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By the time it was past time to have a conversation about Xander Bogaerts, the decision already had been made.
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The Padres could no longer afford to have Bogaerts – a two-time World Series champ, a five-time Silver Slugger and a four-time All-Star who will turn 34 on Thursday – occupying a premium spot in the lineup with a sub-.640 OPS.
“It really wasn’t like a big conversation, honestly,” Padres manager Craig Stammen recalled of a July 21 talk with Bogaerts in Atlanta. “I kind of sat down with him in the batting cage, and I said, ‘Hey, I know you saw the lineup. I know you’re probably not happy about it. But No. 1 goal for us is to get you right and give you a chance to have success.'”
Bogaerts would be hitting eighth. His takeaway from that talk: “Play better.”
He certainly has since then.
Amid blistering second-half surges from Fernando Tatis Jr. and Jackson Merrill and loud if not consistent contact from Manny Machado, Bogaerts quietly put together the best month of his season, batting .315/.425/.479 for a .905 OPS in September as the Padres seized the NL’s top wild-card spot.
On Tuesday, he parlayed that strong finish into the postseason. Bogaerts homered during a two-hit game that helped make Game 1 a blowout of the Cubs. The blast was his second playoff homer as a Padre and the seventh of a long postseason resume, including his years with Boston. Bogaerts drove in the first run of Wednesday’s Game 2 with a second-inning single; he added a one-out double in the fourth.
“Experience is invaluable this time of the year,” Stammen said. “You just get different feelings playing postseason baseball. There’s more intensity, more adrenaline, focus is heightened. You’re facing better pitching typically. To have a guy that’s experienced at it and even experienced at a very young age and experienced that his whole career, looked last night that he felt very comfortable in that environment, and I think it’s a good sign for the Padres.”
That experience has been a crutch for the Padres in three postseason pushes with Bogaerts, who was hitting .303/.343/.545 in his last nine playoff games heading into Wednesday.
While the Padres certainly expected quite a bit more return on their $280 million investment, Bogaerts at least has been more than capable of turning up his game in October. He’s a blueprint for how to handle the ups and downs of a big-league season, especially the dips that plagued so many Padres before they took off this year.
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Jackson Merrill, who grew up a fan of Bogaerts and the Red Sox, has been watching the veteran since his own 2024 debut.
“You really respect people that go through their day-to-day (as) the same person every day,” Merrill said Wednesday. “They come in, they do what they do, they do their work and they’re professional about it. No matter how the season is going, (if the) team’s winning or losing, they’re going to be the same person every day and go out there and perform to the best of their ability.
“I’d say that’s a supreme example of a guy that’s a super professional and he does everything he can to win every day.”
Asked over the weekend, Bogaerts was rather simplistic about his upswing to finish the season.
“Swinging at good pitches,” Bogaerts said. “A couple balls falling. It’s been nice.”
Bogaerts wound up hitting eighth 24 times, but he last appeared that low on Sept. 8. Since then he’s largely alternated between the sixth and seventh holes as the drop in the order wound up having Stammen’s desired effect. He batted sixth on Wednesday.
“I felt like hopefully bringing him down a little bit took a little bit of pressure off of him, allowed him to work out whatever kinks he was working out, get him right,” Stammen said. “And then the other part of it was, and what he understands the most, is we needed to win games. We had to have our best lineup, and we felt him batting eighth at that time was our best lineup. He’s understood that, took it as the leader that he is, and he’s proved to us that he can bounce back and be a great player.”
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This story was originally published September 30, 2026 at 6:42 PM.