Jackson Merrill is back to looking like the hitter the Padres thought they were getting.
After a brutal opening stretch to the 2026 season, the center fielder has started to find his rhythm in July, and the biggest change is easy to spot: he’s using the whole field again. That adjustment has brought his bat back to life and given San Diego at least one lineup piece it can trust.
Merrill was sitting at .211 entering July, a rough place for a player with his kind of bat-to-ball skill. The production had vanished, and a middle-of-the-order expectation was turning into a hole in the lineup.
Since the calendar flipped, though, the numbers have moved in the right direction. He owns an .864 OPS this month, has hit seven of his 15 home runs in July, and has pushed his average from .211 to .231 since July 1.
The way he’s getting there matters. Merrill is pulling pitches he can handle, driving balls up the middle, and even sending a few the other way.
That kind of all-fields approach is exactly what made him such a dangerous hitter in the first place. When he’s locked in, there isn’t an obvious answer for opposing pitchers.
Early on, he looked like a hitter trying to do too much damage on every swing. In July, he’s letting the pitch decide the result, and the power has come with it.
One of those opposite-field swings came in a moment MLB highlighted on July 19, 2026, when Merrill “pounds one to the opposite field and puts the @Padres up big in the 4th 💪”
Even with the turnaround, the .231 average is still not where it needs to be, and there’s plenty of work left before his full-season line looks like what the Padres envisioned. But the progress is real, and it came during a stretch San Diego badly needed it. The Padres swept Miami, though the Marlins had lost 12 straight and never scored more than three runs in any game of the series.
Merrill still did his part, and that matters with the trade deadline approaching and uncertainty hanging over the club. His resurgence doesn’t solve everything, and it doesn’t guarantee better days for the franchise this season. But the bat is alive again, the home runs are piling up, and July has become the month Jackson Merrill found himself.
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