Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at the friendly confines of HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related subjects!:

1. A podcast war was declared
2. Influencer economics
3. Padres rotation is cheeks
4. See how 97.3 does if they lose their highly rated shield

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at the friendly confines of HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related subjects!:

1. Uh maybe pump the brakes on the sale will close soon
2. Padres sign a large quantity of has-beens
3. Overall offseason: is the roster actually better?
4. Daygo Vibes checks in with the fellas

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at the friendly confines of HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related subjects!:

1. We know nothing about Craig Stammen
2. Are the Padres a distressed asset?
3. Who would buy this?
4. Don Tricker checks in with the fellas

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart welcomed Section 1904’s John Gennaro to meet up at the friendly confines of HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related subjects!:

1. Mike Shildt (incompetent boob) “retired”
2. Shildt theories
3. The complete nothing of AJ’s zoom call
4. Replacement theories

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at the friendly confines of HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related subjects!:

1. Wrap-up of the crushing defeat of our beloved Padres
2. Mike Shildt is an incompetent boob
3. Who gets canned?
4. Wow completely free and ad-free!

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at the friendly confines of HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related subjects!:

1. The Padres broadcast’s very weird coverage of the Wild Card celebration
2. Wild Card round roster decisions
3. Predictions
4. DAYGO VIBES calls in with their latest update

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at the friendly confines of HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related subjects!:

1. We come up with the answer for 97.3’s midday show
2. They bought
3. Time to win the whole goddamned thing
4. Greup is grasping

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at the friendly confines of HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related subjects!:

1. Who’s jerking Mud around? And why?!
2. Bad stretch
3. Buy or sell? There is only one answer
4. Upcoming schedule

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at the friendly confines of HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related subjects!:

1. Dodgers Series
2. Line up black holes
3. Ready to euthanize Brandon Lockridge
4. Don Tricker checks in!

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at the friendly confines of HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related subjects!:

1. Bob Chandler recap
2. The Vedder Cup did not go as planned
3. Ready to euthanize Jason Heyward
4. Tough stretch of schedule upcoming

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at Bullys East to fulfill a lifelong wish of HJ: to sit down with our BELOVED Bob Chandler and the ultimate BRO Bernie Wilson. This is 165 minutes of completely free and ad-free content. HJ’s mic was turned off for a 20 minute period after he told his 3 year old to pipe down and forgot to turn it back on, CLASSIC GWYNNTELLIGENCE!:

1. Bob Chandler should be in the Padres Hall of Fame and the voters should be publicly shamed for not inducting him
2. Bernie tells a great DJ Wayne story
3. Too many stories to count about the history of the Padres
4. Kevin Brown jumping out of the team bus in 1998 to direct traffic
5. HJ’s 3 year old pukes all over the Bullys East restroom floor mid-episode
6. SO MUCH MORE!

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics with:

1. Still the #1 completely free and ad-free Padres podcast!
2. Undefeated (until right before I hit post)
3. John Seidler’s reign of excellence
4. What happens with Greupdogg?

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres and media related topics with:

1. John Seidler, Our New Supreme Leader
2. Cactus League Anti-Heroes
3. Catcher Disaster
4. 97.3’s Midday Travesty

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at HJ Manor to welcome in fellow podcaster Darren Smith to discuss a variety of Padres and media related topics with:

1. Fanfest: what’s the point?
2. Optimizing for the 2025 season
3. What was the greatest era of Padres baseball?
4. What does John Seidler even look like
5. Elias Diaz? FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAART

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at HJ Manor to welcome in fellow podcaster Darren Smith to discuss a variety of Padres and media related topics with:

1. The Padres media environment
2. Seidler family drama
3. How great Josh Byrnes was
4. How great Pat Murphy was
5. Discussing why Mike Dee got fired

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics with:

1. Selling off Tony’s legacy for a few grand
2. Recapping the playoff disappointment
3. What hurt the most
4. Offseason outlook
5. DAYGO VIBES calls in with an important update

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics with:

1. PLAYOFFS!
2. The Dodgers Series
3. Let’s not have Jackson Merrill bunt
4. Prominent Through The Fence writer calls in with a voice mail!

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

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Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics with:

1. Why does this year’s 89ish 90ish win team feel better than the 2000’s era Padres?
2. Xander Bogaerts refusal to play shortstop
3. Playoff positioning
4. Reinforcements are coming? If so, we’ll be coming too

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics with:

1. Things are good! They’re actually good!
2. Erik Greupner as third mic on the broadcast
3. The value proposition of going to a Padres game
4. Voicemails: The 5.5 boys and a Coach caller call in!

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics with:

1. Maximizing the window and cashing out the farm, THUMBS UP!
2. New expectations: making the Wild Card isn’t enough anymore
3. 760 completely gives up, Coach still can’t make the cut
4. A pillar of Padres Twitter called in to predict the trade deadline, 100% ACCURATE!

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics with:

1. Discussing the Guardians series
2. Reliever usage
3. Tom Cosgrove MANIA in Lake Elsinore
4. Wild Card threats

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at aristocratic and luxurious Stewart Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics with Madfriars’ Mark Wilkens:

1. Are any prospects really untouchable and why? Is Salas untouchable?
2. Prospect Updates (mostly bad!)
3. Mark Wilkens drops some BIG news
4. Padres gotta make some moves and not blow the window
5. Don Tricker checks in!

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at stately HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics:

1. We listen and react LIVE to the Mike Shildt Ben and Woods interview
2. Five losses in a row
4. Trade the farm, windows closing
5. Daygo Vibes checks in with a voicemail

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewar met up at stately HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics:

1. Shildt representing abdication of accountability
2. Enough about attendance records already
3. The TV broadcast
4. Loving Estrada
5. Solanomania

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewar met up at stately HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics:

1. The embarrassing Rockies sweep
2. Shildt stinks and we don’t like him
3. The Manny mess
4. Voice mails
5. Media coverage of the Padres

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewar met up at stately HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics:

1. Chicago fans vs us
2. Luis Arraez is objectively good
3. Prospects? The window is now as our prospects flounder or get traded
4. Hosmer story: Mud was too mean to him
5. Don Tricker checks in with the guys

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

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Harold James and Corey Stewar met up at stately HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics:

1. The hitting is actually good
2. The pitching is actually bad
3. Mike Shildt is mean to our beloved Dennis Lin
4. Celebrity voice mail
5. Turd polishers

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

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Harold James and Corey Stewar met up at stately HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics:

1. The team is 7-8
2. There’s good stuff going on
3. Only one podcast deemed Profar’s signing worthy of an emergency podcast
4. The TV broadcast
5. Don Tricker checks in

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart welcome in Big Miz fresh out of marijuanas rehab and met up at stately HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics:

1. Dylan Cease
2. Uh there’s still big holes
3. Mark Wilkens’ and Sportsbrain’s enormous wangs
4. Eric’s new position as team official
5. Irrelevant olds ranting about 97.3’s midday show

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and John Conniff from Madfriars.com met up at our beloved Nando’s Peri-Peri in Washington DC to discuss a variety of Padres related topics:

1. Jackson Merrill’s rush to the majors
2. Minor League stories
3. Mark Wilkens’ enormous wang
4. Why AAA El Paso is still needed
5. 2024 Outlook

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at stately HJ Manor over champagne to discuss a variety of Padres related topics:

1. When are the Soto savings being spent?
2. Stop invoking Peter’s name to defend slashing payroll
3. Two sentient pieces of corrugated cardboard address the media
4. Still missing five starting positions
5. JD Martinez chat

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up literally in a public park playground to cover BREAKING PADRES NEWS:

1. Jurickson Profar IS A SAN DIEGO PADRE. AGAIN!

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

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Harold James and Marver met up at loud and boisterous Lost Abbey to discuss a variety of Padres related topics:

1. The Soto Trade
2. Marver’s roadmap to fix the 2024 roster
3. Ohtani complaining
4. Salary cap chat
5. Marver defends Coach’s honor

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

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Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at stately HJ Manor over champagne to discuss a variety of Padres related topics:

1. The Soto Trade
2. Every analysis of the trade and free agents involves the team being worse than 2023
3. Coach Kentera checks in
4. Voicemail calls
5. Don Tricker unveils his new ad read

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, the Audacy app, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at stately HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics:

1. Accepting Shildt and letting AJ go Full Preller
2. Our beloved Peter Seidler
3. Every Soto trade scenario doesn’t involve being better than last season
4. We welcome a new sponsor of the show
5. Don Tricker checks in

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at stately HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics:

1. Offseason talk couldn’t be any worse right now
2. Playoff chat
3. Desperate attempts to escalate our podcast war with Padres Jacuzzi
4. The free agents this offseason totally blow
5. The Pals speculate on the condition of AJ Preller’s condo

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at stately HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics:

1. Sentient sheet of corrugated cardboard Erik Greupner all but confirms that payroll is being slashed
2. How boned we are if payroll is cut to the level Acee reported
3. The Lin Bomb
4. Padres Director of Player of Health Don Tricker has another great appearance on the podcast
5. Padres star Jose Azocar calls in!

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at stately HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics:

1. Manny could use some leadership classes
2. Seidler and Greupner still cowering in hiding
3. Trent Grisham: should he be euthanized?
4. Bill Walton calls in!
5. Padres Director of Player of Health Don Tricker has another great appearance on the podcast

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at stately HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics:

1. We don’t need players to be swell guys, we need them to produce on the field
2. Injuries
3. Do we need to care if Blake Snell wins the Cy Young?
4. Padres Director of Player of Health Don Tricker makes a triumphant return to the podcast

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up literally in a public park playground to cover BREAKING PADRES NEWS:

1. Jurickson Profar IS A SAN DIEGO PADRE

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics over morning mimosas:

1. All hope is lost
2. This team is terrible
3. 2024 – what do we do
4. Voice Mail Segment – GWYNNTELLIGENCE EXCLUSIVE!!!! Don Tricker calls in

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics over morning mimosas:

1. Manny Machado’s August
2. Love to see Tatis smile
3. AJ is actively sabotaging Bob Melvin
4. An unprecedented attack by The Kept Faith and Padres Hot Tub Patreon paywall protected podcasts
5. The hot new and completely original listener voice mail segment! You won’t want to miss it.

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics over morning mimosas:

1. AJ Preller’s disastrous 97.3 interview
2. This team totally sucks right now
3. Will they sell or buy
4. 2024 is the last hurrah
5. A voice mail from Joey Lucchesi!

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics:

1. This fun Giants series
2. Umpiring
3. What to do about AJ and Bob
4. How much is each player over/under performing
5. New innovative and fresh segment!

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

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Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics:

1. The team looks better
2. Pitching has been sexy
3. Defending @TooMuchMortons’ honor
4. No Playoffs? Fire AJ
5. Austin Nola should be fired into the sun

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

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Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics:

1. General Padres related depression
2. The Padres still suck at hitting
3. Whiteville, NC
4. Is there a fix?
5. Trevor Hoffman is a Cure fan

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

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Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics:

1. 5.5 Podcast becoming a soccer pod
2. The Padres suck
3. Trent Grisham sucks
4. Catchers suck
5. Asante Samuel sucks
6. Cyber bully Bill Center into making another top 100 Padres list.

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

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Welcome back Padres fans! The 2023 season is in full swing and our beloved Padres are tied for first atop the NL West standings. They are 6-4 10 games in and just 10 games from now will be welcoming back Fernando Tatis Jr. This offense is about to be even more formidable. Joe Musgrove is nearing his return, so the pitching staff is about to get a boost as well. It should be interesting to see how the starting staff rounds out with Musgrove back. Bob Melvin said Ryan Weathers has earned another start and he will get the ball on Tuesday in New York. Yu Darvish will start Monday night against Max Scherzer in what should be a decent duel. But if Weathers has another start that Melvin likes, does that mean Weathers sticks around a bit longer?

Weathers has seen his fastball tick up a couple of mph over last season while he slowed his slider (the sweeper!) and increased his change up. He used his change a bit more too. But here’s the thing. He’s not missing many bats. He struck out two in his first start over five innings pitched and only induced a swinging strike rate of 11%. He gets hit. And his exit velocity allowed ticked up too. He’s throwing harder and they are hitting him harder. Fortunately he kept the ball in the park. But that has not been typical of his years past. Maybe his new pitch mix is doing enough to keep the ball in the yard, and Ryan sticks around for a few more starts.

So what happens if Weathers is fine and Musgrove is back? I certainly can’t see Melvin employing a seven man rotation. Does he want to kill the bullpen? I think he will have to either send Weathers back to El Paso, or move one of Nick Martinez or Seth Lugo to the ‘pen. Lugo has looked terrific in his first two starts and Nick Martinez wears tight pants, so he looks terrific, but throws like shit. No really, BDN has been BAD. His K-rate is down, his walk rate is up. His HR allowed rate is up, and everything else is up too; ERA bad, xERA terrible. FIP horrible, xFIP pretty horrible as well. Seth Lugo has been terrific. He walked a few too many last night, but other than that he’s been spot on. He’s not giving up many runs and he’s not giving up any home runs. He’s pitching like he belongs in the rotation for a while. Martinez might be better suited for the ‘pen. And the ‘pen could use another arm.

Robert Suarez landing on the IL to start the season teamed with a six man rotation has strained the bullpen right away. Add to it Blake Snell only throwing 8IP in two starts and the usage is a bit high. The Padres have just started an 18 game stretch with no days off, so maybe another stretched out arm would be beneficial. Martinez could still work a lot of innings. I’m not sure who goes down if Martinez has to join the ‘pen, but Domingo Tapia has an option. Apropos of nothing Josh Hader has been awesome. Totally awesome.

