The San Diego Padres Begin a Two Coast Road Trip on the Heels of Epic Offensive Mediocrity

Carlos Quentin and the rest of the Padres hitters are left looking for answers as they take to the road this week. Mandatory Credit: Jennifer Stewart-USA TODAY Sports

How the San Diego Padres won even two games on their recent six-game home stand is a mystery to all but the baseball gods.

A 3-2 victory with a single hit. A 4-3 victory in extra innings with only four hits over the first 7 innings. 11 total runs over six games, a shut out, and one single four-run explosion in the extra inning win.

That was the basic amount of the offense for the 2-4 home stand that has the Padres seven games under .500 headed to the East Coast. The latest team report on the Padres from Yahoo.com has the complete breakdown on the ineptitude at the plate. But that only takes it as far as these past six games. You don’t score an MLB worst 3.1 runs per game on a batting average 15 points lower than the next team in baseball by having one bad home stand.

Ten times this season, the Padres have been shut out. In six of those games, the team was held to less than four hits. Nine more times the Padres have scored just a single run in a game. Needless to point out, the team is 0-19 in those games with one or fewer runs scored.

Lets take a look at hits.

15 times the Padres have notched double-digit hits. That is six fewer than the number of times the line-up has failed to put together a six-hit game so far this season. The high water mark for team batting average this year was a .234 mark on April 16th, after a torrid stretch of 50+ hits over six games. Remarkably in that stretch, the team went 4-2 and scored over four runs per game.

Now lets put all of this offensive ineptitude through nearly 40% of the season in some historical light.

With the current pace they are on, the Padres would end up the season with 501 runs scored and a .217 team batting average. That average would be lower than any of the six worst teams by record in franchise history, edging out the inaugural ’69 club by 8 points and the ’74 club by 12. Even in the Petco Park era, the ’08 squad, a picture of ineptitude that lost 99 games, managed to hit .250.

As for runs scored, the 2014 team is on pace to score 501 runs over the course of a 162-game season. That total, when compared to the same worst six teams, is more than just the 468 scored by the ’69 team and the 486 scored by the 100 loss 1971 squad.

Okay, now for the cherry on top of what has been a pretty downtrodden article. Even with all of the offensive struggles, the 2014 edition of your San Diego Padres is still on pace to eek out 72 wins and suffer 90 losses. FAR from the worst record ever. But now that I read that back, the cherry is a bit sour, and the last bit is actually little consolation.

Ah well, if ‘Keeping the Faith’ was easy, Dodgers fans would do it.