Good weeks and bad weeks, ups and downs, slumps and heaters — they’re all part of the baseball season.
Sometimes a player will hit, reach base, and his teammates can’t drive him home. He still did his job, right? Baseball isn’t a solo game.
It was a tough week for the San Diego Padres, who went 3-4 on the road with the four losses coming consecutively from Tuesday through Friday, but their third baseman, Manny Machado, did his part, going 13-for-29 with four doubles and a homer, driving in six runs and scoring one more to earn World Baseball Network’s International Major League Baseball Player of the Week honors.
Machado, who was born in Florida but has represented the Dominican Republic in the 2017 and 2023 World Baseball Classics, had a pair of RBIs in the Padres’ 9-7 loss at St. Louis on Thursday, going 3-for-5 with a run scored and hitting a two-run homer that scored Luis Arraez. He saved his best game of the week, though, for Sunday, capping the Padres’ 10-game road trip following the All-Star break by going 4-for-5 in a 9-2 win at St. Louis, hitting two doubles and driving in three runs for San Diego.
Three weeks ago, Machado passed the 2,000 career hit mark and last year, he took the Padres’ franchise lead in home runs when he passed Nate Colbert with his 164th dinger in San Diego uniform.
With 361 career homers, more than 2,000 hits, and 60.8 bWAR over his 14 MLB seasons, Machado is looking more and more like a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame.
With a star-studded lineup that includes Machado, Arraez, and Xander Bogaerts, could this be the year that the Padres finally take the National League West pennant? They’re just four games back of the Los Angeles Dodgers with 56 games to be played.
That’s a lot of baseball, but suffice to say, if the Padres do win the division title this year, Machado, who’s batting .294/.355/.491 with 19 homers and 68 RBIs, will have a big part of it.
Photo: Manny Machado doubles during the first inning of a baseball game against the St. Louis Cardinals Sunday, July 27, 2025, in St. Louis. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)