Speaking of awesome, Xander Bogaerts, everybody. No wait, Nelson Cruz everybody. And Juan Soto is alive! Manny Machado, Trent Grisham Ha-Seong Kim and Jacob Cronenworth are all off to nice starts. And they are going to get Tatis back. The only out machine in the line-up is Austin Nola. Maybe Melvin can mix in Luis Campusano a bit more. If that is their only weakness then that is really nothing to complain about. I’m not sure if I’m going to know how to come after this season. Nothing to complain about. What’s that going to be like?

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up at HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics:

1. A disappointing Cactus League season; does the team know how to win?!
2. John Moores sucked and people defending him have Stockholm Syndrome or are bought and paid for like incompetent Bill Center
3. Morejon also sucks
4. Child labor laws
5. Predictions for 2023

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Corey Stewart met up for morning mimosas at HJ Manor to discuss a variety of Padres related topics:

1. Manny opting out and our faith in ownership to do what’s best for the baseball team, not their income statement
2. If you don’t think the Padres have a 100% chance at winning the division and the World Series, it’s dodger lovin’
3. Does Ethan Soto’s mom have to sit in the front seat on his way to Peoria Sports Complex because of his learners permit?

As is standard for Gwynntelligence, we also take steaming dump on a variety of former Padres executives, defunct podcasts, and Eric Hosmer.

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

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I’m not sad. I’m just disappointed. I honestly believed the Padres had one of the best playoff teams in the postseason. They proved me right, for the most part, but I truly believed they would go to the World Series. I didn’t think they had enough for the Astros, but maybe the Phillies do. Congratulations to them both on making it to the big stage. I wish it were the Padres.

Being a baseball fan is tough. It’s a humbling sport and it crushes the dreams of every player, front office, owner and fan base save one each year. Being a Padres fan is even tougher. Never seeing your team hoist the Commissioner’s Trophy for fifty-four seasons is brutal. And yet I can’t wait for next season.

I predict the Padres will be back to the postseason next year. I also believe they will be even better. I trust AJ Preller to build up this roster and I trust Peter Seidler to provide the resources to allow Preller to do so. I look forward to the return of Fernando Tatis Jr. And I expect him to be a huge contributor to the team’s success. I’m not sure if I trust Bob Melvin to lead this team to a championship, but hope Preller builds him a team so strong that even Melvin can’t sleep through a losing effort. Think autopilot, AJ. Bob is a regular season manager. Get him the weapons needed to win a championship despite his loyalty to a fault shortcomings.

I’ll spend the off-season debating potential moves on Twitter. It’s a stupid habit, but one I can’t seem to break. I’ll babysit Miss Scarlett, and she’ll be right there with me when Spring Training kicks off. Some might say raising her to be a Padres fan is cruel when we live in Houston and the Astros are right there. They are one of the best teams in baseball! She could have so much fun! Well maybe she will pick her local squad one day. She is a native Houstonian, so she might switch allegiance. But fandom is fickle. Sometimes you love something because that is what your Pop taught you. Or cursed you with, I can’t tell the difference. Either way, I hope she loves this silly sport as much as I do.

Marver welcomed himself on podcast to break down one of the most momentous series wins in Padres history:

1. Really quick NLCS preview
2. Favorite moments from the NLDS that weren’t really covered elsewhere
3. Where do the Cronenworth and Kim moments rank in all-time Padres lore?

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

I met HJ Preller several years ago at a Christmas party at Fall Brewery. I had organized a little get together for the writers of Padres Public as my family was in town for the holidays. I thought it would be great to see the PP team over a few beers. Woe Doctor came down from North County and brought HJ along with him. I had long been a fan of the Gwynntelligence team so I was happy to meet the infamous Padres Jagoff in person. The meet up set the stage for our next get together in Monterrey Mexico for the Padres-Dodgers series down South. We communicated through texts and he had scored some VIP tickets he was willing to share with my wife and I. We agreed to do a podcast from the hotel we were all staying. It was a great experience and several more beers were consumed together. I had been writing a little bit for The Kept Faith as Padres Public was defunct, but HJ asked if I would consider someday writing for this site. In ‘21 I contacted him to say I was in and I started writing semi-regularly here. It’s been a fun outlet for in-season semi-weekly musings.

The thing about writing about the Padres is it is easy to do when they are playing poorly. The material is right there. Snark flows freely and being miserable about a terrible team is easier to swallow when you have comedic relief. But I felt I needed the challenge of writing an entertaining post when the team is good. And I wanted to chronicle the season’s success after having obliterating the lowly Padres for years. I have to admit, it’s not as easy to be amusing when the team is rolling toward a playoff spot. I did my best last season as the Pads rose to seventeen games over .500 in early August. And then the roof caved in. My beloved Padres pissed away what should have been a magical season. But there were some good lols. Like Jayce Tingler.

This season had the promise of contending for a title a bit more than last in my eyes. The pitching staff was healthy, robust and fairly deep. Then Fernando Tatis Jr. decided to yell “hold mah beer” before jumping on the seat of a motorcycle. A fractured wrist fractured a clubhouse. Sure, Ha-Seong Kim could fill in defensively for Nando, but no one expected him to fill the huge hole in the lineup. That job fell squarely on the shoulders of MVP candidate Manny Machado. He carried the team’s offense and played terrific defense. The Padres probably lose 8 games in the standings if not for Manny.

Then there is the pitching. Yu Darvish was named NL Pitcher of the Month for September. Blake Snell strikes everybody out and actually led the Padres with 1.2 fWAR for September (0.9 for Darvish). Joe Musgrove is a very strong number 3. The lessons from ‘20 and ‘21 have been learned and the knowledge gained was applied to this staff. The starters pulled this team into the playoffs. It’s the starters this team will need to carry them through.

And then there’s Bob. Manager Bob Melvin has been the steady hand this team desperately needed. He is a player’s coach and uses his entire roster for long range success. Even though he is a big supporter of his guys, he kicked them in the butt when they sorely needed it. The Padres won three straight after his talking to, and then clinched the number five seed in the NL. He gets to manage a playoff team now. It will be interesting to see how he switches focus of long term goal setting to a short term win at all costs mentality. He’s got the team to do it. Let’s hope he has the touch.

I’ve enjoyed this season probably more than any previous year in my long Padres fandom. It might feel like there were lots of ups and downs for this team, but they are on the cusp of a 90 win season and are heading to New York for a three game playoff series. I’ll try to keep this up during the playoffs, and would love to be writing deep into October. As to next season, who knows? I hope to catch up with HJ and other Padres fans in Mexico City next season. Maybe even fire up the mics and do another podcast. And there will be beer.

Little Miss Scarlett and I watched six Padres games this week. It was a good week. We didn’t watch Albert Pujols hit his 700th home run. We did watch his Cardinals lose two of three to the Padres, which was imminently more satisfying. And then we watched the Rockies do the same. Scarlett is convinced the Padres will lock up the number five seed this week. You see, she has no shell shock of last year’s collapse since she is only a mere four months old. She has only seen the Padres play excellent baseball. This is her norm. Must be nice.

The magic number for the Padres to clinch a playoff spot is now six with nine games to go. That feels nice. Look at us, talking about magic numbers at the end of September. First up this week is the Dodgers. Capital D. I’ll call them by their name because I’m no longer acting like I’m twelve. The Padres have matured into a very good baseball team. I might as well mature into a very good blogger. Besides, it’s also time for the Padres to take a series from the vaunted squad from up North. No, they are not Vikings, but they do have some ugly gingers and are oddly very white.

The Padres have arrived at the cusp of a playoff berth because they have been playing solid baseball. Two weeks of 4-2 ball has them in the number five seed spot and headed to either Atlanta or New York for a three game set. The Braves have lost Spencer Strider due to oblique strain and the remaining starting pitching staff is probably not as ominous as having to face the Mets duo of Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer. Both teams will be tough, but I like the Padres chances because it truly feels like they are finally putting together a decent tear with both the offense and their pitching.

The upcoming nine game home stand will be a great opportunity for the Padres to clinch a spot early and then set the rotation for the three game first playoff series. It also will see the Padres go over the three million attendance mark for the first time since Petco Park opened. It’s been great seeing the support San Diego fans have shown this team and would be terrific to have some playoff games played in front of the home town crowd. But I shouldn’t get to far ahead of myself. First order of business is getting in. Next week I can worry about rotation match ups and winning a playoff series. But it’s nice to think about. I’m a bit more jaded than little Miss Scarlett. She expects a championship. She doesn’t know anything else.

Just when doubt starts to creep in, Juan Soto smashes it like a center cut fastball served up on a Sunday afternoon. Soto and the rest of the Padres decided they want to be a playoff contender. Bob Melvin finally lost his temper and aired them out on Thursday night. The Padres looked like a bunch of Gen-Xers who finally figured out what quiet quitting was, mailing in in their most lackadaisical effort in their series opener against the Diamondbacks. Melvin, for reasons most of us can’t quite figure out, needed to remind his players they are in the middle of a playoff race. They only had 18 games remaining at that point in the season. It was time to put it in gear. And then they did. The Padres finally played an entire weekend like a team that was ready to do damage in the post season. And Juan Soto was a huge part of the production. Finally.

Soto went 5-12, with 2 Runs, 5 RBI and 2 BBs, for the weekend. He hit two doubles and a home run in those at bats and said he is seeing the ball really well right now. It’s right on time too. Manny Machado may be a lesser baseball god, but even immortals need help every once in a while. Juan Soto has always set the table, but with him finally driving the ball, he can do some damage from the two hole. Now if only someone can get going at the leadoff spot. I’m pretty sure this season has worn down Jurickson Profar as he just looks awkward in left field and has been too quiet at the plate this month. Slashing .196/.220/.357 for September, Profar might be running on empty down the stretch. The Padres have been riding the hot hand of Jose Azocar in center field. Maybe a move to lead off is in order to take advantage of his .400/.440/.520 line for September?

I doubt Melvin does much tinkering with the lineup as he rides the turnaround for as long as they keep winning. He has shown flexibility with the rotation as he has kept Sean Manaea on the shelf for a couple of turns in the starting rotation. The Padres announced they will do so again as Manaea will be skipped to miss the Cardinals, pitch against the Rockies, thus missing the Dodgers next week. Manaea starting in Denver means the Padres will probably need to score 15, but actually it might be the motivation they need. It is time for this team to beat the Rockies with conviction in Coors Field.

But first up are the Cardinals. A possible first round playoff match-up, the Red Birds are playing well and somehow Albert Pujols is hitting like he is 32, not 42. It’s possible Pujols could get to 700 home runs this week. The highlight reel of him hitting it at Petco will be broadcast forever. I’m kind of conflicted about the possibility of Pujols hitting his 700th in San Diego. On one hand is the infamy of giving up the dinger and being reshown on the MLB network for eternity. But on the other, San Diego has great baseball fans and I believe they would ultimately appreciate the historic feat and be proud to have witnessed history in the making. I’m pulling for Clevinger, Snell and Musgrove to shut Albert and the rest of the Cardinals down. History can wait.

The Padres are never going to beat LA. The dodgers are too good. It’s best for everyone to just accept this and move on. Sure, the Padres can win a walk-off in extras on a Friday, but the squad was soundly beaten both Saturday and Sunday. The team from just up the 5 is on another level this season. But losing two of three doesn’t mean the Padres are bad. It caps a slightly disappointing 3-3 week. They played not too bad, but not too good. They sit 2 games ahead of the Brewers for the last playoff spot. With 21 games left in the regular season, the playoffs are in reach. They face a red hot Mariners club for two and then the second half surging Diamondbacks for four.

It’s easy to get down on this team. Last season has me on edge waiting for the other shoe to drop. The offense is sputtering and everyone not named Yu Darvish can’t string a few decent starts together. Last season fooled me so bad and I just don’t know if I can go through that again. So I try to remain even keeled and take the season week by week. If they play good baseball for three weeks it’s playoff time. Anything can happen once they get in them. A few players get hot and carry the team to the Series. Or they can continue to meander and the Brewers pass them and I write a 2,000 word dissertation on why AJ Preller needs to be fired. I really don’t want to write that. Again.

But let’s focus on this week. It’s Vedder Cup season. The most prestigious award going to the winner of the natural rival’s series. The Mariners hold a 2-0 advantage so the Padres can only tie, but since they are the reigning champions they will retain the cup! Such excitement in the middle of a playoff hunt! I’m fully expecting a sweep by the Padres and look forward to Manny Machado and his teammates hoisting that cup high. My favorite part about the Vedder Cup is that Eddie Vedder is a Cubs fan so could really give two shits about the mythical matchup. Long live the Vedder Cup!

The week ends in Phoenix against the D-Backs. A four game series where the Padres have a great opportunity to put some distance between them and the Brewers. The Brewers roster so many ex-Padres so you know they are well trained in epic collapses. The Padres just need to play sound ball and let Eric Lauer and friends do what they do best.

I’m putting that weekend series behind me. You can’t let Wil Myers closing out games get you down. You have to stay positive knowing this is a good team and it is capable of playing very good baseball. Bob Melvin has to dust off AJ Preller after throwing him under the bus last week, and show his little buddy he can manage without analytics. Who needs data? We have advanced advanced scouting (you see, the scouts are all old). We’re winning with old school ways. Bob is going to break out some Saucony high tops and do some major butt kicking of everyone in the Padres path.

