Tiny silver lining?
There is this, what we have been seeing and feeling: an awful offense. The chart below is ranked wOBA by team. The Padres, the red bar, is the worst in the league.
That is not good. But I have been noticing that a lot of well struck balls are finding gloves. Looking at the disparity last night, the Padres and Giants had pretty similar expected batting averages (xBA) yet the Giants had 16 hits to the Padres 6.
Doing some simple math, Giants had 40 AB, got 16 hits for a .400 BA, well above .317 of their expected BA. The Padres had 6 hits in 32 AB for a .187 BA, well below their expected BA of .286.
Doing a quick review of hardest hit balls for the night, Padres had 4 of the 5 hardest hit balls of the night, 3 of which were outs. They all had healthy xBA, some bad luck.
But the maybe, tiny silver lining is that we have the largest gap between expected wOBA (what Statcast says our wOBA would be based on the quality of contact). Below is the same chart from above but with the gap between wOBA and expected wOBA. We have a sizeable gap:
Sorting by the gap, worst to best:
If you ranked teams by their xwOBA, San Diego is 17th out 30, so jumping from pathetic to mediocre. Still not good. But not as disastrous as it feels. Let's hope Statcast's xwOBA is worth something.
Posted Apr 1, 2026, 8:32 PM UTC