Padres’ frustrating early funk is reviving a spring promise fans remember

Where on earth is the "Slam Diego" version of this offense we were promised? Not the “just wait until it clicks” version. The actual one. The one that was supposed to come into 2026 with a little more damage in its bat path and a little more fear in opposing scouting reports.

Yes, it’s early. But early doesn’t mean invisible. Steven Souza Jr. did not arrive in San Diego talking like a guy who wanted this offense to stay small. When the Padres hired him as their lead hitting voice under new manager Craig Stammen, the messaging was pretty clear: this lineup had more thump in it than it showed last year, and his job was to help bring that out. 

Souza talked in spring about controlling the zone, hammering mistakes, and finding a way to tap into the power that should already exist in a lineup built around Fernando Tatis Jr., Manny Machado, and Jackson Merrill. His own framing of the assignment was even less subtle: put the “slam” back in San Diego. 

Padres’ early offensive lull is bringing Slam Diego hopes back into focus

So far, that version has mostly been theoretical.

Through nine games, the Padres were sitting on just five home runs with a .324 team slugging percentage. Only one National League club had hit fewer homers: the Giants, with four. That is not a death sentence in early April, but it is absolutely light enough to get people looking back at all that spring optimism and asking when it is supposed to show up. 

The Padres came into this season knowing the rotation might need a grace period. Joe Musgrove is not walking through that door right now, and the back end has already looked shaky enough that asking the offense to carry a little extra weight did not feel unreasonable. When your margin for error on the mound is thin, the bats do not get to live in the “we’ll figure it out eventually” neighborhood for too long. 

To be fair, Sunday helped. Jackson Merrill’s go-ahead homer in the eighth and Manny Machado’s three-run shot gave the Padres an 8-6 comeback win in Boston and their first series win of the year. That matters. You don’t want to overreact to five home runs and then ignore the day the offense actually looked alive. But two of those five homers coming in one game at Fenway is also not enough to start doing victory laps about a power renaissance. 

That is why this next stretch matters. The Padres open a series on April 6 in Pittsburgh at 4-5, and the conversation around this lineup is still less about what it has become than what it keeps hinting it might become. Fans remember the promise. They remember the messaging. And when an offense is this quiet out of the gate, those spring ideas don’t disappear. They just come back sounding a lot more impatient.