The Padres went 6-3 on their last road trip. Winning six out of nine is nice, and a long way from where I said they’d go 3-6 after losing five of six to the dodgers and Giants. They are playing better offense and getting decent pitching from three of their five starters but maybe what really is at work is my reverse jinx. You see, jinxes are real. Curses are malarkey, but a good jinx, or sometimes the difficult but ultimately satisfying reverse jinx is just what a team needs to get on track. So you are welcome everybody.

The Padres are in their last month of regular season baseball. Just 27 games, nine series, remain. They sit 13 games over .500 at 74-61. They probably need to win 16 games or so to secure the second seed. Most likely the third see will play a three game series against the Cardinals in St Louis. The second seed will play their series in Atlanta or New York against the Braves or Mets, depending on who wins the NL East. Catching the dodgers would take a miracle even a jinx can’t produce. Getting to the first seed is also an order or magnitude beyond what a reverse jinx can accomplish. It’s probably best to hold onto them for the first series. You have to be careful with a jinx. You start throwing those things around haphazardly and the next thing you know you are cursed.

This is another big week for the Padres. Every week is a big week, but the Padres are at home this week and can put some distance on the other wild card contenders with a good showing. They host the dodgers this weekend. It’s time to win a series. Sean Manaea is scheduled to throw on Friday. Bob Melvin can skip his turn as the Padres are off on Thursday and Mike Clevinger can take his spot on four days rest. Blake Snell and Yu Darvish would follow and also be pitching on four days rest. Manaea can be pushed back to start up in Seattle against the Mariners. Maybe giving Manaea a week off will give him some time to reset. Maybe he needs some work with pitching coach Ruben Niebla to regain his early season form. Something has to change. He can’t continue his second half ways that has seen him put up an 8.36 ERA. He has given up 12 home runs in just 37-2/3 IP. Someone needs to take this second half jinx off him.

The Padres can break their streak of missing the playoffs (not counting the 60 game season, as that obviously was not a real baseball season) since 2006. Sixteen years without a postseason is long enough. It’s time to cast aside any thought of a San Diego curse, or believing jinxes are real. The only thing real is results. The Padres have the opportunity to break from silly notions and put themselves into the playoffs. It starts this week. It starts by beating the Diamondbacks today. Go Padres.

The Padres are struggling to remain in the playoff hunt and Wil Myers is pitching. That’s how it’s going. That’s how I’m doing with my fandom. Wil Myers throwing 69mph “fastballs” in a playoff race. I’m not mad at Wil. No, far from it. He had a good weekend clubbing two opposite field home runs. He should probably be starting in left field over Jurickson Profar right now. Profar is probably no longer in consideration for MVP, in case you haven’t notice. Kind of like the Padres probably are no longer in contention to win the NL West.

So what are we doing? Are we going to watch the Padres collapse again? They went 2-3 this last week. 2-3 and had two days off. They get five more off days in the last month plus of the season. The time off should allow them to rest and make their best effort to win games, win series. Good luck. They go to San Francisco and Los Angeles this week. Pads are looking at a 1-5 record this week. Did I say week? I meant weak.

Somehow this team is weak. They just don’t have the fight in them to rise to the upper echelons of the league. They’re mid. They think they are good enough to show up, look good, and be handed a victory. But much like Sean Manaea yesterday, showing up with your jersey unbuttoned four buttons deep, with long hair flowing, thinking you are all that. Then you get your ass kicked. You look like a poser. Wannabe TOR dude, but pitching like just a guy. Cut your hair, Sean. You look stupid pitching like a five with your long locks flowing when nothing else is. And button your jersey. Come on man. You can’t act like you are all that and then just shit the bed the entire second half of the season. What are you doing?

The big question for me this week is; what are the Padres doing with Josh Hader? They can’t give him the ball anymore. You can’t count on Wil Myers bailing him out every appearance. Does he need to go on the IL? Is he dealing with some injury that the team has not disclosed? Does he need to be sent down to El Paso and sort things out. He has options so a two week stint with the Chihuahuas might be necessary. I mean, El Paso is hellish in late August/early September so it would be a penance and punishment too. Kind of harsh if you ask me. Ruben Niebla needs to earn his paycheck, chief. And fast. Or what is he even doing?

You know who we don’t ever have to ask “what is he doing?” Manny Machado. It is truly a treat to watch him play baseball. He’s slashing .340/.400/.631 for August. He knows what he is doing. The Padres offense on the whole has been good in August. Of the active players, only Profar, Josh Bell and Brandon Drury have a wRC+ below 120 during August. All that offense and the Padres can only win half of their games in August. 13-13 so far. They just don’t feel like a playoff team. Limping along and getting swept out the first round feels inevitable. “Yay, we made the playoffs!” But that’s all they’re doing, making the playoffs. Not winning in the playoffs is all this team seems capable of achieving right now. The Padres will draw three million fans this season and not have a home playoff game. What are they doing?

It’s hot and muggy this summer. You can feel this heat and humidity’s pressure. Pressure that can bind. Or it’s pressure that can disintegrate. What will all this hotness do to the baseball teams competing for a playoff spot? Who is going to handle the extra atmospheric weight and step up and into the limelight? Are our beloved Padres one of the teams that will respond to these conditions and win their way into the playoffs? Playing poorly against lousy teams won’t be a recipe for success. So what has to happen for the Pads to get to the promised land?

Bob Melvin was hired away from the Oakland A’s for just this situation. It’s time he starts earning his paycheck, chief. There are only 38 games left in the season. Maybe Melvin can quit saying dumb shit like “we have a long way to go.” or “there’s a lot of games left.” Because there is not. This is it. We have seven weeks left, with seven off days sprinkled in. It’s the dog days and we are going to see if this team can hunt.

Melvin and his coaches must find out what makes this offense tick. And then get it doing so every night. Every at bat. It’s time to tune this offense. So far this offense has only shown it is good at being inconsistent. They just split a four game series against the worst team in the NL and were out scored 8-11. I know why the Hog Watch screams.

Whatever is ailing this anemic offense needs to get figured out and the remedy applied quick. There are only a few weeks left and tinkering with at bat approaches could spell disastrous almost equally as well as beneficial. It’s way beyond time for hitting coach Michael Brdar to earn his paycheck. It seems the only team applying cheat codes to at bats these days are the dodgers. They just destroyed Sandy Alcantara. The Padres looked pedestrian against him. Whatever Brdar is doing ain’t working. Just more feed for the hog, I guess.

The Padres have only five games this week. Two at home with the Guardians, and then out to Kansas City for three with the Royals. They’ve got to win both series. There are only 13 series remaking for the entire season. He’ll, they need to win them all. They are 7-1/2 games behind the Braves for the first wild card. By the way, that’s the wild card that gets a three game series at home for the first round of the playoffs. Kind of a big deal. The Padres need to be a big deal. No time to roll around in the muck and mud. The Padres need to go hog wild.

Looking over the picture in the header it is pretty apparent the Padres are a happy bunch. Not a care in the world for these guys. They are playing well and have a playoff spot to chase. Not one of them looks to be saddened by the news of losing Fernando Tatis Jr. for the next 80 games. Nobody misses that knucklehead.

And neither should we. Really, winning a wild card and making a run for a title is all we, the fans, should be concerned. And with good reason, because this is a very good ball club. The trade deadline acquisitions addressed some glaring needs. First base is now manned by a competent defender. And although he hasn’t hit so far in a Padres uniform, Josh Bell has a nice track record of being very productive with the bat. It’s going to come around soon. His expected stats for the last 50 PAs show a slight slump, but his seasonal numbers point to a solid approach that should have him coming out of this soon.

Juan Soto has filled a major need of outfield power and production. His numbers since donning the brown and gold have been amazing. But his Statcast page shows he might even have another level to achieve. He is still lagging his career averages and this surge with the Padres could get even better. And Brandon Drury has filled in nicely as a DH and another multi-gloved defender. The flexibility he offers allows manager Bob Melvin to rotate everyone in the infield to the bench for a breather, or into a DH role. Drury has had some huge hits in limited ABs but he really hasn’t hit as well as his season numbers so we could see a surge in production from him as well.

Keeping the players fresh down the stretch should pay off as the team continues its playoff drive. The additions to the offense allow everyone a necessary day off. Although some players look to be heating up to the point where you never want that bat on the bench. Yes, I’m talking about Manny Machado. He is off to a monstrous August slashing .333/.381/.632 with 8 doubles and 3 HRs. His at bats are must view live events as he is pounding peas all over the park. It is also nice to see Trent Grisham heat up. He finally is batting above the Mendoza line! He also is on a small tear with some major slugging. His August slash line is an eye popping .275/.396/.700 with 2-Dbls and 5-HRs. That’s some sweet swinging from the bottom third of the order.

It wasn’t just the offense addressed at the deadline as Josh Hader was added to the ‘pen. But we have now seen the return of Adrian Morejon, Michel Baez and Robert Suarez. Baez has returned to El Paso but did look sharp in a couple of innings with the big league club. Drew Pomeranz is finally on a rehab assignment and has pitched at the Arizona Complex League. The league really needs to be rebranded as the “ACL” is just a terrible moniker. But I digress. Pomeranz now is assigned to the Lake Elsinore Storm so hopefully we see him back with the Padres soon. And Morejon looks like he could handle some high leverage work down the stretch.

The high leverage innings could be in short supply as the starting staff continues to work deep into games. Padres starters trail only the Astros in innings pitched for the season with 661. Blake Snell has produced a second half resurgence and now looks like the most dominate starter on the staff. His numbers for the second half read 0.94 ERA, 12.24 K/9, 1.02 BB/9, 1.37 FIP and 2.21 xFIP. Those are the kind of numbers that lead to starting game one of a playoff series. It is great to see him regaining his CY Young award winning form.

The Padres had a solid week while taking a series against the Giants and winning one from the Nationals too. Of course we’d like to see sweeps these days as the wild card race heats up. And the schedule for the rest of this month favors the Padres chances of doing so. And that is the really good news from this last week. The Padres are a good team playing good ball and in the thick of a playoff hunt. It is all they need to be concerned with. There does not need to be distractions from selfish stupid players. They are better than that.

As I open my drafts I realize I have had plenty to say this season and not enough time to finish my thoughts. I had hoped to write weekly, but lately it feels more weakly. I know why I am inconsistent as time spent with my granddaughter is time away from writing. I prefer to spend my time with Scarlett. It’s a much better investment. Besides, not much is going on with my Padres. There was the trade deadline, ho hum. And now the stretch drive to the playoffs. Whatever.

Whatever? This is what I wish for every season! A potent line-up, a solid rotation, a deep bench and a shut down bull pen is dream come true. The Padres are in sole possession of the third wildcard spot and it is time to make the push for the post-season. Peter Seidler has a vision of winning the World Series and with Pete’s major investment, AJ Preller has executed a plan to make that possible. The roster is complete and probably the best ever assembled. Sure you can what if for slight improvements to say the catchers or center field. But there really are no weaknesses. And marginal improvements may have been costly at other positions and possibly leave the roster less complete. Fernando Tatis Jr. is now days away from his return. It’s time to unleash the full power of this devastating club.

The deadline was far from ho hum. It was freaking awesome. Juan Soto is a Padre. That is amazing to write. Adding him to a lineup with Manny Machado and Tatis? Unreal. Josh Bell is now manning first base. I forget who used to be there, I’m fairly certain he was utterly forgettable too. Josh Drury is a nice bench piece/DH. And Josh Hader is probably the best closer the Padres have ever had. This team is loaded. I no longer just expect some wins and a good effort in the playoffs. I expect a World Series win. I don’t care if the Yankees are stacked. I don’t mind the dodgers spanking the Pads ass all weekend. None of it matters because this team is going to play to its ability and finally being home a championship. I can feel it.

There is two months remaining of the regular season. Fifty one games. It’s time to pass the Braves and secure the number four seed. A home playoff series is just the ticket for all of Pete’s investment. Preller’s dizzying deadline work is going to payoff big. I’m predicting 92 wins for the season. They could win more. It’s a great time to be a Padres fan. Scarlett and I are going to enjoy every minute of it. I’ve waited my whole life for a championship. And so has she. Let’s get it San Diego. Let’s win a ring.

Harold James welcomed on regular Padres Hot Tub and Banter contributor @CoreyAStewart to break down one of the most critical moments in Padres history coming up:

1. We, the optimists, see a World Series contending team
2. The Musgrove dilemma
3. If Soto is actually traded and it’s not to the Padres, it’s a fireable offense

In standard Gwynntelligence fashion, it’s important to note that Eric Hosmer is still terrible, arguably more terrible than ever before, and is still currently the biggest obstacle to the Padres winning a World Series.

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

The Padres season is at the All Star break. They need this break too. They have played pretty poorly in July going 6-10 so far. They have 52 wins at this year’s All Star game. Last season they had 53 wins. They only won 26 more games the rest of last season. If this year’s squad wins only 26 more games AJ Preller will get fired. Bob Melvin should too. Burn the whole thing down and sell the ruble of Petco to the Chargers so they can turn the place into a football stadium. Baseball will be dead in San Diego and the true king of all sports in the USA can return to its rightful throne. Powder blue and gold baby! The Spanos family will be back! The most losingest franchise in MLB history will be put out of its and our collective misery. They had 53 years. Time to move on. Pour a little Hazy IPA out for the dead homies. I never liked them anyway.

