Padres' Offensive Approach In Dire Need Of Improvement If They Want To Make The Playoffs

[Randy Holt]

It sort of boggles the mind, given how the first half progressed, but the San Diego Padres will begin the unofficial second half of the season in National League Wild Card contention. Winning two of their last three series (and managing a split in the other) afforded them such positioning by a half game over the San Francisco Giants. But if the team is going to secure such a berth in the next couple of months, the offense is going to have to play its part. 

If you've watched even a small sample of Padres baseball since mid-May, you know most periods of struggle for this team are due to the offense. In contention on the strength of their pitching, the top-heavy attack has had trouble piecing together even multiple innings of run production, let alone multiple games of it. Indeed, the numbers since that point provide a fairly objective measure by which to evaluate the offense. 

Since May 16th, the Padres are 27th in the league in runs (187). They're hitting just .231 as a collective (also 27th) with a .301 on-base percentage (25th). Power production has been an issue all year, but only the Pittsburgh Pirates have an isolated power figure worse than San Diego's .123 ISO since that point. 

Almost no member of the Padres has been immune to the struggle. Fernando Tatis Jr. fell into an offensive void in May from which he's just now beginning to emerge. Jackson Merrill has been working with a power deficiency on either end of his multiple injured-list stints. Jake Cronenworth is a walk merchant without much else, while Luis Arráez is of the same descriptor if we substituted walks for singles. Xander Bogaerts spent all of June working his way to even being an average bat. Even Manny Machado got off to a slow start. This, despite the team's struggles to find any sort of offensive stability in left field and behind the plate. The offensive component isn't an isolated issue; it's a collective one. 

As such, it's going to take a collective shift in philosophy if the Padres are going to start generating run production with a little more consistency. That begins with the approach. 

Plate discipline numbers don't give us the whole story, but they do have a lot to say about the 2025 San Diego Padres. Their 3.80 pitches per plate appearance ranks 24th in the league. For context, the Miami Marlins have the league's worst mark at 3.74 P/PA. They rank only 19th in Swing% (47.0) but sit fifth in chase rate (32.9). Their swing rate inside the strike zone, meanwhile, ranks only 28th (65.6 percent). Those are some problematic components, indicative of a team that isn't overly aggressive but simply makes poor choices at the plate.

What they can do, however, is maintain solid contact rates. Their 79.0 Contact% is the sixth-best rate in the league while maintaining one of the league's lowest whiff rates (9.9). The overall swing rate has also helped buoy the team's walk rate, at 8.6 percent for the season (13th). Their strikeout rate, at 19.5 percent, is also tied for the third-lowest rate in the league at present. In a vacuum, you'd rather have more balls in play than fewer balls in play. However, given the disparity between swing rates inside and out of the strike zone, the team has been unable to parlay steady contact into good contact. 

The Padres' 36.6 Hard-Hit% in 2025 is the second-lowest rate of hard contact (defined as 95 MPH or more). Only Cleveland has a lower rate of hard contact. If we consider only the stretch since May 16th, the Padres actually have an identical rate to the Guardians in terms of quality of contact. Their 7.0 Barrel% is the third-lowest rate in that respect. When you factor in a 44.1 percent groundball rate and a 27.0 Oppo%, it's sort of a marvel that this team is hanging at even a (22nd-ranked) .285 BABIP. From the outside, there doesn't appear to be a lot of intentionality behind how they're approaching each plate appearance. 

Also worth noting in this discussion is Pull AIR%. Sort of the statistical darling of the 2025 season, the idea is that teams that can pull the ball in the air are going to create more offense, as 66 percent of all home runs over the three seasons before 2025 came on such contact. The Padres rank 28th in the league in Pull AIR% (15.4 percent), which speaks to their lack of overall power. 

Not that you have to pull the ball in the air to find offensive success. The Milwaukee Brewers are one of the two teams behind the Padres. At the same time, middle-tier run producers – the Philadelphia Phillies, New York Mets, and Athletics, for example — are all somewhat adjacent to them in the Pull AIR% rankings. The difference is that those teams walk more than the Padres and steal more bases than the Padres. They also have more isolated power scattered throughout the lineup. There are ways to compensate, but the Padres don't have a lineup built to do so.  

As such, increasing the discipline aspect will be a central factor in the team's ability to produce runs. The Padres are not an aggressive team, but they do exercise poor plate discipline. There's just too much expansion of the zone to generate contact, so the actual quality of contact is suffering as a result. There is more power than this lineup has realized thus far (even if it's not necessarily home run power). Power is derived from quality contact. Quality contact is derived from a strong approach. One thing begets another. 

So there's a certain onus on the Padres to start at a more foundational level in the second half. We don't know what A.J. Preller has planned for the lineup. However, given the limited resources at his disposal, the improvements will likely be marginal. As top-heavy as the San Diego Padres are, they're also a team with a stronger volume of quality bats than has been demonstrated to date. The approach needs to come through, though, if that's to be realized.

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