Padres shortstop Xander Bogaerts got candid about his team's season performances and might even be missing Boston a little.
After a productive decade in Boston, Xander Bogaerts got the financial security he was looking for in San Diego, joining a star-laden Padres team ahead of the 2023 season.
Little did he know how far the Padres' hopes and aspirations would come crashing to the ground.
On Sunday, San Diego lost 8-3 against the Washington Nationals, one of their most lopsided defeats by a bottom-feeder team in the NL. The Padres are now 9.5 games back from the first-place Diamondbacks, and their chances of making the playoffs are diminishing week after week.
Bogaerts' former team, the Red Sox, are sitting in dead last in the AL East, but at least they can boast a winning percentage. The Padres haven't even had a sniff of a .500 record in the last month or so.
Here's what Bogaerts somberly said of his team's performance this past weekend:
"C'mon, man. We're playing the Nationals. I don't think they have playoff aspirations. I mean, they obviously have a young team and they fight. But I wouldn't say anyone picked the Nationals to be in the playoffs. So you have to beat the teams that you have to beat."
Xander Bogaerts, Padres feel playoff baseball slipping from their fingers
Bogaerts, a homegrown Boston talent, may be looking back at that December of 2022 and wondering where it all went wrong. Maybe, he's even wondering if his move was worth it.
On paper, the Padres should not be this bad. With an offensive lineup of Juan Soto, Manny Machado, and Fernando Tatis Jr., among others, the Padres spent big to win big this season, but their rollercoaster ride of the 2023 campaign has been riddled by inconsistencies. Every time fans think the team has turned a corner, the Padres hit another wall and lose to a team in demoralizing fashion.
Yesterday, it was a blowout loss against Washington in which San Diego saw the game get away from them, and nothing seemed to go according to plan. The Nationals had an 8-1 lead in the seventh at which point the Padres' "lack of fight" started to show.
In his first year on the West Coast, Bogaerts is hitting .256 with an OPS of .780, and he's recorded eight homers and 27 RBIs. His slump is only part of his team's season-long struggles, and San Diego's latest series defeat puts them on a derailed track to miss the coveted NL Wild Card position. The most he and a down-bad Padres roster can do is try to clean up their game and build up some momentum against the Pirates in the next series.