Padres' Manny Machado Has No Answer for His Career-Worst Struggles

San Diego Padres superstar Manny Machado is struggling to find success at the plate in 2026 — and he doesn't know why.

Machado is hitting .178 with 12 home runs, 35 runs batted in and a OPS of .619 across 67 games this season. Far from an All-Star performance, Machado's stat line is unfolding into a liability for a Padres offense that has spent much of the first half of the year searching for answers.

Machado summarized his struggles as a bad year, noting there were several factors contributing to the ongoing poor performance.

“I’m having a bad season,” Machado said to Kevin Acee of the San Diego Union-Tribune. “It is what it is. I didn’t have a full spring training [due to the World Baseball Classic]. There’s more to it than just one thing. I’m just not hitting right, you know. I’m hitting the ball hard right at people when I do hit it hard. And when I don’t, it’s something else. So it’s a little bit of a lot of things.”

Machado was then questioned as to what's gone wrong mechanically, to which he replied: “I really don’t know.”

Machado was given an example by Acee of a mechanical issue that has persisted this season, which is his front side lagging. Machado admitted that was just one of several issues he's experienced at the plate in 2026.

“I am leaking. I am coming off the ball. Yeah, I’m rotating, so I’m doing a different move, and it’s hard for me to get back to my normal hand-eye and stay through the ball. But there’s not one specific thing, it’s just an overall [combination of things]," Machado said.

The Padres star has found some consistency at the plate as of late. Over his last four games, Machado is hitting .333 with an OPS of 1.056. That, of course, is a small sample size.

Machado's defense remains elite as ever. He ranks in the 91st percentile in Outs Above Average with four. However, offensively, he ranks near or around the 50th percentile in almost every offensive category on Baseball Savant, including hard-hit percentage, chase rate, whiff rate and strikeout percentage, as well as average exit velocity.

The struggles are not from a lack of effort as Machado has worked tirelessly to find a remedy for the down year at the plate.

The Padres can only hope this is simply an outlier year for the 33-year-old, who is in the midst of the fourth season of an 11-year, $350 million contract extension he signed with San Diego. The team can't make a deep playoff run without Machado's bat, so he'll need to figure things out sooner rather than later.

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