The Manny Machado Revival

Though the Padres have largely been treading water for the past six weeks while using a rather makeshift rotation — a situation not unlike that of the Dodgers, albeit with fewer ex-Rays (and probably X-rays) — that description does not extend to Manny Machado. The 32-year-old third baseman, who went 3-for-5 while driving in five runs during an 11-1 romp over the Dodgers on Tuesday, has been red-hot lately. Indeed, he’s putting together one of the best seasons of his 14-year career while doing his best to keep the NL West race a tight one.

Admittedly, Machado did not face the Dodgers’ best pitching on Tuesday. The Padres’ NL West rivals are without starters Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow, Roki Sasaki, and Tony Gonsolin, the last of whom landed on the injured list earlier this week due to discomfort in his surgically repaired elbow. On Tuesday, they used an opener, Lou Trivino, who retired Machado on a routine grounder in the first inning. In Machado’s next three trips to the plate, he faced bulk guy Matt Sauer, against whom he connected for RBI singles in the third (88 mph) and fifth (77.8 mph). Sauer, a thrice-optioned righty who was forced to Wear One on behalf of a gassed staff — he gave up 13 hits and nine runs in 4 2/3 innings — finally retired Machado on a grounder in the sixth, but even that drove in a run to give the Padres a 7-0 lead.

Machado wasn’t done. With the Dodgers resorting to using utilityman Enrique Hernández in the blowout — he threw 2 1/3 innings, the third-longest position-player pitching stint of the Wild Card era — Machado pounced on a 47.8-mph eephus pitch in the seventh inning, hammering it at 105.8 mph to left field for a two-run single to cap the Padres’ scoring:

Again, Machado wasn’t exactly facing any Cy Young hopefuls, but regardless of who has been on mound lately, he’s had little trouble. After hitting a respectable .279/.336/.423 (115 wRC+) in March and April, he’s batting a sizzling .352/.415/.577 (182 wRC+) since May 1, putting him in a virtual tie with reigning NL MVP Shohei Ohtani for the fifth-highest mark in the majors:

Unfortunately for the Padres, Machado’s hot streak has been offset by the struggles of Luis Arraez (.265/.300/.371, 90 wRC+), Xander Bogaerts (.238/.317/.302, 80 wRC+), and Fernando Tatis Jr. (.188/.287/.333, 79 wRC+) — not to mention a whole lot of part-time players — over that same stretch. The team has somehow squeezed 4.35 runs per game out of a .238/.305/.364 (92 wRC+) slash line in that span, with a pitching staff that’s been missing Michael King for the past three weeks as well as Yu Darvish and Joe Musgrove for the whole season; lately, Randy Vásquez, Stephen Kolek, and Ryan Bergert have rounded out the unit behind Dylan Cease and Nick Pivetta. Thus the Padres have gone 19-18 since May 1 after a 19-11 start, basically approximating a 20-18 stretch by the pitching-poor Dodgers. After losing two out of three to Los Angeles in the rivals’ first meeting since last fall’s five-game Division Series — the 11-1 rout was their only win — San Diego is two games back in the NL West race, 1 1/2 games behind a banged-up San Francisco team that has problems of its own.

Overall, Machado is hitting .320/.381/.510 with 10 homers, eight steals, and a 153 wRC+. If the season ended today, all of those rate stats except the slugging percentage would represent career highs, with the batting average perhaps the most surprising. He entered Wednesday hitting .325, second in the NL behind Freddie Freeman (.349) but slipped into third place behind Will Smith, whose 2-for-4 day pushed him to .324. While Machado owns a .281 career batting average, the only season in which he’s finished at .300 or better was the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign. His full-season high is .298, set in 2022.

That season, you may recall, was a great one for Machado, who finished as the runner-up in the NL MVP race while batting .298/.366/.531 (152 wRC+) with 32 homers, 7.1 fWAR (0.1 off his career high) and 6.8 bWAR. Machado used that stellar showing as leverage to opt out and upgrade his 10-year, $300-million contract through 2028 to an 11-year, $350 million one through 2033. He isn’t going to milk more millions out of the Padres with this one, but his 2.7 fWAR puts him in what’s basically a five-way tie for sixth in the NL:

Machado’s performance to date represents a strong rebound from his 2023 and ’24 seasons, both of which were solid (113 wRC+ and 3.4 WAR in the former, 122 wRC+ and 3.5 WAR in the latter) but fell short of the ZiPS projections Dan Szymborski ran when the slugger re-signed with the Padres. “Let’s just say that ZiPS isn’t overly enthusiastic about the contract, valuing Machado’s future services at $181 million over 11 years,” wrote Szymborski. I’m not here to relitigate that deal — I was skeptical he could improve upon his previous one and even more skeptical that it made sense for the Padres — but I am enjoying watching this bounce back. Machado is a polarizing player who’s done plenty to cast himself as the heel throughout his career; many have called him dirty, though for what it’s worth, Dustin Pedroia exonerated him for the takeout slide that turned the Red Sox second baseman’s career. I’ve always enjoyed Machado’s exceptional combination of contact, power, and defense, and the way he’s helped elevate the Padres-Dodgers rivalry into one of the game’s best.

