Bogaerts breaks out of slump with 5 straight hits to end tense Dodgers series

LOS ANGELES -- In the top of the ninth inning on Wednesday night, Xander Bogaerts delivered one of his biggest hits of the season. A game-tying double at Dodger Stadium. A missile off the bat at 112.2 mph, his season high. “At last,” Bogaerts must’ve been thinking. It’d been a miserable month at the plate, within a mostly miserable first half, and finally, here was a moment worth savoring.

Only … he couldn’t savor it very long. The Dodgers quickly escaped with the game still tied, and Will Smith followed by launching a walk-off home run in the bottom of the frame. A sullen Bogaerts ambled to his locker after the game and met with reporters.

“One of the few positive things I do,” he said. “It don’t even last a couple minutes.”

Hey, he’ll get to enjoy this one, at least: The Padres salvaged the finale of their four-game series against the rival Dodgers, largely on the strength of Bogaerts’ four-hit night. He homered in the first, doubled in the seventh and scored three times in a 5-3 victory at Dodger Stadium.

It will be overshadowed by the fireworks in the ninth inning, but this was the type of night that the Padres have been waiting for from Bogaerts all season. In the third year of his 11-year contract, the veteran shortstop hasn’t come close to meeting expectations. The Padres fanbase, as a result, has been hard on Bogaerts.

Possibly even as hard as Xander Bogaerts has been on Xander Bogaerts.

“Xander is human,” said Padres manager Mike Shildt. “Xander cares. This is a guy with an exceptionally high care factor about his team.”

Naturally, Bogaerts’ performance this season has worn on him. Even after Thursday’s three-hit night, his .239 batting average and .653 OPS are both career lows.

Shildt was very quick to note that Bogaerts’ offensive struggles have not seeped into other aspects of his game. Back at shortstop this season after last year’s temporary move to second, Bogaerts has been rock solid (worth three outs above average). He’s 13-for-13 in stolen-base attempts as well, the most successful steals in the Majors without being caught.

“He’s playing as good a defense as anybody in baseball the last three weeks,” Shildt said. “He’s been great on the basepaths. There are a lot of positive things that unfortunately get masked by some luck in batted balls. There are some other things that are there that people don’t look at as much -- understandably because the offense dominates the narrative.”

Lately, as Shildt has been pressed on Bogaerts’ struggles, he’s consistently pointed to rough batted-ball luck as the biggest reason behind them. That’s a claim that’s worth parsing.

Statcast takes the quality of contact with each batted ball -- the exit velocity and launch angle -- and can give us a rough estimate of what a player’s stats “should” look like. Here are some numbers entering play Thursday:

Batting average: .227
Expected batting average: .263

Slugging percentage: .314
Expected slugging percentage: .380

Weighted on-base average: .294
Expected weighted on-base average: .317

You couldn’t possibly argue: Bogaerts has gotten unlucky on balls in play. But even if you take those expected numbers and apply them to Bogaerts’ season, the Padres should realistically expect more from their No. 5 hitter. Put another way: Bogaerts hasn’t been as bad as it looks, but he also hasn’t been good.

Bogaerts seems to grasp this, and he hasn’t cited his batted-ball luck, except when it’s otherwise brought up to him.

“I’m never big on ‘unlucky,’” Bogaerts said. “Throughout my whole career, I’ve been very fortunate. It’s gone my way. But this is definitely the year where it’s been very weird. Unlike me, kind of. It doesn’t matter where I hit it, it’s right at someone. It’s very weird, very frustrating.

“But they say it turns around, and whenever they come, they come in bunches. So I’m looking forward to that streak.”

A day later, Bogaerts stood at his locker with hits in five consecutive at-bats. Hey, maybe that streak has already begun?

He wondered aloud whether his decision to skip batting practice on Wednesday was the spark he needed. (Bogaerts estimated that he’d skipped BP only once or twice before in his 13 seasons.)

"Seventy-something [games], I was playing like trash,” Bogaerts said. “Just one without it, I mean, it’s nice to have the results. Hopefully that’s the fix.”