Padres Struggles Bringing Back Flashbacks to 2023 Season

The San Diego Padres have a bad habit of playing poorly against bad teams and playing great against better ones. The underwhelming performance against the Los Angeles Angels resembled the 2023 version of the Padres.

“We play good against good teams, and we play bad against teams with bad records,” Jake Cronenworth said, via Kevin Acee of the San Diego Union-Tribune on Wednesday. “It can’t happen. We’ve done it in the past, same thing. We need to find a way to switch that. … These are series we need to win.”

The 3-2 loss on Wednesday was the Padres’ fourth loss in a row, dropping them to 15-20 against teams with records of .500 or below (including a 13-19 mark against teams with losing records). It also made them a losing team, at 32-33.

“These games are probably going to come and haunt us,” Manny Machado said Wednesday.

With this series and one against the Colorado Rockies in May, the Padres have been swept by two of Major League Baseball's four worst teams.

“I don’t think we’ve played down,” Cronenworth said. “We just haven’t taken advantage of the opportunities in the games we get against teams that are under 500. It seems like when we’re playing good teams that are over .500 — first-place teams, second-place teams, teams that go all the way to the playoffs — when there are chances late in the games, it seems like we’re capitalizing on them, scoring those runs we need to score, executing in those situations. It seems against the teams that we should have the lead going late in the game or we have that opportunity late, we’re not getting those runs in. I don’t know what that is. … Maybe it’s a little more heightened focus in those moments.”

The Padres will have to try and focus in on the next task at hand — a three-game series against the Arizona Diamondbacks. They happen to have a worse record than the Padres.