Okay that was cathartic. I needed that. Like the Padres need this break. This team is not going to crumble. Jayce Tingler isn’t around. The Chargers are not coming back. Ever. The Spanos family is football franchise poor. They are third generation owners that make no money outside of the rising value of the team’s franchise. They can’t even pay their relocation fee. They can’t afford rent in LA. You should hate them like you hate the dodgers. Or, you can ignore them and the rest of the NFL like I do. Football is dying. Hopefully it dies off soon enough so we don’t keep shortening the lives of talented athletes just so a bunch of mouth breathing low IQ jerk-offs can get their weird kicks watching men bash their brains out. It’s not going to die off here in Texas anytime soon. It’s a state sponsored religion with multi-million dollar cathedrals built for the Friday Night Lights. But I’ll keep dreaming on a better society. Baseball is better. Soccer needs to rise above football and take over their stadiums. The world can be a better place.

But can the Padres be better? That is the important question to ponder. And I have more. Will Preller improve the roster? Will Fernando Tatis Jr. really come back? Is Wil Myers done? Who is Drew Pomeranz and is his shoulder intact? Is Pierce Johnson his real name or has he just been running the funniest gag on us ever? And can he pitch again? Will someone please take Eric Hosmer from us and end our long nightmare? Have you watched him “play” first base the last few weeks? It’s like he is daring the team to dfa him so he can get serious on working on his dad bod. And he hasn’t hit anything more than a single in 22 seasons. So he doesn’t have a dad bod because dads are strong. Hos has no power. Did I say seasons? It’s 22 days. It just feels like that long. Dude is so weak. Anyway, who wants him? The Padres will give you a catching prospect nobody likes if you take him. Maybe give up a slappy outfield prospect if you don’t need a stoned backstop. Preller is ready to make a deal.

Can Preller even make a deal? He is up against the Competitive Balance Tax, and no one seriously wants Hosmer or Myers so he will have to empty the farm just to get a taker. It’s a terrible use of prospect capital but at this point he really has no other options. Once one or both are moved he should still have enough to acquire some production on offense. I hear Juan Soto might be available. Has anyone seen a trade proposal regarding acquiring Soto? Just me? I’ve seen at least 3,000 so I’ve seen enough for everyone. The Padres aren’t getting Soto. They aren’t getting Mike Trout either. It’s Shohei Ohtani or bust. The Padres need a LH DH. And if he can pitch a little too, great. Lagniappe. The Padres need to go after a different National. Go get Josh Bell. Switch hitting first baseman with good power. Is that really a thing for a 1Ber? I don’t know anymore. It’s been so long. The Padres announcers have gaslit me about Hos not sucking for so long I don’t even know what a real first baseman performs like anymore. I think a dude with 0.2 fWAR on the season is no bueno, but it’s so hard to tell. Damn you, Don Orsillo. You are so smooth I sometimes believe Hos is decent. “He’s hit safely in 12 out of the last 16 games!” Don fails to tell us those are all singles and he actually hit .235 in that timeframe.

I’m going to enjoy this break. Four days off from the Padres games is a good thing. I’ll enjoy the Home Run Derby, and fall asleep during the All Star game. I’ll probably fall asleep for both because that derby is long and Pete Alonso is terrible tv. Plus my granddaughter Scarlett wakes me up at 6:30am and Pop is tuckered out by 9:00pm. She is great by the way. She smiles when she sleeps and squeaks like a porpoise when awake. She loves day games and I repeat the play by play to her after Orsillo says it so I am like her own personal Tony Gwynn Jr. Sometimes I throw in an advanced stat that is relevant to the situation or say something witty or tell an amusing story so Anthony probably should hit me up for lessons. The best thing about Anthony is he keeps Mark Sweeney out of the booth. I hope Mud is enjoying his nice long break. He deserves it. We all deserve a nice break. And then it is time to get serious. Time to turn this team into a serious contender. Let’s fucking go San Diego!

Two weeks ago I wrote about the Padres in the midst of 31 games in 31 days and having fourteen games left until a day off. They finally have the day to rest, recuperate and get ready for the nineteen games remaining before the all-star break. I had hoped the Pads could go 9-5 or maybe even 10-4 for these last two weeks. They ended up at 8-6. When considering they played seven of those games without Manny Machado, they really didn’t do too bad. But they sit two back of the dodgers with a huge four game series against them this week. Getting Manny Machado back on Tuesday could be perfect timing. Getting news that Fernando Tatis Jr. is cleared to do more than mimic swinging a bat would be a nice way to brighten up an off day.

At the end of this week the Padres will be at the halfway point of their season. Currently fifteen games over .500 they are on pace to win at least 90 games. Depending on which projection model you prefer, they are forecasted to win between 90 and 94 games. I follow Fangraphs, Baseball Reference and FiveThirtyEight but most others systems have them in this range. All projections have them behind the dodgers at the end of the season, but that is a post for another time. The takeaway for me is outsiders believe in this team going forward. A 94 win team contends for the title in the National League West.

What is odd to me is how little confidence there seems to be among The Padres faithful. Sure last season burned many of us. Why get your hopes up for a team cursed by Nick Canepa? Apparently all San Diego sports franchises are. Who knew Nick was such a shithead? How can one man be so evil that he can bring an entire city’s sporting landscape to be a barren wasteland? Lots of people want to contract the Supreme Court, but I say a true hero will step up and contract the Union Tribune’s sports columnist department. We might not ever have a downtown parade until a pudgy old Portuguese curmudgeon is laid to rest. Where is the hero among us?

Silly curses aside, I strongly believe this is the best team in the National League. It has the best starting pitching, a talented bullpen that will only get better with the return of a few injured players, and a solid bench. The bench will only get stronger with Tatis and Machado back. And the six man rotation will keep the starters fresh for the second half drive. The key to this competitive team has been and will be the steady hand of Bob Melvin. There is little doubt in my mind this clubhouse will not sour and the team will not tank in the second half. Having an experienced manager at the helm will only help to ensure this. It’s been a key missing component of all of AJ Preller built teams, and he finally found the right man(-ager) for the job.

Here’s to hoping the Padres enjoy this off day to its fullest. They have a big week ahead and follow it up with two more big weeks before the all-star break. They need to hang with their non-rivals form LA. They need to get healthy and in the right state of mind for the second half grind. I’m ready for the month of June to be over, maybe not as much as Eric Hosmer, (65 wRC+, lol) but I am excited to see what is in store for this club in July. I’m expecting big things for the Padres. Let’s get this off day over and get into the second half.

My wife and I received our second booster last week. The original vaccination and the first booster did little to me as far as side effects. My shoulder was slightly sore and that was for one day, no biggie. But that second booster? That thing kicked me in the teeth. That was a gut punch from Mike Tyson. I was down and out for two days. I didn’t want to move because everything was sore. Every injury I ever sustained for my entire life flared back up and reminded me I’ve had a pretty rough go as far as injuries. Everything hurt. It was so bad and I didn’t think anything could be worse. Fortunately I finally started to feel better by the weekend.

And then yesterday happened. My best friend, Manny Machado, snapped his ankle slipping on the bag running through first base. One camera angle made it look like his foot was just dangling there and I about threw up. Father’s Day brunch was almost all over the coffee table. Would have been an unforgivable waste of mimosas. But I held it together. I grabbed my own ankle and yelled “No!” like Steve Carell in the The Office meme for a few minutes. Then the trainers helped Manny off the field and I was both numb and sad. It was like I was rapidly working through the seven stages of grief for some strange reason. I wanted to start bargaining with the baseball gods if only Manny could be day to day and not hit the IL.

Bally Sports San Diego played a video of Kennedy Voit being adorable and then her dad Luke hit an absolute bomb deep into the left field stands and I felt a little better. Eric Hosmer grounded out and I knew things could return to normal, just not quite the same. I watched the rest of the game as Sergio Alcántara took Manny’s spot at third and batting third in the lineup. He’s a pretty solid defender but he is no Machado at the plate. Unfortunately for the Padres, nobody approaches what Manny can do at the plate. Well, Fernando Tatis Jr. can, but welp.

It was announced CJ Abrams was on his way from El Paso to join the Padres in San Diego. They also announced Manny’s x-rays showed no bones were broken on the play. That is hopeful because a break would most likely have ended his season. What a season it has been. The Padres have been flirting with first place in the NL West as Machado has been flirting with an MVP season. His 4.3 fWAR leads MLB. He is on pace to challenge Kevin Brown’s ‘98 record of 9.6 fWAR for most as a Padre. Tony Gwynn never had a season above 8 wins. Neither did Dave Winfield. Manny has been phenomenal.

Most likely the Padres will play Abrams at short and Kim will slide to third in Machado’s absence. Voit will move up to bat third and Eric Hosmer will move to clean-up. Let that sink in. The Padres will bat a guy who has a June slash line of .186/.246/.237 with no HRs fourth in their batting order. An .051 ISO is laughable. If anyone felt like laughing about this situation. The Padres will have to lean on their pitching even more while Manny recuperates. Not an easy task for the staff as Joe Musgrove is currently out due to COVID protocol. COVID sucks, in case no one has noticed.

So hurry back Manny. The team needs you. San Diego needs you. Even parts of Texas needs you. We need you to get well, and be pain free. So you in turn can take away our pain. Because until you return, everything just isn’t right. Everything hurts.

Just last week I was happy with the Padres playing one game below .500 in their seven games. This week, one game over feels like a missed opportunity. Taking two of three from the Mets was nice, but the split with the Rockies just didn’t feel good. Winning that series would have meant first place. Not that first place in the NL West matters too much in the middle of June, but it would be nice to see the Padres above the dodgers in the standings some sixty games into the season.

Which brings me to my focus of this week’s post; what are the expectations for this team this year? I used to think this team could scratch and claw its way to a respectable record while waiting for their superstar shortstop Fernando Tatis Jr. to return. And then watch out! Nando will hit 50 second half dingers and they overtake the dodgers and win the West. But now they sit 13 games over .500 and a half game back of that LA team and I’m starting to think this team is better than I previously thought. This team is good. And Fernando will now hit 50 second half dingers and take this team to the World Series.

Full disclosure, Fernando is not hitting 50 second half dingers. He probably won’t hit 25. His wrist is still not healed so goodbye power. But it’s okay, Eric Hosmer will step up his power game to make up for it! Hos might be slashing .139/.158/.194 for June, but come July, watch out. The prestige value will be turned on. The dad bod will find dad strength and muscle out maybe 2 home runs. Kevin Acee recently said Hos is worn down and tired. He’s tired and we aren’t halfway through June. Maybe the month long wedding celebration followed by the month long honeymoon right before Spring Training should have included a workout here and there? Nah, Hos is happy with his career. He’s won a World Series. Winning two would just look greedy.

You know who hasn’t won a World Series? A bunch of ex-Rangers. The Padres now start three ex-Rangers (X-Rangers?) in their typical lineup. Jurickson Profar, Nomar Mazara and Jorge Alfaro all had a solid week for the Padres. Maybe the Padres don’t need to go outside the organization to look to improve the offense. Maybe they just need Profar to stay hot. Mazara could be the left handed bat they thought Matt Beaty was going to be. Trent Grisham can keep fighting back to a respectable slash line. Jake Cronenworth can worry a little less about being so dreamy and a little more about that sweet swing. Manny, you just be you my good friend. And get healthy. No one is saying it, but I saw how slow he was to get up after an awkward swing. It’s hard work trailing that wagon around all the time. Good thing someone works hard in the off-season.

The Padres will go on the road for seven games this week, before returning home for seven more next week. They’ll finally have a day off on June 27th. I should probably think 7-7 would be a good conclusion to this long grind of a brutal June schedule. But this team is better than that. I honestly believe 9-5 or even 10-4 is achievable. They’ve raised my expectations. I now want them in first place in late June. And then late July. And late August and September too. I am expecting more. And I am ready to get hurt again.

After the Padres were swept by the Cardinals in St Louis, it was easy to predict a bad week was in store for the Padres. They still had to go to Milwaukee for a four game series. The Brewers have a very good pitching staff. Fortunately the Padres do to. They took three out of four from the Brewers, and easily could have swept, save for one rough outing from closer Taylor Rogers.

It’s nice to think the Padres turned their road fortunes around because manager Bob Melvin is a steady hand and won’t let this team get to high or to low. And that may be true. But the reality is this starting pitching staff is mostly dominant. I’m not a big proponent of measuring a staff by Quality Starts, but holy shit sometimes the stat fits the narrative. The Padres lead the majors in Quality Starts and Joe Musgrove, Sean Manaea and Yu Darvish are all in the top ten. The Padres rarely get blown out because their starters constantly keep them in games. All four starters against the Brewers were excellent. Even Mike Clevinger, who went 3IP due to a pitch limit in his return from the IL had phenomenal stuff. He did have some issue with command of it, but it was fine considering he returned without a rehab start in the minors.

The Padres are a little over a week into their 31 games in 31 days stretch of their schedule. They are 5-5 so far and come home for seven games against the Mets and Rockies. They have played 54 games, a full third of the season (there is no one-third pole in horse racing so I don’t know what to call this posting) and sit 33-21. Their road record sparkles at 20-11, while they are only 13-10 at home. They are keeping pace with the dodgers, down by 2 games, and the Giants, up by 3-1/2. Hopefully some home cooking can have the Pads extend this little three game winning streak out a bit and get them atop the NL West before my next post.

