts with understanding that performance this outlandish suggests there is some extreme variance at work in addition to a flawed process. Part of the Padres ‘process’ is clearly flawed. Specifically the at bats for the left field platoon:

And at least half of the catching platoon is playing below replacement level:

Martin Maldonado has now accumulated over 40% of the Padres plate appearances at catcher. That’s a lot more than just spelling the starting catcher. Maldonado has been handed enough at bats to suggest the team feels he’s an important part of the winning formula.

And the bench production only gets harder to look at as time goes by:

But there’s another possible source of futility that’s become a rising concern: that the Padres hitters are being coached to trade home runs for singles. Only last year it seemed that hitting coach Victor Rodriguez had made a breakthrough when he advocated for an approach to hitting of focusing on line drives, in the hopes this would lead to more power production overall:

“Let’s focus on hitting line drives, not homers,” Rodriguez said. “By thinking less power, you might have more power.”

This quote is likely to become notorious if the Padres unbelievably bad offensive output continues. A year ago, though, it seemed as if this quote were prescient as the Padres indeed reached the second highest home run rate in Petco of the past decade by adopting a less flyball and pull heavy approach:

The 2024 Padres finished the season with an above average home run rate and the 7th highest slugging percentage in the league. But was that power surge really related to a change in approach at the plate? Do hitting coaches have that much effect on teams’ swing shapes?

Recently Statcast released its bat tracking data for the past three seasons, and this finally allows a data driven understanding of the Padres swing shapes and approach at the plate. Two very clear clues come from looking at the average attack angle and the squared up rate from 2023 to 2024. The average attack angle can be thought of as the degree of uppercut (positive or negative) on a swing:

And the team’s squared-up rate tells us how much of the highest possible exit velocity available a batter was able to obtain based on the bat speed and the pitch velocity. And indeed there is clear evidence of a shift between the 2023 and 2024.

In 2023 the Padres had a fairly typical MLB swing profile with a decent squared up percentage and modest average attack angle just over 9 degrees on the swings they took:

Entering 2024 you see a very stark difference between the approach the Padres took at the plate and the rest of the league:

The Padres became the best team in the league at squaring up pitches when they swung, and had a noticeably lower average attack angle than both the rest of the league, and compared to themselves in 2023. This would seem to be perfectly executing the stated intention of trying to square the ball up better for line drives at the expense of some fly balls. And they also seemed to be getting the extra power Rodriguez alluded to. They finished with higher slugging percentage and OPS than in 2023, and with far fewer strikeouts.

The team implied it was taking the same approach into 2025, and the Statcast data would seem to support that, but with some differences.

The quality of contact has been significantly worse and the average attack angle has been lower.

So why would an approach that yielded such great power results a year ago be responsible for cratering an offense a season later? This is where examining data can again be helpful. Of the six players who were on the 2024 starting lineup, four have increased their home run rates in 2025, while two have regressed:

What stands out in the chart above are two major differences year-over-year: First is the gigantic downgrade in power production from the starting left fielder and catcher, and almost complete lack of power from the bench players. In 2024 the Padres got a ~$25 million season from Jurickson Profar in left field, ~$15 million season from Kyle Higashioka, and very impactful power production from David Peralta, Ha Seong Kim, and even Donovan Solano. Losing all five and replacing them with the Padres current fill-ins is tough tickets. Some of the drop in average attack angle (AAA) in 2025 is explained by at bats from Donovan Solano (9 degree AAA) and David Peralta (6 degree AAA) being replaced with four of the flattest swings in all of baseball:

The second thing that stands out is the severe regression in home run rate from Manny Machado and Xander Bogaerts. Machado is behind his 2024 pace in home runs by about 6, and Bogaerts is behind by about 1.5 home runs. That’s extremely bad. Losing ~7 home runs from the starting lineup through the first 48 games is a big deal. It’s possible that their regression is due to being coached to trade home runs for singles. If so that is something to immediately change, especially for Machado. Machado has excellent bat speed and is capable of being one of the better power hitters in the league. But there’s not much in his batted ball profile to suggests he or Bogaerts are hunting singles. You can see in 2024 Machado and Bogaerts took more level swings with a lower attack angle and barely any pull tendency:

In 2025 Machado has improved his rate of ideal attack angle and Bogaerts has actually increased both his average attack angle and ideal attack angle rate. Bogaerts has also noticeably increased his pull tendency:

These are not changes that imply seeking more singles.

