The Mariners swept the Padres behind six home runs over three games, while the Padres managed only two home runs during the series. And this has raised understandable panic about the difference between the teams when it comes to the very important category of slugging. And there is a stark difference between the teams indeed. But before we jettison the Padres offense into space we should take a brief moment to examine the context.
Record Breaking
The Mariners hit six home runs over three games, an average of two-per-game. The Mariners are 4th in all of baseball with an outstanding 3.55% home run percentage (HR/PA) on the season. They are a truly prodigious slugging offense. But no team has ever kept up a two home run per game pace over a season. A two home run per game average would shatter the all time record for team home runs in a season. But home runs are very good, and slugging is an important input to run scoring. Indeed, after laying waste to Padres pitching to the tune of 15 runs across three games, the Mariners now have 21 more home runs on the season than the Padres, and have scored 216 runs to the Padres 199, both through 45 games.
The Padres on the season have a home run percentage of 2.44% well below the league average of 2.88%. Much was made about last season’s Padres offense that finished 8th in MLB in runs scored, and led the league in batting average, and had the lowest strikeout rate in baseball. But it’s easy to forget that that team could also slug. The 2024 team had 7 more home runs, a total of 48, through their first 45 games, good for a 2.84% home run percentage. That’s actually a good pace during the early part of the season. Year after year league home run percentage follows a predictable seasonality as the weather progresses from Spring to Summer to Fall atmospherics. Home run rates start out slow, pick up in June, peak in July-August, then cool off a bit in September-October. Here’s how the last three seasons looked:
So far 2025 is right in line with the averages of the past decade:
And so it’s reasonable to conclude that the 2025 Padres and their 2.44% home run percentage have been well below average for any team the past decade. But why?
It could be their approach. Perhaps they are making the foolish tradeoff of more singles for fewer home runs. It sure looks like it when you look at the raw stats:
But why would they choose to do something so foolish?
One of the biggest reasons the Padres are 7 home runs behind last season’s pace is that Manny Machado has only 3 home runs this year. There are some interesting things in Machado’s batted ball profile:
Machado is putting up the highest hard hit percentage in his career along with the highest expected slugging, wOBA on contact, average exit velocity, launch angle sweet-spot percentage, and second highest barrel percentage of his career, with a higher average launch angle than last season. Yet only 3 home runs. One way to interpret this is that Machado is cooked. It’s really in the eye of the beholder. We’d argue some of these findings suggest he’s still decently likely to slug. Maybe he’s been a bit unlucky? Through the first third of the season Machado has made outs on batted balls that had 73.4%, 80.8%, and 90.8% likelihood of going for a home run. Is that just normal? Perhaps. But between 2022 and 2024 he hit 13 balls that match the characteristics of those three outs, and 11 of the 13 went for home runs. It’s impossible to prove that a short term trend is due to bad luck, but it’s not unreasonable to think that some bad luck has entered the chat. Machado may be destined to hit only 9 home runs by season’s end. We tend to think that’s not the most likely outcome. Your mileage may vary, and that’s ok. There can be no doubt that having only 3 home runs from Machado has hurt the Padres home run totals. Whether there is regression to the mean coming, or whether he’s decided to become a singles merchant is going to determine a lot about the team’s long term slugging prospects.
Another aspect to consider is who has been taking the Padres at bats. Jackson Merrill and Jake Cronenworth have missed 25 and 24 games respectively, more than half of the 45 games the Padres have played. If we presume a conservative 4 plate appearances missed per game, then both missed ~100 plate appearances due to injury so far this year. Merrill has a career 4.1% home run percentage, and Cronenworth has a career 2.6% home run percentage. If you prorate the at bats they missed due to injury you suddenly find the missing 6-7 home runs1. And it’s interesting to project the difference in scoring output. The 2025 Padres have scored 199 runs through 45 games. The 2024 Padres had scored 211 through their first 45. Since the start of 2024 a home run has been worth an average of 1.592 runs in pure scoring average terms. And there’s a nice symmetry in that 7 extra home runs at 1.59 runs/HR equates to about 11.1 extra runs, almost exactly the difference between the 2025 Padres 199 runs scored through 45 games and the 2024 Padres 211 runs scored through 45 games. If you instead use the estimated ~1.90 runs/HR via Markov chain calculation the 2025 Padres would be projected to outscore the 2024 Padres when healthy. A very counterintuitive idea indeed.
