Bogaerts shifts to shortstop with Padres in playoff push

SEATTLE -- With 17 games left in the regular season and the Padres atop a tight NL Wild Card race, Padres manager Mike Shildt opted for a new-look solution to the club’s shortstop issue.

Rather, it’s an old-look solution: Xander Bogaerts started at his former position on Tuesday night for the first time this season to begin San Diego’s two-game set against the Mariners.

“I talked to him a couple different times, but most recently on Sunday,” Shildt said, sitting in the visitors' dugout at T-Mobile Park before the Padres' 7-3 victory. “He said he’s comfortable over there. He’s comfortable with this field, having played in the American League. He felt good about that.”

Bogaerts certainly looked comfortable from the get-go, playing a part in all three outs in the first inning and starting a crucial inning-ending double play that got the Padres out of a bases-loaded jam in the seventh.

Regular shortstop Ha-Seong Kim has not played since Aug. 18 because of right shoulder inflammation. Shildt said on Sunday that Kim’s recovery has been slower than hoped. Rookie fill-in Mason McCoy had a .523 OPS entering Tuesday, prompting Shildt’s lineup shakeup.

“I’m back at short,” Bogaerts said. “We’ll see how it goes.”

The change set off a chain reaction in the Padres' infield, with Jake Cronenworth moving from first base to second base and Donovan Solano slotting in at first base for just his seventh start in the field since Aug. 1.

It’s a move to get the Padres’ best hitters in the lineup on an everyday basis. Over 80 games this year entering Tuesday, Solano had a .288 batting average with six home runs and 31 RBIs.

So with Kim in what Shildt described as “a holding pattern,” the San Diego skipper made the move that lets him load up the infield offensively -- in a couple different possible ways, with Luis Arraez, who’s on a red-hot run of his own, also an option to slot in at first base.

But all those changes were reliant on Bogaerts moving back to the left side of the infield, where he had played a grand total of nine innings this season before Tuesday.

A few weeks ago, the move for the four-time All-Star, who missed all of June with a left shoulder fracture, would have been a non-starter.

“Coming back from my injury, I probably wouldn't have done it,” Bogaerts said. “To be honest, I wasn’t diving or anything like that. You dive at second and you dive at short, but if I dive at second I can stay on the ground and just flip it over there. At short, the throws are longer, the dives are a little harder into the ground. So I don’t think it would have worked out a couple weeks ago.”

Bogaerts started 1,325 games at shortstop between his 10 seasons in Boston and his first season in San Diego last year.

With Kim hurt, he began getting work in pregame at his old position again, behind McCoy, to get used to the throw across the diamond. Twice in the past 10 days, he moved to shortstop midgame after McCoy was lifted for a pinch-hitter, making the one play that came his way in a total of six innings.

“I think my arm strength got back to where I can [play short],” Bogaerts said.

If the switch leads to the increase in offensive production that the San Diego staff is clearly angling for -- especially going into a quick set against one of the strongest starting rotations in the league -- and a few wins to pad the team’s Wild Card lead in the waning weeks of the regular season, Bogaerts said he’s all for it.

“I don’t see any other way you can put it,” he said. “That’s the only reason. There’s no beating around the bush. There’s nothing else; that’s all it is.”

But the one thing neither infielder nor manager would elaborate on was just how long term a move this was going to be.

“I’m there tonight,” Bogaerts said. “That’s all I know; I’m there tonight. … I guess [Shildt’s] got options now.”