The offense has been mid most of the season, but recent games have shown a resurgence by some key players. Trent Grisham has been swinging much better and has a nice .286/.429/.607 slash line over the last ten games. Jake Cronenworth also seems to have found his sweet swing and sports a .244/.295/.439 line over the same period. Jake’s isn’t great, but the slugging increase is positive. The Padres can lean on Manny Machado all season, but a few more guys helping him carry the load will be welcomed. Hos slashed .171/.216/.211 over the same timeframe. Lol, Hot Hos Opt Out Szn is over. Luke Voit with a slash of .293/.341/.463 in the last 10 games is a huge addition. Maybe he can get some more playing time at first base. The other guy looks terrible. Thank you.

When the news broke that the Padres were going to start the 2022 season without their star shortstop Fernando Tatis Junior, the prevailing forecast for this team was to stay around .500 until he returns and then compete for a playoff spot with him. Manager Bob Melvin said they hoped to bank a few wins above .500 before Tatis’ return and on Melvin’s return from his own surgery, he led the team to their 25th win of the season. The Padres have played 41 games this season. One quarter of the way into the season and they have banked more than a few wins above .500 as they sit 27-14.

Fangraphs projects 93 wins for the ‘22 Padres. That would give the Padres the sixth most wins of all MLB teams if the forecast becomes reality. The Giants project to 87 wins and I won’t tell you what the dodgers win total is predicted to be because I ain’t no dodger lover. All right, it’s 96 wins. Fangraphs are a bunch of dodger lovers. The Padres pitching ranks 8th in baseball, with the starting staff ranked 7th, and relief staff 10th. The defense is ranked 7th. With the offense mid pack (15th) it is most likely the recipe for success has been pitching and defense.

The defense for this team might be a little under-rated. Yes the PR arm of the Padres touted their Longest Opening Streak Without An Error campaign for a few weeks, but went quiet afterwards. Machado, Jurickson Profar, Ha-Seong Kim and Jake Cronenworth all rate as first division defensive players at their positions. Even Eric Hosmer has shown improvement by the metrics, and grades out as the 6th best defensive first baseman in MLB. He’s cut down on that weird backing up into foul territory to catch a short hop too. We won’t talk about his bat because he is pretty much turning into a pumpkin, but on defense their is hope for Hos.

The pitching staff is being led by the starters. And the best starter is Joltin’ Joe Musgrove. Joe is on a Cy Young campaign and most certainly is All Star worthy. But the pleasant surprise of the staff has been Mackenzie Gore. He is fast on Joe’s heels for the team lead in fWAR and ERA. Both were absolutely brilliant against the Giants this weekend. The Padres will need to manage Gore’s workload, but at the quarter mark of the season he only has 35IP. At this pace 140IP would more than double anything he has ever thrown in his professional career so you could see him move between a starter and the back half of a piggyback more as the season progresses.

Nick Martinez has moved back into a starting role as it looks like the Padres might try a six man rotation for a while. They play 29 games in June with 8 games remaining this May. The schedule is brutal for everyone due to the lock out, so some creativity will be applied by most contending teams to keep arms fresh while trying to not over tax a bullpen. The lessons learned from Jayce Tingler should stay fresh in everyone’s minds. Hopefully the Padres bullpen get some reinforcements soon as both Michel Baez and Adrian Morejon are doing well in their rehab assignments in the minors. Steven Wilson is back up on the squad as Mike Clevinger gets fifteen days rest for a tricep strain. That deep starting stable is shaping up to be a huge strength for the club, so kudos to AJ Preller for learning a tough lesson from ‘21.

I remember when Kevin Towers preached pitching and defense was the way to win the NL West at Petco Park. It seems the Padres have finally figured out how to actually employ a team to achieve it. Can this construction actually bring home a title? Even as well as the Padres are playing, they are still behind the dodgers. They do have the third best record in the National League. The horses have rounded the quarter pole in pretty good position for the back stretch. Let’s hope Bob Melvin is the right jockey to bring them to victory at the wire.

I took last week off because I was being obliterated by Eric Hosmer fans. All I could do is rage tweet against the machine. Hos is still hawt. The HOT HOS OPT OUT SZN is going swimmingly. I won’t say anything snarky, like June is coming, but aren’t we half way through May? Good luck, Hos Homers.

I never go on Padres Facebook. I imagine it is full of boomers and mouth breathers that swear Batting Average is still relevant. It’s full of fans that enjoy a bunt. But now they are infiltrating Twitter. They don’t have a solid argument when defending Hos because there is really no defense that will stick. He still drives the ball hard into the ground. He’s not going to change. The Padres will ride his hot streak to a decent record. Hopefully they stay hot long enough to stay competitive until Fernando Tatis Jr. returns. Heal quick, youngster.

But now Hos fans are punching back. As they should. Hos sits near the top of the league in batting average. Which means something to Padres Twitter. I guess. I don’t want to do my own research to find out for certain. His defense is rating pretty well on Baseball Savant’s statcast. Statcast obviously has not seen him back up on short hop throws so I am not sure if the data is real. I should do some research. 1 Defensive Run Saved (DRS) and an Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR) of -0.7. Baseball Savant has his Outs Above Average at the 81st percentile. Not bad Eric Hosmer. Not bad.

Hos has cooled down in May. He’s slashed .294/.345/.392 over 55 PAs which is also not bad, but not really good for a first baseman. That has always been the big problem with Hos. He’s just not that good for a 1Ber, but is paid for premium production. That contract hamstrings the Padres front office from being able to add helpful pieces elsewhere as they are up against the salary cap. Did I say salary cap? Excuse me, I meant luxury tax. My bad.

But this piece is not just about Eric Hosmer. Everything isn’t about you, Hos! I have it on very good authority that he reads this blog religiously. So does his brother. Thanks for reading, guys! I’m glad somebody cares. I know HJ Preller doesn’t. He broke my heart and admitted as much on the Padres Hot Tub podcast last week. But the joke is on HJ because I don’t give a rat’s ass what he thinks of my posts. I’ve got important readers like Eric Hosmer’s big brother and my mom. And I’ll have you know I do not live in her basement. Anymore. No I’m fine if HJ hates me. I’m not crying, you’re crying! No this week is more about Your/My/Our first place San Diego Padres! It’s mid-May and the team is tied atop the NL West with the dodgers.

The Padres have gone 7-5 since my last post and are now 22-13. They are on the road to Philadelphia and then San Francisco for three apiece so this will not be an easy road trip. With five games left to the quarter post of this season, this team is looking like a serious contender. The starting pitching is fantastic. Manny Machado is my best friend. Luke Voit and Wil Myers are back and the team is scoring more than two runs a game. Sure the bullpen is shaky, but with Blake Snell back in the rotation it looks like Nick Martinez moves to long relief. It also looks like Mackenzie Gore will stay as the Padres go with a six man rotation for the next few weeks as the Padres will play 22 games in 23 weeks.

The main concern for the team right now is the lack of production from the outfield. Combined they have produced about a half a win. Trent Grisham has been well below his career numbers at the plate and surprisingly in the field as well. Jurickson Profar has been above league average on both sides of the plate and the only positive producer in the outfield. Wil Myers has been injured, so hopefully he is healed enough to move off replacement level production. There isn’t any useful help in AAA El Paso, but maybe Estuery Ruiz of the AA San Antonio Missions will get a much deserved promotion to the Chihuahuas to possibly provide a second half spark. It is possible the Padres look to trade at the deadline for an outfielder or two as well. But it’s hard to imagine AJ Preller will be of much use in adding without making a mess elsewhere to the roster.

I also wish Padres manager Bob Melvin all the best in his recovery. Hopefully he rejoins the team in San Francisco as he said he wanted. Heal up and get back at the helm. He has this team playing good baseball and well positioned for a fun summer. And on a personal note, we welcomed our first granddaughter to the world just this morning. A new Padres fan joining our ranks. It’s going to be a great off day. Enjoy, everyone.

And go Padres!

It’s May. The Padres have played a month worth of games and sit on top of the National League West. The parades on Sixth Avenue have been wonderful and frequent. People are pumped about this Padres team. At the beginning of the season I predicted 92 wins for this club. If all the Padres were to do is play the NL Central, I’d be safe with that bet. They are on pace for 106 wins mostly because they can beat up these bad teams. Sitting 15-7 and atop (albeit tied) the NL West to start the month of May is a great place to be.

Fangraphs projects 91 wins on the season for the Padres. I realize Fangraphs was projecting 94 wins for the team last season when they were 17 games over .500, and we all remember how well that ended. But this year feels different. The pitching staff is better. The run prevention is stout. You know I can’t wait for the ceremony with the unfurling of the “Longest No Errors Streak To Start A Season flag. That will look nice next to the Number 1 Ranked Farm System flags from ‘19 and ‘20. I bet they fly in DJ Wayne for the event. That kook. I wonder where he is peddling losers to now.

But this team pitches. They are so stacked at starting pitching that the most productive starter this season just might have to go to El Paso and eat shitty Tex Mex for a while. Poor Mackenzie. I really hope he stays. But Mike Clevinger will start this week against his old team from Cleveland which should move Nick Martinez to the ‘pen. Actually the ‘pen could use the help as they have had injuries and those left have seen some recent struggles, but if Martinez can pitch in, maybe that stabilizes the entirety a bit.

Blake Snell made his first rehab start in Fort Wayne and went through four IP on just 44 pitches. He didn’t walk anyone gave up two hits, no runs and he struck out four. He’ll be back soon. Which leaves me wondering what they do with Gore. He struck out 10 Pirates in five innings of work last week. His season numbers in a very small sample size, but still, he’s pitching like a kid going for the ROY. And if he’s allowed to keep this up maybe even the Cy Young. How can they send down the probable Cy Young winner? What kind of id…oh yeah, AJ Preller.

These good problems to have tend to sort themselves out, so I’m hopeful there are enough innings to go around for everyone. I honestly believe this is the best starting pitching staff ever assembled by a Padres team. So credit to AJ Preller I guess. But if he sends Gore down I’m still going to call him an idiot. And with the defense at an all time high, maybe they do have the make up of a championship contender.

They are scoring runs at decent enough rate to stay in this thing. Manny Machado is so hot right now I don’t think he can hit a ball less than 100mph right now. Eric Hosmer, well maybe Hos can grow on me a little. He’s still hitting like someone who sold their soul to the BABIP gods, but maybe his marriage and soon to be fatherhood have changed him for the better. He has a family to take care of now. He needs to have a great season so he can opt out and make the big bucks. Go Hos!

Last season I wrote a piece updating the whereabouts and what about MacKenzie Gore. This season you don’t have to have a special clearance to see him work. He’s on the big stage, in MLB. Last season he spent a great portion of the year hid away at the training facility in Arizona. No more. He is here and the the question is; is he here to stay?

Mike Clevinger will make his next and probably last rehab start for El Paso this week. He is being built back up to join the rotation for the Padres, and should join the team on this upcoming road trip. Most likely he will move Nick Martinez to long relief and Pedro Avila back to AAA. Gore will start game two of the series versus the Reds. Blake Snell is to begin his rehab starts this week in the minors and will likely need three starts to be ready to rejoin the Padres as well. This should give Gore three more starts before the Padres have a big decision on who fills out their five man rotation.

With Yu Darvish, Sean Manaea and Joe Musgrove cemented in the first three spots, Gore, Clevinger and Snell will soon be vying for the last two spots. It’s easy to say Gore gets pushed back to AAA and the Padres run with Snell and Clev rounding out the staff but right now Gore is making a solid case to stay. With upcoming starts against the Reds, Guardians and Marlins it should be easy to see Gore putting up good to great numbers and forcing the Padres to rethink sending him down. Padres manager Bob Melvin has stated he plans to use a five man rotation so someone has to be the odd man out. Unfortunately for Gore he is the only one that can be optioned to the minors.

Should the Padres send Gore down though? The publicized thought has been “once he’s here, he is here to stay.” That’s not to say if he falters or flops he can’t go back down and get back on track. But so far Gore has shown he not only deserves to pitch at this level, but he is also showing he can be very good at this level too. Sure he has a heavy fastball mix, and using it almost 70% of the time. But when a lefty throws 98mph and averages a strike out per inning, can you really find fault there? His slider is getting more usage, but he still lacks great feel to the pitch. As the usage goes up, the pitch is looking better. He is only two starts in to his young career. His off speed stuff is going to continue to get better. His calling card throughout his successful MiLB days was his change up. He barely has used it yet (5% of the time). Once he commands all four of his pitches at the big league level he will have nothing left to prove in the minors.

Can he get there? Can he go 3-0 and show a strong four pitch mix? These next two weeks will be a great test for him. I hope he passes with flying colors. I’m really hoping he makes the upcoming decision as absolutely difficult as possible for Melvin and Padres GM AJ Preller. I truly believe this is his huge opportunity to shine that he missed last season. It is his time to grab a spot in the rotation, and not relinquish it to anyone. I’m pulling for the young man. You go MacKenzie Gore.

On Friday night the unofficial Captain of the Padres made a slick snag of a hot shot grounder toward third and then threw hard to first. The throw was inside of the bag and one hopped Eric Hosmer. He did his infamous “olé” swipe and booted the ball. Ruled a hit, the play could have been another highlight reel example of Manny Machado’s prowess. Instead it will fall into obscurity and be soon forgotten. But something not discussed on the broadcast but can be seen from the screen shot in the headline above was Eric Hosmer’s positioning on the play. Hos has a terrible habit of backing up on balls he perceives will be in the dirt. He often goes into foul territory to receive the throw. It’s terrible positioning not only because some day a base runner will absolutely destroy him as he runs to first and trucks Hos who is standing in the way, but it makes the throw much longer than it needs to be. First basemen are taught to “gain ground on balls in the dirt.” Hos was obviously absent on days that mantra was discussed.

