My first contribution to the East Village Times was an article suggesting that Manny Ramirez or Fernando Tatis Sr. should be the new hitting coach for the San Diego Padres in 2026.

Just over two months into the 2026 season and the team might already be in serious need of a new offensive voice. The criticisms are louder, the struggles are larger, and the possibility of this team losing their way has become a very real reality. 

There are some very real things that need to be contextualized when assessing the Padres offense not just in 2026, but overall.

The marine layer in San Diego does impact the flight of flyballs and line drives and does take away extra base hits. The trend of outfield positioning also has hurt offense in MLB where a lot more extra base hits are being taken away due to outfielders playing deeper. Although these are factors that the Padres cannot control, they are factors that impact their opponents as well in one way or another. The statistical analysis shows that this team is significantly worse than what was an underperforming offense in 2025. The eye test shows a completely different ballclub that does not look like a big league offense.

The regression in offense on the 2026 Padres thus far, is so widespread and so significant that it can only be chalked up to the coaching and team philosophies being preached to the players. Much has been criticized about the idea of “playing to the back of the baseball card” but it is an idea that helps instill some confidence. Unfortunately, if the Padres were playing to the back of their baseball cards, the team’s offense would be infinitely better. 

The clear goal going into 2026 was finding ways to add power and get more extra base hits for this team. Whatever the team has done to try and rectify that approach has opened significantly larger holes in their game. Through 61 games, the Padres offense has seen a drop of 36 points in batting average, 30 points in on base percentage, 30 points in slugging, and a whopping 60 points in OPS.

The 2025 Padres were a 98 OPS+ and the 2026 Padres are sitting at an 84 OPS+. Even with the smallest uptick in home run and walk ratios, the offense is striking out four percent more than last season. Typically you’d trade some strikeouts for power but this offense struggles to just get any base hits on a nightly basis. The players are swinging more, chasing more, and whiffing more. All three of those stats have seen increases of at least two percentage points.

There are some signs of what has been worked on and it shows in the hard-hit rate of the team being over three points higher. The quality of those hard hits becomes moot when their groundball percentage has risen to 46.2%. The Padres’ collective launch angle has dropped from 12.2 degrees to 10.2 degrees. This is clearly suboptimal for producing more offense. 

The clearest red flag for the 2026 Padres has been the production from their “big four”. Manny Machado, Fernando Tatis Jr., Jackson Merrill and Xander Bogaerts are the four starters meant to lead this team offensively. Outside of a great April for Bogaerts, and the recent hot streak for Tatis Jr., these four have severely underperformed for the team. The three best players offensively have been the first base/designated hitter trio of Gavin Sheets, Ty France and Miguel Andujar. When looking at those big four players, there seems to be a lot of tinkering under the hood that could explain why they have not produced.

There may not be a more documented story in the 2026 MLB season than the power struggles of Fernando Tatis Jr. Not getting his first home run of the season until the last few days of May, much has been said about the right fielder’s hitting this year. From mechanical breakdowns to discussions of contact point, the Dominican star has been analyzed ad nauseum. Recently, Tatis Jr. has started to heat up, hitting .284 in May and currently hitting .313 in June. The slug has not been there, but the at-bats are starting to look a lot more comfortable, and the hits have been coming in bunches. His contact point is still a cause for concern as he is hitting the ball too deep in relation with his body which has raised his groundball rate to a career high and lowered his pull rate to a career low.

Xander Bogaerts, as previously mentioned, had arguably his best month as a Padre in April and has heavily slumped since. An .854 OPS with a .472 slugging percentage in April seemed to show a resurgence for the shortstop. His five home runs were the second most in a month in his Padres tenure. Since then, all his numbers have gone down and Bogaerts is striking out more and walking less. His OPS dropped almost 300 points from April to May.

Jackson Merrill has been an anomaly at the plate. While toting his hardest hit rate of his career, Merrill is having his worst season at the plate by far. Merrill is walking more but is also striking out more and whiffing more than he ever has before. The star center fielder is whiffing eight more percent from his rookie season and striking out seven percent more. These significant increases have diminished what at times looked like the best center fielder in the business. Merrill is actually pulling the ball in the air more and has a faster bat speed than ever before but the results just have not come for him. 

Manny Machado, the team’s de facto captain, may be the biggest surprise of them all. A model of consistency throughout his career, Machado is seeing an astonishing career low in 2026. Machado is another example of a player that is walking more, striking out more, and getting less results with a lower launch angle. Machado, shockingly enough, is an even bigger culprit of hitting the ball too deep than even Fernando Tatis Jr. The third baseman is also suffering from a swing whose attack direction sees his bat facing the opposite field. He may be at a better pace home run wise over his 2025 season but is just getting a significantly lesser amount of hits overall.

Some of what may be able to explain these strange trends is the odd changes individually between the players’ swings and even where they stand at the plate. Machado, Merrill and Bogaerts are hitting deeper in the batters box than they did in 2025. Fernando Tatis Jr. has been standing in a similar spot the last three years, but that in itself is a few inches back from 2023. Machado is standing three inches further back in the box from last season. Merrill is standing two inches back and Bogaerts is standing back almost five inches deeper in the box.

There can be a benefit of standing deeper in the box to allow yourself more time to see the ball but the results clearly have not supported that this is what’s best for the players. The question then becomes, why are they still doing it? The same can be said about bat speed. A higher bat speed does create more power and carry on balls that are hit. Faster bat speeds also correlate to higher strikeout rates as slower bat speeds correlate with more contact. For a team that already has a stadium that takes away offense from them, selling out a bit more may not have been what was best. 

The last few seasons, the Padres have thrived with their “power of friendship” innings. Getting on base, whether by hit or walk, and passing the baton. Taking tough at-bats and competing. Grinding the opposing team’s pitchers down. While the 2026 Padres have had a knack for the dramatic comeback win in late innings, they are not consistent in piecing together innings with multiple runs and especially not against starting pitching. The team seems to lack competitiveness in the process of creating offense. Make no mistake, this team is very talented from an offensive standpoint. Whatever the strategy has been, it is very clearly not working. So the question remains, is it time to make a change? 

It may not be fair to judge hitting coach Steven Souza Jr. based on a few months of lacking production. The month of May was not kind to the Padres and June has not started out much better. Given the optics of the present and future of MLB, the Padres may be in a spot where they are pressured to make moves to compete and go for it this year. With labor tensions rising and the threat of a lockout, general manager A.J. Preller may be putting all his chips in the middle of the table this trade deadline. The team has to justify him going for it. What seems to be clear is that, over a third of the way into the season, what the Padres have tried to get more out of their offense has not worked at all.

Many of the Padres players seem to have a bit of an old-school mindset when it comes to hitting and how they view offense. Former hitting coach Victor Rodriguez has thrived in Houston as the Astros offense has performed well under him, even if the team has not played well overall. That could be a blueprint for the Padres to potentially bring someone in midseason to instill some old school competitiveness and grit, while being able to properly coach the team into performing to more modern statistics.

The Padres had clear goals to add power from their players and tap into the potential the offense has. The way they’ve gone about it has not worked. The team may be wise to cut their losses and pivot as soon as possible to save their season. They will need additional pieces to try and compete for a World Series title. Given the fact that they’ve managed to maintain a winning record even amidst a season long losing streak, the team needs to make changes fast to turn it all around before it is too late.

Brian Ferreira

30

East Coast Based

Dominican