By any stretch of the imagination for a player of his stature, Padres All-Star third baseman Manny Machado is in a horrendous slump.
Despite a booming a two-run, first-inning homer into the far reaches of center field at Petco Park during Tuesday night’s 5-4 loss to the Dodgers, Machado is struggling with a .182 batting average, a .339 slugging percentage, a .617 OPS this season. He sports a 73 OPS+, a statistic in which 100 represents league average.
Machado said Tuesday night he doesn’t have a theory about what’s going on.
“I’m a baseball player, I’m not a theorist,” he said. “You got something for me?”
Amid the slump, it’s even easier to focus on his penchant to jog out routine plays. A grounder to short? Machado reacts with a jog, not a sprint.
“That’s my sprint,” Machado said. “I touch first base. What else do you want me to do? I don’t know what you’re referring to. Running to first base is running to first base. There’s guys like [Chandler] Sampson [of the Rays]; he runs to first base just like I do.”
Well not quite. Machado takes between 4.3 to 4.5 seconds to run from the right side of the plate to first base, above the league average of roughly 4.15 seconds. Sampson, to use Machado’s example, runs to first base in just 3.64 to 3.90 seconds. That’s a sprint.
Machado cautioned to use the eye test rather than analytics.
“Act like a scout,” he said.
But by any measure, Machado is not giving max effort when he runs out a grounder. He believes he’s saving energy, one of his former managers said, and that it functions like a governor to keep him fresh and healthy.
“Manny posts every day,” Padres manager Craig Stammen said, when asked if Machado has permission from management not to run grounders out. “That’s what I respect about him.”
“It’s not about looks,” Stammen said. “It’s about production.”
And now we get back to the heart of the matter.
With Memorial Day quickly approaching, the question is whether this is a strange anomaly or if, at 33 years old and in his 15th season, Machado is at the start of a serious decline.
The analytics website Baseball Savant indicates decline. In the three seasons since 2023, Machado’s bat speed has deteriorated from 76.7 mph to 71.7 mph right now. His fast swing rate has plummeted from 66.3 mph back then to 37.2 mph now. At that rate it’s almost impossible to chase 95-mph pitches.
That may explain why Machado is tied for 49th in the league in homers and 103rd in RBIs, hardly commensurate with his annual salary of $31.8 million a year for luxury tax purposes. The Padres are indebted to him at that rate through the 2033 season.
He said he’s working on it with the coaches.
“We’ve been working on some stuff,” Machado said.
But he wouldn’t disclose any detail about the “stuff.”
“I’m not going to tell you that,” he said. “That’s for me to continue to work on. You don’t need to know that.”
To be clear, this is not to say Machado isn’t working his butt off to correct his hitting problem.
“No one sees the extra swings in the cage and extra ground balls I take,” he said.
Certainly, that happens behind the scenes. Every world class baseball player puts in the work to maintain their status. Machado is no different.
Machado’s fate right now is part of a team-wide power and offensive outage. The Padres are at the bottom or near the middle of the league in batting average (.222), OPS (.664), home runs (49), and runs scored (200).
The Padres finished Tuesday night’s game with 10 players used in the lineup hitting under or just above .250 and three under .200, including, of course Machado.
It’s a wonder that they’re 29-19 and playing nip and tuck with the Dodgers for first place in the National League West. That’s simply not sustainable over the course of a 162-game season.
Fernando Tatis Jr. still hasn’t hit a homer and is earning $24.3 million this season. He leads the league with 50 hard hit outs, line drives that are finding gloves rather than open green spaces.
One would think considering the law of averages, this would eventually work itself out.
The Padres don’t have a captain, a la Aaron Judge with the Yankees, but Machado is certainly the acknowledged team leader. The club is built around him and his 11-year, $350 million contract.
This current Padres team has been toughened by recent playoff failure. They know what they have to do.
“We just have to play our game,” Machado said. “Take it day by day. Prepare. Got out there every day and compete. We’ve been doing a good job of it as a ballclub. It’s been fun to be a part of it.
“We’re winning ball games; that’s the most important part. I know where I’m going to be by the end of the season. Other guys have been carrying the load that we haven’t right now. There will come a time and place where we replace them.”
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