The Padres have proven once again that they’re a legitimate threat to win the NL West.
After seriously testing the Dodgers for the divisional throne in 2024 and ‘25, the Padres have a 29-20 record and sit 1 1/2 games behind Los Angeles, even after dropping the three-game series earlier this week in San Diego. Most remarkable about that fact is that the Padres have gotten very little from their core offensive trio of Fernando Tatis Jr., Jackson Merrill and Manny Machado.
Here’s the outlook on those three players, where things have gone wrong this season and the chances of them bouncing back as the year progresses.
The following numbers are entering Wednesday’s games.
Fernando Tatis Jr.
2026 numbers: .585 OPS, 0 HR, 0.2 WAR (per FanGraphs)
Much has been said about Tatis’s start to the season, as the Padres star still hasn’t homered through nearly two months. Of the 63 players to record at least 200 plate appearances, Tatis is the only player who has not homered. It’s almost hard to wrap your head around, given that Tatis entered the season with 152 career home runs across six MLB seasons and hit at least 21 home runs in four straight years.
MLB.com’s Mike Petriello examined Tatis’s bizarre season earlier this month and most of those points remain the same. The gist of it is Tatis is hitting the ball as hard as ever -- his 55.6 percent hard-hit rate ranks in the 97th percentile of MLB -- but the types of batted balls he’s getting are suboptimal. A meager 6.8 percent of his batted balls have been pulled in the air, fourth-lowest among hitters with 100 batted balls and well below his 14.9 percent career clip.
In layman’s terms, Tatis is now putting his hard contact into optimal locations (his 53.4 percent ground-ball rate is a career high by a comfortable margin). As Petriello documented, some of this could be timing or it could be his more closed-off stance. Given that he’s still only 27 and was a force as recently as last year, there’s ample reason to believe he’ll turn things around.
Jackson Merrill
2026 numbers: .598 OPS, 4 HR, 0.3 WAR
While there are ample reasons to remain optimistic about Tatis, there have been some concerning trends for Merrill in 2026. The 23-year-old has a .598 OPS, well below his career .772 mark. Under the hood, Merrill has been struggling in terms of both quality and quantity of contact. Making matters worse is Merrill left early from Wednesday's series finale against the Dodgers with a back injury after trying to rob a Shohei Ohtani home run.
While Merrill is boasting a career-best 46.5 percent hard-hit rate, his barrel rate is down from 13.0 percent in 2025 to 9.4 percent this season. That’s largely tied to more balls on the ground as his 44.2 percent ground-ball rate is a career low. Merrill is also whiffing on a career high 28.0 percent of his swings, which has led to a 25.1 percent strikeout rate.
After posting an .826 OPS with 24 home runs and finishing second in NL Rookie of the Year voting in 2024, Merrill has seen his numbers dip in consecutive years. Merrill isn’t as bad as his 2026 numbers indicate (his expected numbers say he’s been a bit unlucky), but he is also in need of some adjustment at this stage of his career. Outside of Tatis, Merrill might be the biggest X-factor for the Padres this season.
Manny Machado
2026 numbers: .617 OPS, 7 HR, 0.3 WAR
Machado has been such a consistent force across his career that it’s almost been expected to see him post 25-plus home runs and 3+ WAR seasons on an annual basis. For the first time in his career, maybe there’s a realization that he is entering his decline phase, which is not terribly surprising for a 33-year-old playing in his 15th MLB season.
Machado has the most home runs (seven) of this trio of Padres and the highest OPS (.617) but the other two players are on the right side of 30. Machado’s strikeout rate is at a career-high 22.4 percent rate, just the second time it’s crossed 20 percent in his career. The contact quality has suffered, too, as Machado is running a 6.3 percent barrel rate, his lowest figure in the Statcast era and nearly half of his 10.9 percent clip since 2015.
With his defense mostly hovering around average these days, Machado can’t afford for his bat to be this far below his career norms. It’d be unwise to doubt Machado after his track record, though, and he’ll be a fascinating player to monitor the rest of the year.