Padres place Wil Myers on DL with left foot contusion

The Padres’ most valuable hitter heads to the disabled list for the third time this season.

The Padres have placed outfielder/first baseman/man without a steady position Wil Myers on the 10-day disabled list with a left foot contusion, as the team announced prior to Saturday’s game against the Cubs:

The 27-year-old Myers has been a strong contributor when healthy, leading the team in slugging percentage (.517), OPS (.834), and OPS+ (124) while ranking first among Padres position players in Baseball-Reference WAR (1.6) and third in home runs (9) despite having just 183 plate appearances this season. Unfortunately, as that small plate-appearance total suggests, he’s had trouble staying healthy in 2018, and this is his third DL stint of the season; he was on the disabled list for 16 days in early April with right arm nerve irritation, then went on the DL again near the end of that month with a left oblique strain and ended up missing nearly two months with that injury.

While Myers has been a steady offensive contributor during his four-season tenure in San Diego, he’s been asked to move all over the field and has never really settled in at one spot. Though Myers was almost exclusively a corner outfielder prior to his acquisition by the Padres in 2015, San Diego initially tried to make him a center fielder between Justin Upton and Matt Kemp, but after that experiment failed, they moved him to first base. He spent a lot of time at that position in 2016-17, and while he may not have been the most technically-skilled first baseman in the majors, he certainly was one of the most athletic, leading big-league first basemen in UZR/150 in 2016. He was pushed off first base to accommodate free-agent acquisition Eric Hosmer prior to this season, and though he’s spent nearly all of his time in the outfield in 2018 (and has had a strong defensive season), MLB.com’s AJ Cassavell reported earlier this week that the team is considering moving Myers to third base at some point in the future. That move that could allow them to field their best offensive lineup with guys like Manuel Margot, Hunter Renfroe, Franmil Reyes, Travis Jankowski, Francisco Mejia, and Josh Naylor all perhaps factoring into next year’s outfield mix. While this injury shouldn’t keep him off the field for a terribly long time, it should be interesting to see if it alters their plans, as it presumably will limit his mobility and inhibit his ability to take grounders at third for a while.

The 23-year-old Reyes, a 6-foot-5, 275-pound slugger who has a 1.042 OPS in Triple-A this season but has struggled in limited big-league action, rejoined the Padres’ roster in place of Myers.