It’s going to get tiresome to hear this, but some of the explanation of the Padres abysmal power outage is that replacement players have accounted for more than 25% of the total plate appearances for the team this season. For more than half of the season two of the team’s better hitters were sidelined and replaced by this cumulative output:
CF Replacements:
2B Replacements:
Merrill and Cronenworth’s collective replacements accounted for zero home runs in their time filling in. And they missed a very big portion of the season so this downward drag on the team’s averages is going to linger for quite awhile.
Not Ok
None of this means that the offense is ok. It is not. It is extremely flawed and this going to catch up to the team and cost wins. We noted how during one of the crucial rallies during the Angels series, the Angels hunted down Jason Heyward’s spot in the lineup to seek a crucial strikeout, which they got, and snuffed out an important scoring chance. There is one dead spot in the lineup every night when either Heyward or Brandon Lockridge is platooning in left field. When Martin Maldonado plays catcher there are two dead spots in the lineup. And something that is underappreciated in back of the baseball card statistics is the effect that dead spots have on the surrounding lineup. Teams will target dead spots in the order to try to kill rallies, and this means less favorable pitches to the hitters preceding the dead spots as we saw with Cronenworth getting a straight pitch around in the aforementioned example. But take a look at what dead spots in the lineup do to the hitters who are downstream of them:
Fernando Tatis Jr is the team’s leadoff hitter, and the hitter with the most in-game power, and the two spots in the lineup that precede him are getting on base at below replacement levels. You see this reflected in Tatis’ splits:
The team’s best power hitter has had 33 plate appearances all season with a runner in scoring position. Left field and catcher are two very different positions. It’s tough to be an every day catcher, and Martin Maldonado does need to spell Elias Diaz sometimes. But he’s played a lot. More than seems warranted by the need for a day off for Diaz. Left field is the real point of focus though. That is a premium offensive position. And the Padres have had some of the worst production in all of baseball:
Teams always know more about their players than the rest of the world, but unless the team knows something about imminent offensive production from Heyward or Lockridge, upgrading the position should be a priority.
With Merrill and Cronenworth back playing regularly, there is a strong likelihood that the lineup will produce above average slug and home run rates as it did last season. But that doesn’t mean the offense will suddenly be healthy. Even the most prodigious slugging teams in history scored most of their runs through rallies. Dead spots in the lineup rarely start rallies, and frequently crush those in process. A truly good offense needs a holistic lineup construction. The Padres don’t have it, even when fully healthy.
0-21 with RISP
Merrill and Cronenworth being back in the lineup didn’t help the Padres score many runs during the Mariners series. The entire team went 0-21 with RISP across the three losses. That’s an astounding number. Going 0-21 in a series is one of the very worst stretches the team has had in years. It’s hard to imagine that this is representative of the likely output in similar situations going forward. But if they do continue to go 0-21 with RISP in every series they will not win many games, irrespective of how many home runs they mix in. In fact if that continues they will likely finish as the worst offense in baseball history. But unlike the bleak outlook in left field, there doesn’t seem to be any indication that going 0-21 with RISP is what we can expect from the offense going forward. It’s true that Merrill made some uncharacteristic bad swing decisions, and seemed to struggle to square up the ball on the good pitches he saw, but it’s a stretch to think this means he’s become a bad hitter overnight. Cronenworth looked good mechanically but popped up on multiple good pitches to hit during the series. Good mechanics and good swing decisions typically portend good results. The failures here may be only indicative of the baseball tenet that the very best hitters still make outs the majority of the time.
