After winning the series finale against the Los Angeles Angels last night, the San Diego Padres have been on a winning streak. They opened the year by losing their first two series but haven’t lost one since. The friars have won five series’ straight, capped off with an eight-game win streak and a perfect seven-game homestand.
Padres’ Early-Season Power Outage Quieted by Recent Loud Bats
That success propelled them from last place in the National League West to second, with a 15-7 record to start the year. It’s been, in large part, due to their stellar offense.
At the outset of Spring Training, I asked if the power outage that has plagued Padres’ offenses in recent years may finally come to an end. Could Slam Diego really return to Petco Park? It’s been a tantalizing thought in the minds of the Friar Faithful every offseason, and it seemed poised to finally become a reality.
Now? It finally has.
Over the course of that perfect homestand, the friars smashed 10 moonshots. For the 12 games prior to that, they had only hit seven. This was a turnaround. Especially in a pitcher-friendly environment like Petco Park. Night after night the Padres continued to dazzle, and why shouldn’t they?
Seriously … Why Shouldn’t They?
It’s an important question, and one that has been asked year after year. San Diego always enters the season with so much hope for an offense that is stacked on paper. Fernando Tatis Jr., Manny Machado, Xander Bogaerts and Jackson Merrill are just about as fearsome a top-four as any team has. And the emergence of Ramón Laureano and Gavin Sheets were also real assets for this year’s club.
So what’s gone wrong? Well, mostly it’s been Petco Park. It’s a hard stadium to hit home runs in. That’s for a multitude of reasons, but the long and short of it is that the friars have never had a whole lot of success there ever since the juiced-ball era came to an end.
Only one Padre has hit 50 home runs in a season (Greg Vaughn, 1998), and one of the only ones to hit more than 40 in their current stadium (Tatis Jr., 2021) faced severe backlash about his performance after possible steroid usage was alleged.
For whatever reason, the Padres never seemed to be able to put it together. With an offense as loaded as this one, they should have been able to, but they always fell short. It came to its lowest point in 2025, when the club ranked 28th in home runs across all of MLB.
Victor Rodriguez served as San Diego’s hitting coach throughout that power outage (2024-25) after being hired in December 2023. He left the Friars this offseason for a job with the Houston Astros and was replaced by Steven Souza Jr.
A New Approach
Souza was criticized early. And the calls for his immediate firing were loud. With the Padres failing to score more than three runs in their first five games, the offense was a major question mark for this team. But then … it happened. These guys started raking.
In their sixth game of the season, the friars gave the San Francisco Giants a 7-1 shellacking, salvaging the series and preventing a sweep by the division rivals. They went on their first road trip and continued to go off, winning both series away before the eventual perfect homestand.
It was a stark contrast. The turnaround came seemingly out of nowhere. But it wasn’t out of nowhere. The Friars had continued to espouse a philosophy of continuing to put in good at-bats and, eventually, the results would come. And they came in bunches.
A Temporary Outage in Anaheim
So, when San Diego came into their series against the Los Angeles Angels this weekend, it felt all but certain that the two red-hot offenses would turn the weekend romp into a slugfest. Curiously, that didn’t happen.
Instead, the Padres and Angels combined for only 16 runs in their three-game set. And the Friars only put up six of those but still managed to win the series. It was odd to see from two teams that have been homer happy as of late.
However, it seems that that lack of slug has more to do with pitching than batting. Both San Diego and Anaheim were grinding out there at-bats, but the battles were often won by the pitcher. The Padres also didn’t take advantage of as many scoring opportunities as they could have. And that’s just baseball.
Sometimes, the offense is moving, and it doesn’t matter who’s on the mound that day. They could pitch a perfect game or give up 10 runs, and the lineup will rake and pick them back up. And sometimes it takes a village, with a starter pitching his hardest to dominate while the offense barely scratches two runs on the board for the win.
Baseball’s inconsistent like that, and that’s what’s beautiful about it. The Padres are not the first (and certainly won’t be the last) to fall prey to that. San Diego’s had a wonderful start to the season. The only hope now for the Friar Faithful is that they can keep it going.
Main Photo Credits: William Liang-Imagn Images