San Diego Padres on pace to be one of the Worst Offenses in MLB History

San Diego, CA- Derek Togerson of NBC San Diego in his article “Padres Offense Flirting With History” described how the Padres are last in Major League Baseball in hits, runs, batting average, slugging percentage and on-base percentage. Togerson explained how this years offense is on pace to be one of the worst in franchise history, but actually this years offense is on pace to be one of the worst in Major League Baseball history.

Before we look at how historically bad the Padres offense is on pace to be, lets look at how pathetic they’ve been compared to Major League Baseball this season.

The Oakland Athletics lead Major League Baseball this season in runs scored with 318 runs. The average offense in Major League Baseball this season has scored 264 runs. In the offensive challenged National league the average team has scored 254 runs.

The Padres are the only team in baseball that has not yet scored 200 runs, as they have only managed to score 195 runs on the season. The Padres offense is so bad that even the Cincinnati Reds the second worst offense in baseball has scored 20 more runs than the Padres and they’ve played less games than them. The Padres are batting a ridiculous .218 on the season with only 452 hits. The average Major League Baseball team this season is batting .251 with 550 hits.

Now lets approach this historically.

The average Major League Baseball offense scores about 700 runs per season since 2000. The Padres are on a pace to score exactly 500 runs. If the Padres fail to reach 500 runs this season, they will be the first Major League offense to not reach 500 runs in a full season since the Padres themselves only scored 486 runs in 1971.

Even with the Padres struggles on offense the past decade, the Padres have still managed to score at least 600 runs every season this past decade. If the Padres could only produce their franchise average on offense to support this seasons top 5 pitching staff, the Padres could still be in serious contention and at the very least .500.

The 2010 Seattle Mariners and the 2013 Miami Marlins are considered by many as the worst offenses in Major League Baseball history. Both these offenses were at least able to reach 500 runs and averaged 3.17 runs per game. The Padres are on pace to only average 3.10 runs and less than 500 runs.

Here are the ten worst scoring teams in the past 20 years.

2010 Mariners 513, 2013 Marlins 513, 2011 Mariners 556, 2011 Giants 570, 2003 Dodgers 574, 2002 Tigers 575, 1993 Marlins 581, 2012 Astros 583, 2010 Pirates 587, 2003 Tigers 591.

For as rough as these offenses were, most of them at least almost reached 600 runs.

What makes this seasons offense even more offensive than they already are….is that they shouldn’t be and are too talented to be this bad. The 2010 Seattle Mariners and the 2013 Miami Marlins were fire sale teams that were expected to be historically bad. This years team is completely different. This offensive group has scored 650 and 620 runs the past few seasons and was expected to produce at a similar if not better amount this season, to allow the Padres to compete for a wildcard.

Instead this team has completely under performed and failed to live up to their potential up and down the lineup and are now pace to be in my opinion the worst offense in Major League history.