Machado’s advanced stats are interesting to look at as well:

In 2025 Machado’s line drive, fly ball, pull percentage, hard hit rate, and exit velocity have all increased since 2024. Combine these outcomes with the fact that his ideal attack angle rate increased in 2025 and what you’re left with is evidence that, if Machado is indeed being coached to hunt more singles, he is not executing that strategy well.

Bogaerts regression is less pronounced than Machado’s. And perhaps less surprising. Bogaerts’ career was spent playing in the sweltering humidity of the AL East bandboxes, and he never had underlying performance metrics to suggest he’d be a power hitter playing the majority of his games for a West coast team. He’s been a serviceable hitter, and that’s what he’ll likely remain, even if the hitting coaches start encouraging him to hit more home runs.

So if the poor power production is not simply explained by the team having a line drive approach, and if the enormous downgrade in the quality of hitter on the roster is not enough to explain it (although it might be enough), is there anything else that might contribute to poorer outcomes at the plate this season? It turns out that yes, there’s another pretty straightforward explanation.

Expanding The Zone

The 2024 Padres executed the hitting philosophy of hunting hard contact and line drives and getting to more power. But they helped themselves out by swinging at better pitches. This was a year long trend, and interestingly they were more free swinging in the second half of the season when they were taking the league by storm:

And this is where you see a large difference in 2025, and a massive difference during the great slump of the past two series:

The Padres have been the least disciplined team when it comes to expanding the zone, and during the great slump in which the Padres replicated the worst 5 game stretch of futility in MLB history they saw their out-of-zone swing percentage climb to astronomical rates. Since they were swinging instead of taking pitches out of the zone their walk rate plummeted and their strikeout rate skyrocketed. And all of this badness was compounded by an increasing whiff rate on pitches in the zone (z-contact%).

What do you do about that really?

To summarize: The Padres have much much worse personnel in 2025, are choosing bad pitches to try to hit more frequently, and when they’ve chosen good pitches to hit they’ve been swinging and missing them more. The biggest outlier in home run production from the returning players is Manny Machado, who actually increased his ideal attack angle rate, pull rate, fly ball rate, hard hit rate, and average exit velocity, while maintaining the same swing attack angle in 2025.

During the great slump since May 16th the team’s best hitters have been just been lost at the plate at the same time:

That’s completely unworkable. Teams cannot win games when their stars produce so little. But also, none of these players is this bad. Bet your life savings on regression to the mean coming.

What To Do

This would seem like pretty strong evidence that firing the hitting coach won’t fix the offense. Still, there’s no way to rule out that the lack of power production is due to a disastrous coaching decision to advise hitters to trade home runs for singles. It doesn’t look like it, but it’s impossible to prove a negative. And it -is- true that the Padres swing shapes took on a noticeable difference from the rest of the league starting last year. So this needs be watched. If the line drive approach is the problem it will declare itself and more evidence will emerge. We will keep looking for it. Any and all avenues for improvement deserve scrutiny when the results are as horrifying as they’ve been for stretches during this season. And there is a mountain of Statcast data that is going to make this scrutiny possible, maybe even fun.

It’s hard to explain why the identical approach produced so much power last year if it is truly to blame for the power outage this year. But if the focus on line drives and quality of contact is part of the problem, there are certainly other major deficiencies contributing as well. The clearest solutions implied by the above are twofold:

1. Improve the personnel, and

2. -Please- stop expanding the zone

If that doesn’t work they could try launching the hitting coach into the sun, though odds are they’d just knock him weakly into the ground right at the shortstop.