SAN DIEGO — Before Manny Machado picked San Diego, before Fernando Tatis Jr. earned his callup, before general manager A.J. Preller’s spending spree turned up a rotation full of aces, before the Padres were good and fun and wore brown — Eric Hosmer signed on the dotted line.
In retrospect, that moment serves as something of a turning point for this once-forlorn franchise. But on that late-February afternoon in 2018, could Hosmer have truly envisioned this?
“Definitely not to this extreme,” Hosmer said last week. “If you were to tell me Manny would’ve been here a year after me, then followed by [Blake] Snell and [Yu] Darvish — and I’d heard a lot about Fernando obviously, but I didn’t realize how good he actually was until I got here and got to see him on a day-to-day basis.
“I definitely had an idea about this team being good, having a lot of talent. But this amount of talent on one team is pretty special. You certainly didn’t expect this.”
Hosmer sure seems determined to make the most of it. Two games into the 2021 season, the Padres are 2-0, and he’s the one doing the heavy lifting. For the second consecutive game, Hosmer homered and had three hits as the Padres held off the D-backs, 4-2, at Petco Park on Friday night.
Hosmer became the first player in Padres history with three hits in each of the team’s first two games of a season. His 13 total bases in that span are also a franchise record.
Hosmer gave the Padres a 3-0 lead with a two-run home run to right field in the third. After Ketel Marte’s two-run homer cut San Diego’s lead to one in the seventh, Hosmer tacked on an insurance run with a two-out RBI single in the bottom of the inning. He’s made four trips to the plate this season with runners in scoring position, and he has hits in all four.
Snell started and made his Padres debut, striking out eight in 4 2/3 scoreless innings. The left-hander allowed four hits and two walks, and he exited with a runner on second in the fifth after he had thrown 86 pitches.