San Diego Padres Power

After 11 games, I did a post about the Padres power outage. The team was averaging fewer than 2 extra base hits in those games. My conclusion was that the Padres were struggling because they hadn't played many games outside Petco and because the sample size was too small.

Through yesterday's games, the Pads had played 74 games, 38 at home and 36 on the road. They now have 199 extra base hits, or 2.7 per game. At home, they are averaging 2.6 per game, and on the road, 2.8. So the home/road and sample size explanations hold up.

One other thing was in the original post...a table showing the Padres were hitting up the middle and to the opposite field more frequently, which tends to reduce slugging percentages. Here's the original chart.

     Pull  Middle  OppField
2008    22%    57%       21%
05-07   28%    54%       18%

Now here's the chart with updated figures:

     Pull  Middle  OppField
2008    36%    47%       17%
05-07   28%    54%       18%

That's an incredible shift. Not only has the pull percentage gone up, it has skyrocketed above the 05-07 averages. The opposite field percentage has regressed to the mean, but the team is hitting less to the middle and more to the pull side.