When Padres Needed Them Most, San Diego's Offensive Stars Retreated Back Into Their Shell

[Randy Holt]

The old baseball adage is, generally, that pitching and defense win championships. The San Diego Padres and their lineup just gave a lot of credibility to that idea, but not necessarily in a way in which they may have hoped. 

For most of the second half of the season, the Padres boasted one of the league's top lineups. They were tied for second in the league in runs scored (343) & on-base percentage (ironically, at .343), second in collective wRC+ (119), and fifth in power output (.168 ISO), while also pacing the other 29 teams in batting average (.270). 

That offensive prowess carried into postseason baseball almost immediately. Fernando Tatis Jr. & Manny Machado homered in the first inning of Game 1 of their Wild Card Series against the Chicago Cubs, with the Padres cruising to an 8-0 win. They added four more runs in Game 2's 4-1 victory that propelled them into a National League Division Series matchup with the Milwaukee Brewers. 

That's when the first-half iteration of the team's offense began to reemerge. 

The first half version of the Padres was a team that ranked 29th in wRC+ (90). They were the league's worst offensive team in runs scored (379) and sat at the bottom of the league in batting average (.226) & on-base percentage (.302) while sitting 25th in ISO (.144). Struggles from key players exacerbated their woes, leading to the consistent sputtering we saw from the lineup through the first 96 games of the season. An above-average strikeout rate and far too much groundball contact compounded with a variety of other factors to stifle any hope of consistency. Sound familiar? 

Now, the caveat in all of this is that this is a four-game stretch we're talking about against the team with the league's best record. The nature of Major League Baseball's playoffs is that you need a whole lot of fortune to succeed within a small sample. Of course, you can also take some control of your fortune by executing within that small sample. The Padres failed to do so, reverting back to their first-half form across four games. 

As a team, the Padres slashed .181/.278/.236 across 145 NLDS plate appearances. Their collective wRC+ was just 54. They struck out 22.1 percent of the time. They hit the ball on the ground 48.4 percent of the time, with an ISO of only .055. Their 30.2 percent hard-hit rate was nine points lower than the one they had turned in during the season's second half. It all led to just 10 runs across four games after dropping a dozen in the Wild Card Round. And no individual seemed to be immune to the struggle. 

Tatis had just two hits in the quartet of games, one of which was a home run that momentarily leveled Game 4. Xander Bogaerts & Jake Cronenworth each matched his hit total, with Jackson Merrill contributing only three to the effort. Only Manny Machado, who spent most of 2026 as a power-only bat, added more than three hits to the mix. Tatis, Cronenworth, and Machado all featured groundball rates of at least 50 percent (Tatis was over 60) while Merrill struck out more than 35 percent of the time. There was never a chance here, despite how close some of these contests were.

Again, it's a small sample, and the Brewers boasted one of the league's highest-performing pitching staffs throughout the regular season. But for a team with a rotation that was built to tread water and not dominate games and a bullpen bordering on overworked, the offense had to buck the adage and drive the team's success in the Division Series. They didn't do that, which is reflected both in their inability to make contact and the ball ending up on the ground as much as it did. 

In other words, in a series where three of the games were decided by one run and the fourth featured a 3-1 final score, the efforts of the offense were simply not enough.

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