What we’re seeing now from Machado is the result of his being back to full strength after years of elbow troubles. “It feels good to just be somewhat normal and be able to get some good swings out and not really be on the training room table every single day,” he told The Athletic‘s Dennis Lin recently. Recall that at the end of the 2023 season — a disappointing one for the Padres, who missed the playoffs in Juan Soto’s only full season with the club — Machado underwent surgery to repair the extensor tendon in his right elbow after battling tennis elbow for most of that great 2022 and the lesser ’23. Limited to DH duty over the final month of the latter campaign, he nonetheless finished strong, but he struggled at the outset of last year while again DHing. He didn’t play third base until April 26, the team’s 29th game, and hit just .241/.293/.361 (86 wRC+) through the end of May. He’s up there with the big boys over the past 365 days:

That won’t win a batting title, but it’s just another way of confirming that what we’re seeing isn’t some fluke. Machado is back near his peak form, at least on the offensive side, hitting the ball as hard as he has at any time in the past half-decade:

Machado has shed some top-end power, as evidenced by the decreasing maximum exit velocities, but his hard-hit rate, xSLG, and xwOBA are at Statcast-era highs, and both his barrel rate and average exit velocity are nearly there as well. His xwOBA is as high as it is thanks to the combination of that hard hitting, a lower-than-usual strikeout rate (16%), and a higher-than-usual walk rate (9.3%). His expected stats, average exit velocity, and hard-hit rate are all in the 92nd percentile or higher.

Beyond that, two things stand out to these eyes: the frequency with which he’s squaring the ball up and the extent to which he’s spraying hits everywhere. We’ve got less than two full years of bat-tracking data spread out over parts of three seasons, and Machado’s current average bat speed of 74.8 mph isn’t quite as fast as last year (75.2) or the second half of 2023 (76.7, whew), but it’s still good enough for the 87th percentile. What’s impressive is that his squared-up rate has improved from the 40th to the 52nd to the 72nd percentile in that span.

All of this is happening while Machado is pulling the ball less frequently than at any point in the past half-decade, on just 34.8% of all batted balls. His pulled air rate of 15.2% is an eyelash above last year but over six points down from his career high (21.5%) in 2022; on his Statcast page, the cell has turned from dark pink to pale blue. His opposite field production, on the other hand, is as good as it’s been since before the pandemic:

Aside from his average exit velo (seventh) and hard-hit rate (13th), none of Machado’s 2025 oppo stats are that close to major league leads, but those two categories are career bests, and as you can see, they’re contributing to his impressive overall numbers. His xSLG going oppo is higher than most of his career xSLGs overall. As hitting coach Victor Rodriguez told Lin, “He knows when he’s good is when he’s a gap-to-gap, line-drive guy.”

As for his defense, Machado remains visually impressive with his dives, slides, and long throws while crossing over into foul territory, but the metrics do suggest he’s in decline. His -3 FRV is his lowest mark since 2019, 12 runs below his total just two years ago. Still, particularly to this aficionado of third base defensive highlights, he’s entertaining as hell:

Machado hit his 350th career home run on June 5, as part of a seven-homers-in-16-games tear. He’s now just 19 hits away from 2,000, and 3,000 isn’t out of the question. According to Szymborski, he’s got a 31% chance of reaching the latter milestone, which is lower than that of Freeman (61% as of a few weeks ago) or Jose Altuve (41%). But because he’s about two years younger than the latter, he’s got a better chance of reaching 3,200 hits (16% vs. 11%), a mark that only 15 of the previous 33 3,000-hit club members have reached. Freeman, by comparison, has odds of around 50% for that higher mark. Even if Machado falls short of 3,000 hits, he’s already at 60.4 career bWAR, 42.6 peak bWAR, and 51.5 JAWS, the last of which is good for 18th among third basemen. He’s at 2.8 bWAR this year, and anything above 4.1 will push that peak score higher. Plugging in his rest-of-season ZiPS (2.6), for example, would take him to 63.0/43.9/53.5, past upcoming Hall of Fame inductee Dick Allen, as well as Sal Bando and Buddy Bell, into 15th in JAWS.

It’s all impressive stuff. In the wake of his past two seasons, it’s not hard to imagine Machado continuing his downward trend, still rating as an above-average regular but shedding a bit of value each year. That may yet be his fate, but right now, watching star-level Manny is a lot of fun.