Now one play doesn’t mean Hos is horrible, but what he does time and time again is not stretching for a throw. Maybe Hos has been taking Tucker Carlson’s advice and has taken to tanning his testicles. Maybe Hos overdoes it and this makes stretching uncomfortable on his burnt nucksack. It makes the most sense because every first basemen in the world is proud of their ability to stretch to a throw. Hos seems fully incapable of stepping into a low throw. It’s got to be because of his burnt balls.

“But Billy, Eric Hosmer is off to a terrific start!” “You are just finding something to hate on him!” “Your a hater!” To which I say, first off, it’s you’re, you moron, and second, I am rooting for him to do well this season. The Padres need offense, and he is one of the few providing it. But also, if he continues to hit well, there is a real possibility that he opts out of his three years left of his contract. If Hos can produce to say his ‘17 season level, he might just want to bet on himself in the open market. Don’t crush his dreams.

Will Hosmer be able to replicate his ‘17 numbers? Well, so far in 39 plate appearances he is slashing .378/.410/.514 and a 165 wRC+. He has 5 doubles but no home runs. He is slapping plenty of singles and ground doubles down the line, but he isn’t lifting the ball very well. His batting average of balls in play (BABIP) is .519. For context, in his best season ever (‘17) his BABIP was .351. His average for his career is .316. I’m not forecasting him to fall off a cliff anytime soon, as Hos is known for his hot starts, but regression is coming. And probably coming for him pretty hard.

Last night on the Sunday Night Baseball broadcast Eduardo Perez was being critical of Hosmer’s swing and why he is so prone for driving balls into the ground. I know this may come as a surprise to most Padres fans that primarily just watch Bally Sports San Diego, but most of the baseball world knows Hosmer’s approach at the plate is terrible. He keeps his hands too high for too long and his long swing tends to always be in a downward plane toward the ball. Hos does hit the ball hard. He continues to be in the top third of the league in exit velocity (EV). The problem is he also continues to be in the bottom 5% for launch angle (LA). His LA this season is 4.2°. His career LA is 3.2° so hurray for improvement! But most likely Hos will continue to hit low line drives or grounders this season. He honestly is looking at a single digit home run season. He had 12 last season. He’s turning into Sean Burroughs.

Why the dire prediction for Hosmer even though he seems to be on such a hot streak? A couple of key factors on data that normalizes fairly quickly in the season, walks and strikeouts, aren’t trending well for him. He is at career worsts for both. A 5.1% walk rate and a 25.6% K-rate means once his BABIP normalizes, he could have his worst season ever. Hos also has not hit one barrel this season. A barrel is a stat that counts how many times a player hits a ball with an EV of >98mph and a LA between 26° and 30°. No barrels equals no homers. Which means Hos ain’t opting out and our nightmare can continue for three more seasons.

Then the weekend came and the Padres played like they were intended. Just like AJ Preller drew it. Pitching and defense win championships. Well the Padres have the first part, so they are halfway to a championship. How much of this weekend was the Padres playing well versus how bad the Diamondbacks truly are probably remains to be seen. But the D-backs are bad. And the Padres can pitch. Darvish, Sean Manama and Joe Musgrove all looked good. Blake Snell died. Rip, unless we see you in 10 days. Nabil Crismatt is a Colombian god. So is Jorge Alfaro. Together they make up the first Colombian gods battery. We can’t lose.

Jurickson Profar is MY left fielder. All you naysayers, whiny little cry babies, and internet trolls now have to just lie back and enjoy his smile. Profar got his power stroke back. And from the right side of the plate too. Sure it’s a minuscule sample size, but after last season where he OPS’d worse than most pitchers batting from the right, we should just take it. Then we simply project from this small sample and predict 70+ home runs and a clear MVP victory for Jurickson. And somebody said I don’t know how projections work. Who’s laughing now, loser.

Looking around the horn, Manny is being Manny. So steady and productive, he’s just perfect. Never change, my captain. Ha-Seong Kim looks good at short, but so does our rookie CJ Abrams. Platooning the two of them is probably not the best idea for their perspective development, but it probably is best for the team right now. I think things will sort themselves out by the time Fernando Tatis Junior returns. Everybody light a candle for that knucklehead to heal quickly. Jake Cronenworth looks great. Has anyone noticed he has become a heartthrob to quite a large swath of Padres fans? I know of at least one local sports broadcaster whose lovely wife would seemingly risk it all. For Jake. You go Jake. But the real beefcake is now platooning at 1B. Luke Voit is a big dude. Have you seen his pecs? How much does he bench? Just mash, Luke, and we’ll get to the swooning soon. Hos is off to a nice start. So what. We’ve seen this movie before.

The outfield is superb now that JP is an MVP. Trent Grisham can still track down a gapper better than anyone in the National League. And Wil Myers got two hits! A couple a week is probably all we can expect. The Padres tried to upgrade the outfield seemingly all off-season. When there was an off-season. The lockout was pointless and will probably lead to too many pitchers getting injured, but billionaires gotta keep all the monies, so good job MLB. Anyway, our outfield is going to be fine. So is our catching staff. See the Colombian god reference above. Plus Austin Nola. We good.

Since this is the time of year when most baseball prognosticators have set their predictions, I’ll go ahead and join them. I say this Padres team will win 92 games. 92-70. Bob Melvin will be a steady hand and the results will be in line with what was wished for last season. Or this team will have another epic collapse and AJ Preller gets shitcanned. No! I’m not going negative in my first post of this season. This team is going to the playoffs and they are going to be competitive throughout. It should be a fun season and I’m looking forward to having some baseball fun.

Harold James welcomed on regular Padres Hot Tub and Banter contributor @CoreyAStewart to break down arguably the worst day in Padres recent history:

1. Tatis the Dirt Biking King
2. What are the options left?
3. HOSMER MUST BE DUMPED AT ALL COST

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

The Agenda:

1. Dane Dobbie is a god among men
2. Offensive powerhouse Seals
3. Goalie roulette

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

The Agenda:

1. Just who is still on the team?
2. Dane Dobbie: Perfect Angel [ALLEGEDLY!]
3. Pechanga Chat

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

This, more or less, seems to be the sentiment among Padres fans at the moment. 2021 was like any other year and perhaps even more heartbreaking given our “real” hopes to start the year. Allow me to disagree.

I actually think the franchise is in its best shape ever and I’m not particularly bothered by two months of bad baseball. At least half of you guys hyped up all those shitty ballclubs who sported a payroll that started with a 3 or 4. Now you can’t stomach a few months of bad baseball in the middle of the Padres Renaissance? I knew the fanbase was soft, but you’re giving Andy Green a run for his money here. Frankly, it’s embarrassing.

Let’s examine some details. The Padres have one of the most beloved, best young players in all of baseball and another likable superstar, both signed through their primes. They have a number of team-controlled, good pieces alongside those two. A San Diego native threw the first no-hitter in franchise history this season. The Padres fielded the largest payroll they ever have, both nominally and relatively. Miraculously, the Padres even seem reasonably competent off-the-field: they play in beautiful brown uniforms, Mud and Don continue to be incredible on the broadcast, Jesse and Tony form the best radio tandem we’ve had in at least twenty years¹, and there wasn’t a single off-field incident this season that caused national embarrassment, unless I missed a Ron Fowler interview on one of Dan Sileo’s (single digit viewer) Twitch streams or something.

¹ I’m sure I’ll catch flak for this, but I didn’t enjoy listening to Ted for the past decade, as he struggled to describe the action. It’s the same concept for why I wouldn’t enjoy Trevor Hoffman pitching for the Padres at age 60. They’re both legends and deserve to be in the Padres Hall-of-Fame, but like players, broadcasters also have an aging curve.

It’s true: the Padres didn’t win the World Series this year. It turns out you can’t just try for once, after decades of not giving a shit, and expect to instantly succeed. It’s going to take time and it’s entirely possible Tatis and Machado never win us a World Series. Cover your ears if you must, but that’s actually the most likely outcome. Just do the math: there are 30 teams and one World Series title, yet Tatis isn’t playing 30 seasons. I find it absolutely incredible how many fans don’t appear to be enjoying the actually enjoyable era, right after choking on Jeff Moorad’s cock and telling me how Jose Pirela’s sprint speed will make his .400 BABIP sustainable long-term. With the likelihood of failure, even during the good years, in mind, maybe spending the entire Tatis era loudly complaining about a player with a positive contribution to the team’s championship odds isn’t a healthy approach to life.

Things aren’t perfect, obviously. They’ve fired the manager and some scouts. Tommy Pham’s attempted assassin is still at-large. Dave Cameron resigned. There’s some clubhouse turmoil, allegedly.

But wouldn’t it have been worse if these things didn’t happen? Would you be happier if they kept the manager after this choke job? Would you be happier if they didn’t fire scouts who, let’s face it, whiffed on a number of recent decisions? Would you be happier if SDPD was a competent group, capable of investigating crimes and getting assassins off the street? Would you be happier if Dave Cameron stayed on, despite clearly not consistently demonstrating the ability to influence sound data-driven decisions? Would you be happier if the clubhouse sang Kumbaya after going 26-43 after the All-Star break?

Of course all of this shit was going to happen after the way the season ended!

And don’t get me started on the vehement “fire Preller” movement on Twitter. Far too many of them bought ‘In AJ We Trust’ or ‘Rockstar GM’ shirts two years ago, cheered Josh Byrnes openly scoffing at signing “quality players in their prime” eight years ago, and completely ignored letting Jed Hoyer leave the organization for literally no compensation whatsoever ten years ago. You’ve got no credibility on this one.

That said, I am mildly surprised Preller is still here and unless his job security is guaranteed going forward, he probably shouldn’t be. The last thing this franchise can afford is a GM trading away future assets to prolong their own employment. That’s the dangerous Chicago Bears trading for Jay Cutler territory that I’ve discussed many times. So even if Preller’s job security is tenuous (which it has to be, right?) ownership needs to give him every impression that it isn’t. To that end, Seidler’s recent comments are good and everyone should accept that’s what we actually want to hear.

This year, the arms just exploded – seriously, you can’t get just 90 starts out of six of your starters and expect success – and it seems Preller barely got beat out for Max Scherzer at the trade deadline. For me, it’s hard to complain too loudly about that, especially after it was literally reported as a done deal by leading media members. Truthfully, I think Preller is just a mediocre gambler, but that beats the shit out of the mediocre pussy we had before him. AJ is more likely to trade for Seth Smith as the final piece to his pickup basketball squad than the final piece to the roster, and there’s something to be said about YOLOing in situations/games where only the absolute best outcome is the one you care about. If you aren’t first, you’re last. You can’t win the lottery if you never buy a ticket, Josh, expected value be damned.

Listen, the entire purpose of the documentary, “Change the Padres”, and whatever else I’ve rambled on about over the years was about influencing the Padres (with however much I can muster) to try to win an actual World Series. Even without winning one this season, I am very confident that the purpose of my account is no longer relevant. Peter Seidler is probably the best sports owner we’ve ever had in San Diego, and I can finally just sit back and enjoy the team, content that the outcome is being decided by fortune, not pre-determined by ownership inaction. My watch has ended. You win, Pete.

It seems outrageous that I – the one who was maligned for years, by fans, local media, and individuals within the Padres organization, for *correctly* identifying that the owner was pilfering funds, the team President was lying about it, and that the Padres would never improve without major changes – am the one who now sits before you, furiously typing on the same computer I used to create the documentary … about how things are actually pretty good. But, *looks into Paul Rudd’s eyes as he pours me a glass* here we are.

For the record, I plan on either re-branding (Bring Back Rye Triscuits) or just going away altogether and spending that time in more constructive ways, like making homemade Rye Triscuits and trying to become a titled chess and backgammon master. To be honest, the current Padres discussion climate just isn’t worth the time and effort anyway, except in rare, periodic long form.

It wasn’t always this way, though, and to a large extent, the prevailing climate – aversion to constructive conversation and the emergence of insolated circle jerks – are broader societal issues. It just so happens that this problem has polluted even basic sports talk, including the Padres, let alone everything else like politics, medicine, anthropology, and even comedy.

To better illustrate this point, I need to give a brief overview on the history of Padres discussions on the internet. This will be a long-winded aside, but these are my rules.

Like I hinted at above, most of what I now experience when it comes to Padres discourse, in general, is complete fucking garbage. And when I say Padres discourse, we all know we’re really just talking about Padres Twitter, which is where the overwhelming majority of it occurs. I recall once reading that Twitter is just a whole bunch of Letters to the Editor that never got published, but even that gives Twitter too much credit. Letters to the Editor require more effort and thoughtfulness, and generally exceed 140 words, let alone 140 characters. The character limitation is exacerbated by the fact that almost any asshole can post on Twitter: you, me, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Wendy’s, a paid troll in Russia or China, and even OJ Simpson. At least Letters to the Editor are curated. The entire world has been dulled by the reduction of discourse to limited characters with some implicit goal to acquire a dopamine kick from a free, intrinsically worthless “like”. The revival of tribal, 1930s identity politics during the era of Twitter is not a mere coincidence. It shouldn’t be a surprise, therefore, that Padres Twitter seems to solely push simple, naïve solutions (DeRp, DfA hOsMeR) when the truth for why the Padres failed in 2021 is far more detailed.

