3 Padres overreactions after star players’ early-season struggles

The 2026 MLB season is barely a week old, and the panic button in San Diego is already getting worn out. Under first-year manager Craig Stammen, the Padres have stumbled out of the starting blocks, dropping early series against the Detroit Tigers and San Francisco Giants. The rotation entered the year with legitimate question marks, but the real shock has been the deafening silence from the lineup.

​When Fernando Tatis Jr. challenged the offense to “come off the gate hauling ass” in Spring Training, this was hardly the response he or the San Diego faithful had in mind. Through the opening stretch, the Padres are staring up from the bottom of the NL West, and the fanbase is unsurprisingly looking for scapegoats.

The Xander Bogaerts contract is officially an unplayable albatross

There is no sugarcoating it: Xander Bogaerts has looked completely lost at the plate to open the 2026 campaign. Through his first 28 at-bats, the veteran shortstop is slashing a dismal .143/.172/.179. He has yet to hit a home run, has driven in just three runs, and looks to be pressing at the dish.

It is incredibly easy to look at an aging infielder on a massive 11-year, $280 million contract and assume the cliff has arrived the moment he falls into a slump. But declaring Bogaerts washed in the first week of April is a classic overreaction.

​We have to remember who Bogaerts is. This is a player who finished the 2025 season on an absolute tear, posting a .299 average from mid-July onward and serving as a steadying force for this offense. Timing is notoriously the last thing to click for veteran hitters in the spring. Right now, Bogaerts is chasing pitches he normally spits on, and the barrel accuracy simply isn’t there yet. However, players with a career .286 average and approaching 2,000 career hits do not simply forget how to hit over the winter. Give him a few weeks of reps to recalibrate his timing mechanism before writing the eulogy on his bat.

The league has completely figured out Jackson Merrill

The 22-year-old phenom who took the league by storm has had a surprisingly quiet start to the year. Through 27 at-bats, Merrill is hitting just .185 with a .241 on-base percentage. He has managed one home run and four RBIs, but the consistent, line-drive contact that made him a breakout star has been mostly absent.

The “sophomore slump” or “league adjustment” narrative is low-hanging fruit for analysts, but applying it to Merrill right now is wildly premature.

​Development in the Major Leagues is never perfectly linear. Pitchers undoubtedly spent the offseason studying Merrill’s heat maps, locating the exact zones where he does damage, and they are attacking him differently right now. They are testing his discipline and forcing him to prove he can lay off the breaking stuff out of the zone. This is the natural cat-and-mouse game of professional baseball.

​Merrill has elite raw tools, incredible bat-to-ball skills, and a mature approach for a 22-year-old. Overreacting to a 5-for-27 stretch ignores the fact that he has a career .277 average and an OPS approaching .800. He is currently going through a necessary adjustment period. Once he recognizes how the league is pitching him and begins making the counter-adjustments, those hard-hit rates will normalize. Panic here is entirely unwarranted; this is just part of the growth process for a young franchise pillar.

Jake Cronenworth is a black hole in the lineup

The start of 2026 has been downright miserable for the Padres’ second baseman. Jake Cronenworth is sitting on a .160 batting average with a .250 OBP through 25 at-bats. Even more concerning for San Diego is the absolute lack of run production, zero home runs and zero RBIs to his name thus far.

When a team is losing, an empty stat line from a core veteran becomes a lightning rod for criticism. Fans are already clamoring for Cronenworth to be dropped to the bottom of the order or benched entirely until he figures it out.

​The reality is that Cronenworth has always been a slightly streaky hitter who makes his money on grinding out at-bats and providing elite defensive value. Last year, he proved his worth by ending the season on a phenomenal 16-game on-base streak and reaching base safely in 115 of his 135 games.

​Cronenworth is currently out of sync, but his value isn’t purely tied to his slugging percentage. His glove remains exceptional, and he is still taking pitches and working counts, even if the hits aren’t falling. Slumps happen to everyone, but Cronenworth’s elite fielding and track record of finding a way on base mean he deserves a much longer leash. The Padres need his leadership and defense on the field while he works through his early-season mechanical kinks in the batting cage.

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