Lest We Forget
Something interesting happened in the 9th inning of the Angels/Dodgers game Saturday. With the Angels leading 11-9 the Dodgers were down to their final out with Shohei Ohtani on first and Mookie Betts at the plate against Kenly Jansen. Jansen’s first pitch was a ball in the dirt, and Ohtani stole second. Here’s what happened next:
This was an intentional balk to get Ohtani off second base, due to fear that he may have tipped pitch location to Mookie Betts. Jansen removed any doubt of this in his post-game interview:
“I definitely wanted the intentional balk there,” Jansen said. “With Mookie hitting, Shohei at second, I thought it was best for him to be at third. I didn’t want him seeing any of the locations where Logan is sitting. So that was definitely the plan there.”
At the higher levels of the game, from college to the pros, attempts to relay pitch calls or locations are ubiquitous. Every team is trying to do this every game, even though it’s rarely talked about. It is legal3 and it has been part of the game since its inception. And it shouldn’t be forgotten that the Padres, for all their offensive woes, seemed to have a problem with teams relaying their pitch calls just two weeks ago. This has gone by the wayside as other concerns took center stage. But they’ve yet to play a game against their division rivals, and Jansen, who spent most of his career on that team, thought it was a good tradeoff to intentionally balk a runner from 2nd to 3rd to take away the sightlines. The Padres strength has been its pitching. But when a hitter knows what pitch is coming, or it’s location, even effective pitchers become batting practice. In a world where the Padres could count on averaging two home runs a game it might make sense to ignore little things like this. But bound by the constraints of the real world, the margins still matter. And unlike fixing left field, no resources other than the focus of the team’s brass, should be required to iron out the pitch tells that opponents were picking up on in the early part of the season. This will be something to pay attention to as the season goes by. Other teams certainly are.
If the 2025 Padres had the same 2.84% home run rate they would project for between 47-48 home runs by this point in the season. 6-7 home runs behind 2024.
The Astros and Red Sox were using technology to steal signs which is prohibited. Players and coaches on the field relaying signs they’ve picked up visually is permitted.
One of the reasons Luis Arraez is such a fun and controversial player is in line with the no-power issues of the Padres. We talked about this at length on PHT last night. When you commit a major power position (1B or DH) to a player who is going to max out at 6-7 HR, that's a choice. It's a choice you need to overcome by getting above-average pop out of different positions. Cronenworth gives you that pop at 2B but Bogaerts (so far) has not. And to then compound the issue with a virtual zero in LF, now you have a power problem.
For me, an underrated part of our offensive struggles has been the lack of stolen bases. In our first 17 games, we went 14-3. We had 23 stolen bases (1.35/game). Since then, we've had 28 games and gone 13-15, with only 13 stolen bases (0.46/game). It certainly seems like as a team, we are collectively not being as aggressive on the bases as we once were. And for a team built on singles, getting from 1st to 2nd is the difference between having your 2nd single of an inning being an RBI, and your 2nd single moving the runner to 3rd, and needing a 3rd single to get an RBI.
Looking a little deeper, it's primarily about 2 guys: Tatis and Manny. Through 11 games (when Tatis hurt his shoulder April 8 vs the As), Tatis and Manny both had 5 SB (0.45/game). Since then, Tatis has 3 SB in 33 games (0.09/game), and Manny has 2 SB in 34 games (0.058/game).
The only other guys on our team with more than 2SB on the whole season are Bogey (w/ 8) and Lockridge (w/ 6). Through the first 11 games, Bogey had 3 (0.27/game) and Lock had 1 in 8 games (0.125/game). Since then, Bogey has 5 in 34 games (0.147/game) and Lock has 6 in 23 games (0.26/game).
So, what are my takeaways?
1) I think we all were surprised Manny was running as much as he was, and we shouldn't expect him to put up big SB numbers anyway.
2) It would be good to have Tatis and Bogey be more aggressive (especially Tatis). Tati is the straw the stirs the drink of this offense, and since hurting his shoulder (and not diving headfirst anymore), he barely attempts at all. I personally don't think he's that much worse of a base stealer sliding into 2nd than diving headfirst, but apparently he thinks so. (And perhaps he is: he has 2 CS vs 3 SB since hurting his shoulder).
3) IMO, Lock needs to start LF every game (until we trade for a better bat there). JHey only gives us defense, and Lock gives us that and he's by far our best base stealer.