SAN FRANCISCO — The Padres are on the verge of breaking the franchise record for home runs hit at home.
They will do it by accident.
At least, as they begin their final homestand of the season on Monday, they certainly have not done it on purpose.
New hitting coach Victor Rodriguez came to the job in the offseason having seen on a few occasions — and heard on many more — how difficult it was to hit home runs at Petco Park.
The approach he would instill was simple.
“So if it’s hard to hit homers, why would we look for homers?” Rodriguez said Sunday. “Let’s focus on line drives. Let’s get doubles. So that’s when we came up with ‘Petco Park hitting.’”
That was even the name of a drill in spring training in which targets were set up near the area where the second baseman and shortstop would stand. The philosophy of hitting the ball hard on a line was constantly preached and is still reinforced regularly in meetings.
“Let’s focus on hitting line drives, not homers,” Rodriguez said. “By thinking less power, you might have more power.”
The season-high seven doubles the Padres hit Saturday night were a product of the approach.
“It doesn’t matter where we are at,” Rodriguez. “When we say ‘Petco Park hitting,’ it means line drive, gap to gap.”
The home runs are also a result of the approach. And it is not as paradoxical as it sounds.
“We’re not playing in a ballpark that every fly ball is going to go out,” Fernando Tatis Jr. said Sunday after hitting a home run on a fly ball that was just high enough to not qualify as a line drive. “So, you know, as we try to build as a lineup a contact team, and we have, and we also have power. But we have emphasized being better hitters than power hitters. So I feel like that has given us a lot this year.”
Tatis, who missed 2½ months of the season with a stress reaction in his right femur, is one of six Padres with at least 16 home runs. (He has 18 homers, Manny Machado 26, Jackson Merrill 23, Jurickson Profar 22, and Kyle Higashioka and Jake Conrneworth 16). That ties the Padres with the Diamondbacks and Orioles for most players in the majors with at least 16 homers.
The Padres have hit 99 home runs at Petco Park this season, two shy of the team home record set in 2019.
The 173 total home runs they have hit this season does not have them on a record pace. But it does rank sixth all-time, 46 shy of the record 219 hit by the ‘19 squad.
The Padres hit 205 home runs last season, but just 91 at Petco Park.
Line drives, it would seem, are the difference.
The Padres’ 20.8 percent line drive rate is second in MLB to the Dodgers’ 21.3 percent. The 1,053 line drives the Padres have hit are most in the major leagues, as are their 28 line drive home runs. (Of those, 17 have come at home.)
Still, the Padres rank just 12th in the league in home runs and are getting just 39.9 percent of their runs from homers, which ranks 16th. So the real manifestation of what is preached by Rodriguez (and assistant hitting coaches Morgan Burkhart, Mike McCoy and Pat O’Sullivan) is the Padres’ MLB-leading batting average (.265).
“That was the goal from spring training,” Rodriguez said. “I was not expecting to break anything. We were expecting just to keep hitting line drives, doubles, hits. And we have done it. … I knew that if you focus on staying short to the ball and drive the ball, you have a chance to hit more homers, because you are in a better position to drive the ball. And hitting is driving the ball.”
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