SAN DIEGO – Before Manny Machado chose San Diego, before Fernando Tatis Jr. won his call, before CEO AJ Preller’s spending spree produced a full rotation of aces, before parents were good and fun and turned brown – Eric Hosmer signed on the dotted line.
In retrospect, this moment serves as a turning point for this franchise that had already been abandoned. But that late February 2018 afternoon, could Hosmer really imagine that? this?
“Definitely not at that extreme,” Hosmer said last week. “If you told me Manny would have been here a year after me, then, then [Blake] Snell i [Yu] Darvish, and I had heard a lot about Fernando, obviously, but I didn’t realize how good he really was until I got here and I could see him day in and day out.
“I definitely had an idea that this team was good and very talented. But that amount of talent on a team is pretty special. Surely you didn’t expect it. “
Surely Hosmer seems determined to make the most of it. In two games of the 2021 season, the Padres go 2-0, and he is the one who weighs. For the second game in a row, Hosmer homered and had three hits as the Padres resisted the D numbers, 4-2, at Petco Park on Friday night.
Hosmer threw a two-run home run on the right field in the third, and then attacked an insurance with a two-run RBI single in the seventh. This season he has made four trips to the set with runners in a scoring position, and has had success in all four.
“Start with: Eric wants to be up there right now,” said Jayce Tingler, Parent Manager. “He does a good job of aggressively on the playing fields where he can get the barrel.”
Hosmer’s 13 total bases through the team’s first two games of the season are the most important in the franchise’s history. He is also the first Padres player to start a season recording three hits in each of the team’s first two games.
So while Machado and Tatis have started the season on the cold side: they have combined to win 1-on-15 and Tatis has made three mistakes, the Padres have made up for it with a more than enough production of Hosmer, his signing original nine figures.
After a nervous win on opening day, in which Tingler admitted he had stayed too long with Darvish and then used the four main weapons for bulls, San Diego played Friday’s game as if you knew that he had 160 left. The Western National League will not win the opening weekend. So Blake Snell got a first hook after 4 2/3 innings on his Padres debut, and Tingler remodeled his bullpen to give an early break to some of his key arms.
Snell, of course, infamously received an early hook in his final start as well, throwing the 6th game of the world series for lightning strikes. I was cruising on Friday night, having hit eight in 4 innings with no score of 2/3. But the circumstances, as Snell was quick to point out, were different. The Padres had him with an initial throw limit of 85, and he had already surpassed that count by one.
“I’m not here to throw nine innings in the first game I throw,” Snell said. “It simply came to our notice then. No one remembers the first two months of a season. Remember how you finish and what you do in the postseason. … Let’s build this the right way, and we’ll start to get some input and some depth. Then we can have fun.
After Snell’s retirement, the Dorsals got two runs back in the seventh, when Ketel Mars scored at home with right-back Craig Stammen. But Hosmer responded with his RBI twice at the bottom of the box.
“He loves these opportunities and thrives on them,” Tingler said. “He’s been as successful as anyone in these situations.”
After his big performance on Opening Day, Hosmer set the bar high for the Padres offense, saying he thought he should be the best in MLB in 2021. When he arrived in San Diego, he was certainly the worst. What a difference they make a few years ago.
But Hosmer has never been one of the achievements “on paper.” The Fathers have built an excellent list, for sure. In Hosmer’s eyes, that doesn’t mean anything.
“We have a special group here,” Hosmer said. “We have a lot of talent. Now is the time to put that talent into practice. “
Through two games, Hosmer walks.