Padres notes: Jurickson Profar’s complicated relationship with switch-hitting; Joe Musgrove’s next step

Jurickson Profar has a new locker-mate in the Petco Park clubhouse. He won’t be at the field every day, but when he is he’ll have the chance to learn quite a bit in the shadow of the Padres’ lone switch-hitter.

But not that.

Profar wants no part of 6-year-old son Khairy — who has his own No. 10 locker next to dad’s — learning to hit from both sides of the plate.

“It’s hard,” Profar said with a laugh. “I’m a really good hitter right-handed. I think if I stayed right-handed I’d have a really good career.”

Profar, of course, is going really good right now from both sides of the plate.

The 31-year-old veteran is hitting .333/.407/.482 with three homers as a lefty against right-handed pitching and .278/.381/.556 with three homers as a righty against left-handers.

Of course, for his career, Profar, a natural right-handed hitter, has been slightly better from the left side (.716 OPS) than the right (.708 OPS). That’s the product of trying to catch his left-handed swing up to his right-handed swing.

In fact, Profar was so adept at hitting as a young teen that his friends in Curacao made him hit left-handed as a way to even the playing field, so to speak.

That’s when the switch-hitting began.

How he’s done a from both sides of the plate has varied drastically over the last nine years, with Profar’s attention to his left-handed swing taking away from what he believed he could do as a right-handed hitter. In 2021 in his first year in San Diego, for instance, he had a .698 OPS against righties (322 plate appearances) and a .478 OPS against lefties in far fewer plate appearances (78).

In the last few years, he’s moved from overloading the work on unnatural side to working equally on both.

It’s that workload that he wants to spare his son.

“The really good players like (Fernando) Tatis, (Manny) Machado, (Luis) Arraez, they only have one swing that they have to work on,” Profar said. “And I have to work on two swings every day.”

He added: “I started switch-hitting so late that I always took a lot of swings left-handed, left-handed, left-handed. Then my right-handed swing started going (bad). Until a couple years ago I started focusing on both. It’s a lot of work.”

Notable

• After playing catch the previous three days, RHP Joe Musgrove (triceps) threw his first bullpen since landing on the 15-day injured list, a significant step if it’s indeed going to be a minimum absence. Asked if this starts the clock toward a return to the rotation around May 20, Padres manager Mike Shildt said “we’ll see how he recovers.”