The San Diego Padres offense hasn't been producing, and Manny Machado finally went off about their issues.
San Diego padres fans are unhappy. The players are unhappy, the hitters especially. It was only a matter of time before one of them went off about it, and that turned out to be third baseman Manny Machado.
Machado echoed those sentiments about the state of the offense, and his comments had a familiar ring. He's hitting just .174, and while Machado does have 11 home runs, that average is a shockingly low number from a future Hall of Fame player.
"People are frustrated. The fans want us to win games. So do we. We're more frustrated than anybody," Machado told MLB.com after the Padres' latest loss to the Philadelphia Phillies. "We want to turn things around. Everybody on this ball club is trying to do that. So, we're going to keep working, just knowing that we're still in a good position, even though we're playing like dog [expletive].
"But things will turn around. It's a long season. There's still a lot of baseball to be played. This group in here knows it. All we can do is keep working. Things will change."
Machado just hit a home run yesterday, and so did center fielder Jackson Merrill. But it was too little too late, and as a result he had to deliver the same answers to the same questions.
"I don't know how many times I've got to talk about it: We want to win, we've got to [expletive] hit," Machado said. "It needs to come from us, the people who aren't doing anything.
"... I've been part of slumps before. You think you're never going to get out of it. It just takes one little thing to click, and one little ball to fall, and things start rolling -- snowballing -- after that. Just keep battling and keep controlling what we can control, which is the work that we do every single day."
Padres are now 7-1/2 games behind the Los Angeles Dodgers and they open a three-game series today against the New York Mets. They were projected to be a 500 team, and now they're starting to look like just that.
"I don't think it can get worse," Machado said. "I mean, there's only one way: Up."
Unfortunately, that's not quite true. The Padres have a golden opportunity to get back on track against the Mets, who are also struggling, so much so that they've become one of the worst teams in baseball. San Diego is a team used to having unlimited resources to get out of situations like this, but for the time being that's no longer the case.
