SAN DIEGO _ We knew the Padres were going to look different this season.
New uniforms, new manager, a few new coaches, many new players.
But then almost everyone decided to join in the renewal.
Fernando Tatis Jr. got better at everything. Dinelson Lamet found the ability to command his pitches. Manny Machado seems to have rediscovered the mojo he'd misplaced between Baltimore and Los Angeles. Eric Hosmer is hitting the ball in the air. Wil Myers isn't trying to reinvent the art of hitting every other day.
It really is something to see for those who have watched the Padres, as a group, mostly only look bad for some time.
Having won seven consecutive games to arrive at the halfway point of this season at 18-12, they are in second place in the National League West and one of just eight teams in the major leagues with at least a .600 winning percentage.
The organization pointed to this year as when it expected to be tangibly better.
But this good?
And as a group?
The metric OPS-plus take a player's on-base-plus-slugging percentage and considers factors such as ballparks and the era as it attempts to create a normalized standard. An OPS-plus of 100 is league average; so a player with an OPS-plus of 120 is considered 20% better than average.
The Padres have six players with an OPS-plus higher than 100, and all six are at 131 or above.
They have never had more than three qualifying players finish with an OPS of 131 or higher. The majority of their 51 previous seasons, the Padres did not have more than one player at 131 or higher. They haven't had a single player at 131 or higher since Seth Smith (134) in 2014.
It is only the halfway point, but that means there are just 30 games remaining. They just need to keep this new brand of Padres baseball rolling for another month.
Here is a look at what has gone right and what hasn't gone so well, with an eye on what is coming up as the Padres attempt to qualify for their first postseason appearance since 2006.
