SEATTLE — The public messaging from all corners of the organization has consistently been that the Padres’ offense will be fine.
Again and again, they say it. And they believe it. They have to.
But that in no way reflects their approach has been to just wait for it to get better.
“We were like (a week) in,” manager Craig Stammen said, “and we were trying to figure it out.”
He spoke on Friday afternoon before the Padres went out and looked for three games like a team that was not ranked at or near the bottom of the major leagues in almost every significant offensive category.
Illustrating the swings a season can take — and how quickly — the Padres hit the ball all over T-Mobile Park in a three-game sweep of the Mariners.
“Lo and behold,” hitting coach Steven Souza Jr. said Sunday night, “we drive the ball when we don’t try to do too much.”
Padres hitting coach Steven Souza watches batting practice during spring training workouts at the Peoria Sports Complex on Thursday, Feb. 12, 2026 in Peoria, Ariz.(Meg McLaughlin / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
That has been the internal messaging for some time, and it was reiterated with some extra intentionality before this series.
“Exactly what we’ve been trying to figure out here over the last month or so,” Stammen said. “And we finally got it right for a couple days.”
As their offense has mostly ebbed and sometimes flowed this season, Padres hitting coaches and others in the organization examined everything from how they are presenting information and what information they are presenting and considered organizing hitters’ meetings differently and/or altering the terminology they use in communicating with hitters.
This is where it gets tricky.
Souza, the Padres’ 10th hitting coach in 13 seasons, gets an abundance of scrutiny. And he wears it.
“I’m the head hitting coach,” he said Friday. “So I’m responsible for it.”
That is something that rankles Stammen, among others.
“It’s not about him as a hitting coach,” Stammen said. “It’s about all of us collectively. It’s our hitting department. It’s all of us. … We’re struggling. Who is to blame? We’re all to blame. … Our performance, the buck stops with me, because I’m the manager.”
Nick Castellanos was asked about Souza on Saturday and was emphatic in his defense.
“Steven Souza is somebody who cares extremely much,” Castellanos said. “He’s somebody that is never going to show up to anything that matters to him not prepared. He has all of the right information. He goes above and beyond to give it to all of us. And now it’s on us how we take that information and (how) we’re gonna mold it into our individual forms of hitting that works for us. I don’t like when hitting coaches get a lot of blame. … Hitting is the hardest thing to do in sports, and a hitting coach is the most volatile job that you can have in a baseball organization.”
Manny Machado pointed the finger at the men who have bats in their hands:
“It’s the players,” he said. “The players on the field hit or don’t hit. We get the information, and then we do what we do with it.”
There has been some concern raised internally that Padres hitters have at times been caught off-guard by how some starting pitchers have attacked them. Most have said so in private. Stammen has publicly acknowledged it has happened.
The Padres are one of 12 teams who have hit relief pitchers better than starters this season. But no team has had the disparity they have — with a .209 average and .608 OPS against starters, both worst in the majors, and a .241 average (14th) and .734 OPS (8th) against relievers entering Sunday.
“I really don’t have a good answer on that one,” Souza said. “… You can get a little impatient because the starter is not going to do the same thing every time. And if you’re asking the hitting staff to say, ‘Hey, this is exactly what he’s going to do,’ that’s impossible.’ But we give them individual game plans, and give them overall. And I think for the majority of this year, they’ve done a really, really good job. I just think this is a stretch of baseball.”
By that, he meant that over the previous few weeks, the Padres had gotten away from their prescribed offensive attack.
According to multiple people who were present, the hitters’ meeting before Friday’s game included a firm admonishment by Souza that they had strayed from being disciplined and were trying to do too much. He reminded the assembled players that they had been among the league leaders in hard-hit balls and line drives the first month of the season.
“We kind of got away from that a little bit,” he would say later. “We kind of swung it a little bit more and chased a little bit more, got a little bit greedy at times.”
The message seemed to have gotten through.
On Friday, the Padres hit 12 line drives, tying a season high set on April 5 and twice as many as they had hit in all but five of their previous 24 games. The 10 balls they put in play with an exit velocity of 100 mph or more that night were more than in any of their previous 27 games, and just three of those were ground balls.
Saturday, they hit three home runs for the first time at sea level in their past 27 games at season level.
They hit eight more line drives Sunday. And with 10 hits in the 8-3 victory, they had 26 hits in the series, their most in any three-game stretch this month.
The weekend only fortified the belief that things will turn.
“It just kind of happens,” Souza said. “Obviously, we don’t sit back and just say, ‘Hey, it’s gonna turn.’ We keep working and have a direction. But at the end of the day, my faith has not wavered in this group. History says that they’re going to be just fine.”
