The San Diego Padres lost to the Giants, 3-2, and at 1-3 they're off to their worst four-game start since 2018.
The San Diego Padres are having a power outage, and it’s affecting nearly everyone on the team. It’s very reminiscent of what happened in the postseason against the Chicago Cubs in the Wild Card series, and outfielder Ramon Laureano is the only one in the lineup who’s hitting right now.
Center fielder Jackson Merrill finally joined Laureano by providing some offense with a two-run homer in the Padres’ 3-2 loss to the San Francisco Giants. The Padres have scored nine runs in four games, and they’ve hd just six extra-base hits in those games. Including two apiece from Laureano and Merrill.
"One way or another, it’s going to start coming,” Merrill said in a story written by AJ Cassavell of MLB.com. “Keep putting up good, consistent at-bats, it’s going to flow. We’re going to get some big hits. It’s going to start going.”
That’s true for Merrill, but will it really happen for his teammates? We know third baseman Manny Machado and right fielder Fernando Tatis Jr. will hit home runs, but no one else on the roster really looks like a genuine power threat, as new DH Nick Castellanos struck out in two of his three at-bats.
The counter is that it’s not even April, but the Padres are now off to their worst four-game start since 2018, according to Cassavell. It gets late early when you’re competing in the same division as the Los Angeles Dodgers, and last night the pitching wasn’t better as the Padres were dominated by Landen Roupp, who’s basically a back-of-the-rotation starter.
"Today was definitely a struggle,” said manager Craig Stammen. “We didn’t hit too many as hard as we had in the previous three games. But that guy, he threw the ball good tonight. Pitching in the big leagues is tough. We’ve got to be able to battle every single day, scratch a few runs across.”
The Padres' rotation problems continue to be glaring as well. Walker Buehler gave up three runs in four innings, and he showed why he’s strictly a stop-gap option at this point in his career.
Buehler doesn’t have an out pitch, and it shows. He still knows how to pitch and set up hitters, but the velocity he relied on when he was younger to finish them off simply isn’t present anymore. The bullpen got taxed again, and it’s hard to see that sort of sequencing changing any time soon.
Dropping another series would put Stammen in the spotlight, too, with the Padres about to head off on a six-game, East Coast road trip that includes stops in Boston and Pittsburgh. The Padres are playing some lifeless baseball right now, and that part needs to change quickly.