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\u2019t lost one since. The friars have won five series\u2019 straight, capped off with an eight-game win streak and a perfect seven-game homestand.<\/p>\n
Padres\u2019 Early-Season Power Outage Quieted by Recent Loud Bats<\/p>\n
That success propelled them from last place in the National League West to second, with a 15-7 record to start the year. It\u2019s been, in large part, due to their stellar offense.<\/p>\n
At the outset of Spring Training, I asked if the power outage that has plagued Padres\u2019 offenses in recent years may finally come to an end. Could Slam Diego really return to Petco Park<\/a>? It\u2019s been a tantalizing thought in the minds of the Friar Faithful every offseason, and it seemed poised to finally become a reality.<\/p>\n Now? It finally has.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t they?<\/p>\n Seriously \u2026 Why Shouldn\u2019t They?<\/p>\n It\u2019s 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\u00a0stacked on paper. Fernando Tatis Jr.<\/a>, Manny Machado<\/a>, Xander Bogaerts<\/a> and Jackson Merrill<\/a> are just about as fearsome a top-four as any team has. And the emergence of<\/a> Ram\u00f3n Laureano<\/a> and Gavin Sheets<\/a> were also real assets for this year\u2019s club<\/a>.<\/p>\n So what\u2019s gone wrong? Well, mostly it\u2019s been Petco Park. It\u2019s a hard stadium to hit home runs in. That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Only one Padre has hit 50 home runs in a season (Greg Vaughn<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Victor Rodriguez<\/a> served as San Diego\u2019s 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>.<\/p>\n A New Approach<\/p>\n Souza was criticized early. And the calls for his immediate firing were\u00a0loud. 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<\/a>. But then \u2026 it happened. These guys started raking.<\/p>\n