Manny Machado and Jackson Merrill could hardly hit.
Fernando Tatis Jr. couldn’t hit a home run.
Jake Cronenworth could hardly see the ball and then sat for two months with a concussion. Xander Bogaerts went dormant.
The starting rotation was without Joe Musgrove from the start and Nick Pivetta shortly thereafter due to injury. Ineptness had the rotation down to two actual starting pitchers by July.
For extended periods of this season, the Padres have not looked anything like a playoff team.
Yet, they are a half-game out of playoff position with 22 games remaining.
It is not a great position to be in. But they don’t seem to think it is as bad as it seems.
They know for certain it is not as bad as it could have been after a 1-5 road trip that wrapped up Wednesday.
“We didn’t play our best baseball, especially here in Cincinnati,” manager Craig Stammen said. “But I also think we should be thankful because somebody didn’t run away with the third wild-card spot that we’re fighting for. We’re still right there, where we want to be, in contention, and all things are on the table that we want for the rest of the season.”
That is, to them, the point.
Machado has chided the media twice in the past several weeks for what he perceives as negative coverage.
“I don’t think you saw us doing this or getting here, but here we are,” he said on July 28. “I think we’ll finish off strong as a group.”
It might have seemed odd that he chose to say such a thing, considering the Padres were .500 and 1½ games out of a playoff spot when he spoke. (And because any contention that the San Diego media is negative is laughable.)
But the Padres were at that point in the beginning of a stretch in which they would have the major leagues’ best record for a month — 21-7 from July 24 through Aug. 23.
“I’ve been saying it all year, that we’re going to be in this spot,” he said on Aug. 24. “I think you guys didn’t believe in us, and here we are once again. But (that is) how much belief I have in these guys in here. And I see how much work we put in every single day, and we know what type of talent we have in this room. So we always had that belief, and we’re going to continue to believe in it, and hopefully continue to put ourselves in better positions, and continue to fight for what we want to bring to the city.”
That the Padres are 2-7 since then is beside the point.
Machado doesn’t bend with the breeze. It is his confidence and lack of compunction about expressing it publicly that speaks to some of the Padres’ best traits.
That confidence, which is a product of experience, has produced resilience.
They strongly believe that is why they have been able to survive all that has gone wrong in 2026.
“It definitely has something to do with talent,” Michael King said. “But I also think it’s the confidence in our own ability.”
The Padres have warts.
At best, they are inconsistent. That is especially true and troublesome in regard to some of their best hitters.
They might have been bad for too long in May and then again at the end of June and early in July. Three days in Cincinnati suggests they might be bad now.
The Padres lost three games to the Rays last weekend that were basically the reverse of the type of games they were pulling out of a hat in April.
Of their seven losses in nine games, five have come by one run, two after holding a three-run lead and one after leading by two with two outs in the ninth inning.
So maybe what is happening is the baseball season is evening out on them.
And maybe that won’t work out well for the Padres, who are projected by FanGraphs.com to finish with 84 wins and tied with the Diamondbacks for the final wild-card spot. If that is what happens, that spot would go to the winner of their season-ending series at Petco Park.
While the Padres responded when they had to before the trade deadline, their season has been plagued by some troubling and extended letdowns as well.
There has long been a thought by some in the organization — some that have departed and some that remain — that the Padres have lacked a killer instinct that keeps them from being as good as they can be.
But for all the chances the Padres have squandered to take control of their destiny, they hold fast to the belief they will figure out how to win enough games to make their third consecutive postseason appearance.
And in part, that faith is based on the fact that they have been there and done that.
The average age of their position players is 29.6, the third oldest in the major leagues behind the Dodgers (30.9) and Phillies (30.2).
Failure is such a big part of baseball that they are practically synonyms. And it takes failing a lot to understand how to handle it.
That is what experience does.
“We’ve been through it,” Ty France said. “There are guys that have been playing for 14 years. There are guys that have been playing for three or four. Like, we understand what 162 is. … it’s not going to go your way for, you know, six straight months. You have to roll with the punches, take the bumps and bruises, and move on. And you know, I feel like we’ve done a very good job of that. You know, when something doesn’t go our way, we show up the next day as if it never happened.”
Experience also reinforces success. It teaches those who are good enough that they are, indeed, good enough and that they can perform when it matters.
“The first few times I was put in high-leverage (situations), I definitely was a little more juiced up than I should be,” King said. “And then once I started to get a feel for it and do it, then it became second nature. And it was like I fully expect to punch out the side, I fully expect to get out of this situation instead of like, ‘Let’s see if my talent plays.’ And when you look at the years of service that we have on this roster, they know that their talent plays.”
Those in the game most often describe the baseball season with two words: grind and rollercoaster. They are apt descriptions. And they are not enough.
It is a mind-melt and physical beatdown over 162 games in 187 days.
It is a marathon run through ankle-deep mud. There is lots of falling.
Among the 16 teams within 1½ games of a playoff spot this season, all but the Brewers have endured a losing streak of at least seven games. Six of the past eight World Series participants got there in a season in which they had at least one 25-game stretch in which they went 10-15 or worse.
Stammen began preaching the virtues of adversity in the first week of the season, when the Padres went 2-5. He preached it again during a dreadful 24-36 run from late April to early June. And again, he was an adversity evangelist during an eight-game losing streak from June 27 through July 4.
“I want our team to have that attitude that the discouragement of a bad at-bat, a bad play, a bad series does not determine the future whatsoever,” Stammen said. “It’s just a moment in time that happened, and the next moment is not determined by the previous one. … I just know in a major league season you have to be able to move on really quickly, otherwise you’re just stuck in a rut.”
At the conclusion of the sweep by the Rays, Stammen explained the philosophy in terms of it helping build toward the end goal.
“Adversity is a good thing because it makes you tougher and it makes you stronger, and it makes you bounce back,” he said Sunday. “And if we can’t handle this adversity at this point in the season, how do we think we’re going to be able to be the champions at the end of the season? And so I think if you look at it that way, this is experience for when it could go really bad or when it could go bad on a bigger stage.”
The Padres have rebounded after each of their previous swoons. They went 17-4 after the bad first week, 11-7 after the horrid May and 28-15 after the eight-game losing streak.
Those surges got them here. They will be forgotten, relegated to mere sentences buried within the story of a disappointing season, unless there is another surge now.
“It’s ‘go’ time,” France said. “I mean, there’s nothing else you can really say about it except we need to play our best baseball now and start winning these games.”