At the risk of dating myself, Padres discourse just kind of sucks now in a way that it didn’t back in the SignOn San Diego (and then SDUT forum) days. Back then, there were no likes or other forms of social validation guiding your posts. The forum was “intellectually” pure; it was an outlet to actually discuss various Padres-related topics, where posts were ordered chronologically and the flow of information was strictly Padres-related. The word limit was in the thousands and that lent itself to posters spending their time formulating coherent arguments and being able to discuss more complex, nuanced views than you can with a character limit in the low hundreds. Juxtapose that against the current situation, where users just blurt out whatever easy statement will rack up quick likes from the same inner circle of TikTok addicts, aspiring communists, and thirsty fives. Now, that doesn’t mean the forum didn’t also have its garbage – just ask someone there to explain the shortstop thread or Henry trade proposals – but overall, the level of discourse was probably the most well-developed that there ever was for Padres chatter. And the jokes and memes didn’t suffer for it, either.

The forum slowly died when (ironically) the UT took over. They didn’t kill the forum, it was just poor timing. A new form of Padres dialogue had entered the fray: Gaslamp Ball. Originally, GLB was an independent blog run by Padres fanatics Dex and Wonko. (Full disclosure: we have history.) Eventually, GLB became an SB Nation syndicate and with that acquired all the bells and whistles that comes with a larger parent company. Among those resources was a real-time comment section. And that was how GLB became the intermediate between the forums and Twitter.

The real-time comments section was basically just a Twitter thread, but restricted only to replies about a specific post. It had its own version of likes and if you got enough of them, it’d be color-coded green. (Good job, popular shithead!) Some threads would get off-topic, but over 95% of the comments were directly related to the Padres. Replies had a character limit which was lower than the forum, but greatly exceeded Twitter. It, like Twitter, had censorship issues and was subject to the Padres front office trying to curry favor and control the message. In short, it was a more limited circle jerk than what we experience today, but it wasn’t a total shit show. Actual Padres topics were discussed in a more brief manner than the forums and lacked the rich text formatting and quote format that made the forums more elegant, but GLB still retained an “intellectual” flair on most Padres discussions, even if its leadership had questionable conflicts of interest, like receiving free mentorships from Tom Garfinkel or having Brooks Conrad nut in your sister.

But there’s a reason the documentary came from a SOSD user and not Padres Twitter, GLB, MLB.com comments, or Padres Facebook. Most topics (and especially those as important to clearly explain and nuanced as public policy) require long-form and suffer from outside influence, like the dopamine kicks and social validation garbage that guides Twitter discourse. Even basic ass topics like “San Diego Padres baseball” are difficult to adequately discuss in the word vomit format that is Twitter. I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I’m pretty sure that’s a contributing reason to why the best Padres writer we’ve ever had isn’t a part of Padres discussions anymore. I would trade the entirety of Padres Twitter – every last one of you – to get Sac Bunt Dustin posts in my inbox again.

So yeah, this post will be long. It needs to be long. That’s fine. I can’t do what I’m about to do – basically dismantle the offensive portion of fWAR – in 140 or 280 characters and you should balk at the thought of anytopic (let alone public policy!) being reduced to character limits.

And all this leads me back to Eric Hosmer, obviously. If you spend any time at all on Padres Twitter, you’ve likely heard quite a bit about Eric Hosmer. Nothing coherent, probably, but I’m sure you’ve heard it. In the off-chance that you haven’t, just look for the crowd pirating its mannerisms from the seagulls in Finding Nemo: “HOSMER”, “HOSMER”, “HOSMER”.

I’m probably one of the lone people still standing here believing that Eric Hosmer isn’t one of our biggest problems. I know your arguments well: he’s not worth his contract, his fWAR is negative, he grounds into double plays, he looks shitty defensively, and so on. You state your claims every day, even in situations completely irrelevant to Eric Hosmer, and after every benign out. I get it, seagull. Now it’s my turn to present to you why his fWAR – and many others’, including Tony Gwynn – is plain wrong and shortchanging him many wins, in a format conducive to formulating a coherent argument.

Statistics are like bikinis. They show a lot, but not everything.

Lou Piniella

One thing that I’ve always found interesting about Eric Hosmer is that his situational hitting metrics are off-the-charts good, in comparison to his generic line: in 1243 high leverage plate appearances, he has an .820 OPS, 51 points about his medium leverage line and 79 points above his low leverage line. This is abnormal; the league on the whole bats roughly the same in each of these situations, with the high and low leverage OPS’s sometimes the exact same, but occasionally differing by up to 9 points. It’s especially abnormal when you consider that pitchers are more likely to be allowed to hit in low leverage situations (deflating the aggregate numbers) while teams tend to bring in better pitchers for high leverage situations (deflating the numbers for non-pitchers).

There are a lot of plausible explanations for why this might be. Chief among them are clutch, extreme luck, and laziness. But those first two are unsatisfactory explanations for me; I’m not a huge believer in an innate clutch skill while, on the flip side, his sample size is large enough that he deserves some benefit of the doubt that this disparity is arising from something other than dumb luck. The third explanation concedes that Eric Hosmer is more talented and valuable than his baseline statistics indicate, which de facto wins the argument.

But allow me to propose a fourth plausible explanation, which I intend to prove: certain skillsets are more valuable in high-leverage situations than other skillsets. This would imply, then, that statistics which do not consider context – everything using linear weights, including wOBA and fWAR – are unfit for use, or require heavy editing, if applied on players who possess this other skillset. And it turns out that there are many players who possess this skillset, including Eric Hosmer.

For this, we’re going to turn to a different Fangraphs statistic: Clutch. Fangraphs’ Clutch number measures how many more wins a player added in high leverage situations than would be expected based on their overall performance level. For example, a player that adds 1.5 wins (by wins probability added²) in high-leverage situations when their overall performance level suggests they should have added 2.5 wins in those situations would have a clutch score of -1.0. They may have still been good in those situations (which is true, since they added 1.5 wins) but relative to their baseline performance, they didn’t live up to expectations. They weren’t “clutch”.

² Please read this primer on win probability added if you need to understand how this works.

Now, before I continue, I want you to close your eyes and think about who you believe are the most “clutch” batters since 1987 (i.e. my lifetime)?

Who did you name for the first one? David Ortiz? Derek Jeter?

*buzzer*

The answer is Mark McLemore, with a clutch score of 8.47, indicating that he produced roughly 8.5 more wins in high-leverage situations than we would have expected given his baseline performance. Next on the list is Ichiro, followed by Daniel Descalso (!?!), Omar Vizquel, Yadier Molina, Lance Johnson, Scott Fletcher, Jose Lind, Mark Grace, Bill Spiers, Tony Gwynn (+6.27 since ’87, +9.50 career), and Ozzie Guillen.

You might notice a trend here: these aren’t really clutch hitters. Sure, some of the names you may have come up with are on this list – Yadier, Johnny Damon and Jim Leyritz are all top 25 out of 2,018 players since 1987 with at least 500 plate appearances – but the majority of guys towards the top are simply contact hitters. It turns out that classic contact hitters “overperform” in high-leverage situations for two primary reasons:

1. In high-leverage situations, the value of a single is much closer to the value of a homerun than in an ordinary situation. For example, in a tie game with two outs and a runner on 2nd in the 8^th inning, a single adds 27% in win probability while a homerun adds 34%. But in the third inning, that single adds 10% while the homerun adds 20%. The ratio of the value between a single and homerun is 1.26 in the first scenario, but 2.00 in the second.

For a handful of different score/base/out scenarios, the following chart shows the relationship between the inning of the game vs. the aforementioned ratio between the win probability added by a homerun and a single.

Whereas fWAR (through wOBA’s linear weights³, shown below) treats a homerun as being precisely 2.28 times as valuable as a single for all plate appearances in 2021, that ratio clearly isn’t true during actual baseball game situations. Sometimes a homerun is even more valuable than that, while other times a single and homerun are identical in value. Late game settings tend to bend these curves and really augment the relative values.

³ Here’s the calculation of fWAR, so you can see for yourself that the 2.28 ratio is correct and all outs (except sac flies) are indeed treated the same, a topic discussed further down the post.

Working backward one step at a time:

WAR = (Batting Runs + Base Running Runs +Fielding Runs + Positional Adjustment + League Adjustment +Replacement Runs) / (Runs Per Win)

Batting Runs = wRAA + (lgR/PA – (PF*lgR/PA))*PA + (lgR/PA – (AL or NL non-pitcher wRC/PA))*PA

wRAA = ((wOBA – lgwOBA)/wOBA Scale) * PA

wOBA = (0.690×uBB + 0.722×HBP + 0.888×1B + 1.271×2B + 1.616×3B +
2.101×HR) / (AB + BB – IBB + SF + HBP)

That’s it. According to fWAR, a position players’ offensive WAR is ultimately decided by how many walks, hit-by-pitches, singles, doubles, triples, homers, sacrifice flies, and intentional walks the batter accumulated, normalized against league-wide performance.

You might be wondering: how are fWAR’s weights for singles, doubles, and so on determined? Linear weights describe the value of these events (single, double, etc.) in terms of runs added, based on an analysis of historical games and how these events impacted total runs scored. It is not in terms of wins added, which is the crucial error. In effect, it ends up assuming that a run produced at any juncture is equally valuable to one another, which is demonstrably false. A win, on the other hand, is always worth a win.

Ultimately, the game situation dictates the relative value of a homerun vs. a single. That should be accounted for in the way we assess player performance, unless there is hard evidence that player outcomes are randomly distributed. (You’ll be searching for a long time, because that evidence does not exist; players do participate in situational hitting.)

2. Contact hitters are more likely to make productive outs, like moving a runner over. Much more on this later…

My observation about contact hitters being disproportionately towards the top isn’t merely just an observation. There’s a clear statistical relationship between clutch and several relevant statistics: swinging strike rate, contact percentage, single rate, groundball rate, and many others.

To show this, I’m going to use a data science pre-processing tool called weight-of-evidence. This is a widely used method to determine if a particular variable has a meaningful relationship with some target variable. In this case, my target variable is whether or not the player is in the 90^th percentile or above for Fangraphs’ Clutch statistic: this is our “clutch” population.

You can skip ahead to the color-coded tables below if you wish, but I’m going to give a very quick primer on WoE for those who are curious:

Basically, you divide your variable into separate bins – generally even width or even volume – and calculate both the share of target events and share of non-target events in each bucket. You then take the natural logarithm of the ratios of these shares: it’ll be positive for buckets where our target variable disproportionately occurs and negative for buckets for our target variable disproportionately does not occur.

Generally, we aren’t just satisfied with the weight-of-evidence values themselves, but with how much total information value is provided. The information value for each bucket is the weight of evidence value multiplied by the difference between the shares. To get the total information value for the table, you simply sum up the information value for all buckets.

A total information value greater than 0.1 is considered to be reasonably useful, while anything above, say, 0.3 is considered to be fairly strong. (I’m simplifying, as there’s a bit of hands-on experience required to really understand this concept and its potential pitfalls – i.e. data leakage – but this basic understanding is sufficient for this post.)

Here’s this method applied to swinging strike rate, where the binning is in equal widths of 1%:

There’s a pretty clear relationship here: the more you swing and miss, the less likely you are to be in the 90^th+ percentile for Clutch⁴. Applying weight-of-evidence shows this is a strong relationship, as the total information value (IV) is 0.49.

⁴ Note that I’ve reduced the original 2000+ players down to 1478. That’s because batted ball data doesn’t exist before a certain date, so many players had to be removed from the dataset for this portion of the analysis.

The same general relationship, but inverted, applies for contact percentage:

Increasing contact rate increases the likelihood of being clutch – the 0.44 total information value confirms that there’s definitely something to this.

But more than anything, single rate seems to be a key discriminator:

I mean, look at that. Hitting more singles means you are considerably more likely to overperform in high-leverage situations, from a win probability added perspective, and thus be considered “clutch”. Players with single rates greater than 18% represent almost three-tenths of all 90^th percentile Clutch players, but only one-tenth of all un-Clutch players. Amazingly, four of the six most single-heavy players are in the 90^th percentile or above in Clutch: Ichiro, Juan Pierre, Dee Gordon, and some fuckin dude named Harold Castro. (The late, great Tony Gwynn would be included here, too, but the dataset does not include players without granular batted ball data, per the prior footnote.)

Even groundball rate shows some promise, but this is probably because groundballs often result in singles, which are disproportionately more valuable in high-leverage situations:

What does this all mean? At the end of the day, it means Mark McLemore’s 17.4 career fWAR is short-changing him by basically 8.5 wins. McLemore was worth about 50% more than fWAR indicates.⁵

⁵ This isn’t exactly how the math would work. Taking Clutch into consideration would alter so much of the underlying calculations that, pragmatically speaking, it would break fWAR altogether. (fWAR already is broken, once you ingest these realizations, but that’s another topic.) That’s because the total sum of the Clutch variable for all batters is actually negative; the relative value of events is bent so much during high-leverage situations that the only players who are able to maintain a positive relative performance in these conditions are those with specific underlying profiles. This is also surely affected by the quality of pitcher used in high-leverage situations. However, the units of Clutch are indeed wins, so a rudimentary exercise like this works to some degree.

But obviously, McLemore isn’t the only player affected. Our beloved Tony Gwynn was worth 9.5 more wins than his 65.0 fWAR states; that’s 14.6% more! Adrian Gonzalez was worth 5.73 more wins, while – good news! – Adam Frazier has produced 4.5 more wins. Most screwed of all in the old friend department is Geoff Blum, whose 3.3 extra ‘clutch’ wins is almost as much as his entire career fWAR of 4.4. Ultimately, there are a lot of players whose reputations as baseball players have been unfairly altered by fWAR’s failure to account for these effects.

On the other side of the spectrum, Sammy Sosa amassed a whopping -14.7 Clutch score, indicating that his performance in high-leverage situations was basically 15 wins worse than expected. Now consider that Sammy Sosa’s overall fWAR is 60.0, almost the same as Tony Gwynn’s (65.0). With the Clutch correction, however, their career difference widens from 5 wins up to 30 wins, from an 8% relative difference up to 41%! So while fWAR says these two players are very comparable theoretically, the story of what actually happened on the baseball field indicates that Sammy Sosa was nowhere close to the player that Tony Gwynn was.

There are other prominent players who suffer the same fate: Jim Thome, ARod, Adrian Beltre, and Giancarlo Stanton, among others, all have clutch values of -8.0 wins or worse. Mike Trout is at -7.88, Barry Bonds at -7.38, and old “friend” Matt Kemp at -6.82. The list goes on. Again, this doesn’t mean these players were bad. Quite the opposite, really; they were so good in general that more was expected out of them in these situations. It just turns out that the way value is generated in high-leverage situations is not the same as the way value is generated in ordinary situations, to the benefit/detriment of certain types of hitters.

And in what I’m sure you’ll find to be both humorous and validating, at the bottom of the list for the Padres – the least clutch Padre since 1987 – is none other than Chase Headley: -5.1 wins! Wil Myers sits in second-to-last at -4.35 wins. Phil Plantier, Darrin Jackson, and Dave Roberts (lol) round out the bottom five.

But you know where this is going, right? Right?!?

Of the 2,018 MLB players since 1987 with at least 500 plate appearances, Eric Hosmer ranks 18^th, wedged between Adrian Gonzalez and Jim Leyritz. In his career, he has produced 5.84 more wins in high-leverage situations than would be expected from his overall performance. That’s a 53% increase on his 11.0 career fWAR. As a Padre, he’s put up 1.44 of those 5.84 additional clutch wins, worth something close to $12 million in value (but actually more because, as mentioned above, total league Clutch does not add up to zero).

For Hosmer, it appears his Clutch rating stems from a high groundball rate, fairly high single rate, productive outs, and plain ‘ole timely hitting, but not his contact or swinging strike rates.

Don’t get me wrong, though. He’s still very mediocre, perhaps worth 2 to 2.5 wins in his Padres career with the Clutch correction instead of fWAR’s paltry 0.5. But with this 300% increase in value as a Padre, we’ve started to enter the “maybe we shouldn’t just DFA him” territory. At the end of the day, Hosmer’s contract is a sunk cost: we’re paying that fucker no matter what. But if his actual production in 2022 is 1 win, rather than replacement-level, it makes justifying an outright DFA difficult. And that’s before considering platooning him, which would increase his per-unit value, and considering that finding a platoon partner is a far cheaper and easier option.

But the relative value of events changing in different situations isn’t the only reason fWAR is so wrong, particularly on Eric Hosmer.

Context neutral statistics, like Wins Above Replacement (WAR), are also predicated on the assumption that all plate appearances are equally-indicative of player quality. That implicitly assumes that a player who hits a homerun in the ninth inning when down by six runs randomly hit this homerun and that this player is equally likely (from a skill perspective) to hit a homerun in the ninth inning of a tie game. It simply credits the player for hitting a homerun, removing everything that has to do with game context from the calculation.

In this way, WAR penalizes players who “overperform” in important situations in comparison to players who “underperform” in important situations. The creators of WAR contend that the outcomes are random – that a player who overperformed was lucky and that a player who underperformed was unlucky. Put another way, WAR assumes that the outcome in all situations is as simple as drawing a marble (groundball out, single, homerun, etc.) out of the player’s bag of outcomes, where the ratio of marbles in the bag is determined solely by the overall statistics from the player. This assumes that the ratio of marbles does not change in any circumstance – it assumes that a player is just as likely to hit a flyball with the bases empty as with a runner on third. In summary, WAR is completely predicated on the idea that situational hitting does not exist.

So in addition to ignoring that the value of events changes in different circumstances, fWAR also ignores that players might change the type of events they influence via situational hitting.

But situational hitting certainly does exist and it isn’t merely random. Hitters are more likely to groundout to the right side of the infield when there’s a runner on second and no outs. They’re more likely to fly out with a runner on third and less than two outs. And so on. These are well-known and studied. Going back to the analogy above: the ratio of marbles in the bag isn’t fixed and different players have different bags of marbles in different situations. We need to quit pretending they don’t.

There’s another logical fallacy in the argument against Hosmer worth highlighting here, as we discuss batted ball profiles. For years, both fans and writers have beseeched Hosmer to change his launch angle in order to increase the number of flyballs he hits. This would lead to more homeruns and fewer hard-hit groundball outs, increasing his theoretical value. I agree with this line of reasoning, although the effect (due to what I’ve highlighted above, but also due to what I’ll describe below) is considerably less than the theorists publicize. But underpinning this idea is the notion that players actually can control and therefore change their batted ball profiles.

That begs the question: if players can change their batted ball profiles, why is this idea only extended to the aggregate level, but not at the individual event level? Why do we assume that Hosmer could only change his overall flyball rate, while simultaneously assuming that Hosmer cannot control his batted ball profile in specific situations?

The situational hitting error doesn’t just end at failing to consider that players might hit more singles when a single is disproportionately more valuable. The other major glaring situational hitting omission is the failure to differentiate between types of outs. Productive outs, avoiding grounding into double plays, and sacrifice bunts aren’t considered. Revisit the formula in the footnote above, if you want to confirm. Players which excel at these things receive no credit for these skills, even though they are real baseball plays which result in improved win/loss outcomes.

To illustrate this point, let’s look at a few examples where different types of outs have significantly different values. With no outs and a runner on second, down one run in the bottom of the 7^th, a strikeout reduces the odds of winning from 48.7% to 39.9%, a reduction in win probability of 8.8%. A productive out in this situation – via groundball to the right side of the infield – reduces the odds of winning from 48.7% to 46.5%, a reduction in win probability of 2.2%. Relative to the strikeout, the value of a well-placed groundball out is worth 6.6% of a win! That groundball out is more valuable in comparison to the strikeout than if a player on this same team had hit a leadoff single two innings earlier with the same score: 42.4% up to 48.2%.

When we assess player value and talk about how players perform, we tend to focus solely on positive outcomes that players produce: the hits, the walks, the homers, and so on. And make no mistake, productive outs are still outs and they still mostly decrease the odds of winning. But all outs aren’t the same and some are much better than others. Unless we have good evidence that players can’t control the type of outs they produce and when they occur, we probably shouldn’t be assessing players with that rigid assumption. This is especially unfair since it double penalizes players if they sacrifice any portion of their positive outcomes in order to hedge against striking out; they are both penalized for getting out and then not credited for the real value produced when the hedge works.

You know where this is going, right? Right?!?

Surprise! It turns out Eric Hosmer is really good at making productive outs.

In his career, in situations where there is a runner on and nobody out, Eric Hosmer’s outs have advanced the runner(s) 195 times out of 535 chances: 36.5%. (As a Padre, it’s 36.6%, aligned with his career, and in 2021 it was 43.8%!) League average over this time period is 29.3%, which comes to an absolute difference of 38 of this type of productive out over his career. That’s only a few extra good outs per year, but it’s also only one type of situation where a productive out is helpful.

Examining these situations more granularly, it turns out that many of them occur with a runner on second and no outs. Hosmer has advanced this runner 61.0% of the time in his career, well above the league average of 53.4%. Again, this is only a few plate appearances a year, worth a small fraction of a win.

Another situation where the value of outs differ significantly is when there’s a runner on third and fewer than two outs. Even in one of these basic ass early game sac fly situations – say, the bottom of the first, tie ballgame, runner on third with one out – the difference between the sac fly and a strikeout is a whopping 8.2% of a win (+2.0% versus -6.2%). As you may now expect, Hosmer is better than league average in this family of situations, scoring this runner 55.9% of the time in comparison to the league average of 50.5%. Like before, this isn’t worth all that much on its own – a few runs or fractions of a win here and there.

One good way to understand this difference is to compare Hosmer directly to his teammates. Wil Myers, who we noted earlier as being poor in Fangraphs’ Clutch measure, is really shitty in these situations. With a runner on and nobody out, his outs advance the runner(s) just 22.2% of the time, 7.1% less than league average. Astonishingly, Myers would have produced 77 fewer of this type of productive out than Hosmer over the same number of opportunities that Hosmer has had in his career! And in the subset where there’s a runner on second and nobody out, Myers has advanced the runner just 42.0% of the time, 19.0% less than Hosmer! In other words, for every two times that Myers moves this runner over, Hosmer does it three times.

Myers isn’t the only teammate we can compare to. Hunter Renfroe also was dogshit in these situations – 25.0% and 38.3% – and Cody Decker literally never got a hit in any of these situations. Manny Machado, on the other hand, is pretty good in these situations, with career percentages of 30.1% and 60.8%. In case you were wondering, Tony was absolutely nails in both of these situations – 43.0% and 67.9% – as well as every other niche situational hitting category, except sacrifice bunting for some weird reason.

Again, I want to stress that those items above aren’t worth much individually. But, like remembering to turn off the light when you leave the room, the value will add up over a long period of time if you do it often and do all of them. In order to illustrate this, and avoid accusations of “cherry-picking”, let’s just look at every plate appearance and how it impacts wins/losses. Isn’t that what matters anyway? Every plate appearance, weighted for their impact? That’s called Win Probability Added.

Whenever WPA and similar statistics get brought up, they are often dismissed with a simple “they’re noisy” complaint. In one sense this is true: the aggregate WPA figure is significantly influenced by a few high-leverage plate appearances, and that isn’t always an accurate representation of player skill. But this is a lazy dismissal. Most plate appearances aren’t noisy, while the studies done by Fangraphs and Hardballtimes to focus solely on the consistenty of year-to-year total WPA instead of focusing on percentiles or career totals. Even then, the high magnitude events – clutch or lucky or unlucky, however you want to characterize them – are still real events which happened; they added the value they purport to have added and I don’t mind erring on the side of properly crediting players for their achievements.

Anyway, one way to really visualize this concept is to rank order every plate appearance from most impactful to least impactful and plot it on an x-y plane: the x-axis is the “badness” percentile of the event while the y-axis is the magnitude of the event in terms of win probability added.

Let’s brainstorm what we expect to see when we make this plot. We should expect to see that the plot crosses the x-axis at roughly the same percent as the players’ on-base percentage, since getting on-base is almost always positive while making outs is almost always negative. We should expect that players who hit more homers and have a higher slugging percentage will have more high-value events than the others. And, at the other end, we should expect players with more productive outs to have a softened tail, as their outs will appear less negative.

This is exactly what we see, plotted here for Hosmer, as well as a number of other firstbasemen (Josh Bell, Jesus Aguilar, Miguel Sano, and Trey Mancini) who allegedly were all more valuable offensively in 2021 than Hosmer:

It’s hard to really process everything here, as the y-axis is stretch to view the extreme events – game-winning hits, etc. – so let’s zoom-in on the boring region: the other 80% of plate appearances that we generally don’t focus on when looking at player performance.

Well, it’s pretty clear from this graph that Eric Hosmer is better than all four of these other firstbasemen in basically half of all plate appearances. For example, from the 70^th percentile onwards, Hosmer’s average plate appearance is like a 0.5% to 1.0% win probability improvement over Miguel Sano and Josh Bell per plate appearance. Doing some back-of-envelope math…

From the 70^th to the 90^th percentiles is 20% of all events, which is something like 125 plate appearances, or 0.6-1.2 wins added just by making less shitty outs than these other guys, either situationally or through committing productive outs. And again, almost none of this is captured by Batting Runs and, therefore, this real value is not a part of Hosmer’s fWAR. Some portion of it will be captured by Clutch, but not all of it.

Another interesting way to see this difference is to examine their outcomes on a basic boxplot.

The top of Hosmer’s range of best outcomes are worse than the others, his mean and median outcomes are about the same, while his worst outcomes are clearly better. And Miguel Sano, who has more Batting Runs than Eric Hosmer, is actually worse in all of these categories, so another point to the fWAR “it’s just lazy theoretical dogshit” counter.

The win probability charts aren’t displaying some 2021 fluke, either. Hosmer has pretty much always been like this as a Padre:

Some years it has been more pronounced than others, but the overall line here is pretty consistent with his 2021 season: his chart reflects that his outs are just not as bad as the other guys’. There are more productive outs and a change in approach in important situations. This hurts his overall line, since fWAR doesn’t consider type of out, but helps the team win more than these other firstbase options. I don’t know about you, but that kinda sounds like a team player.

Taking all of this into consideration – the changing value of events based on game situation, the batted ball profile of a player influencing Clutch, the changing distribution of outcomes from situational hitting, productive outs – it’s hard for me to ever take fWAR seriously again. Its fundamental assumptions are just, well … wrong. The nicest thing I can say about it is that it’s a fun theoretical concept whose offensive component, at the very least, needs to be completely rethought.

But the problem doesn’t just end with the fact that the statistic itself is poorly constructed.

What exacerbates the issue is the fact that players know they are being assessed based on metrics like fWAR. This incentivizes players to jettison areas of real value – fuck singles and productive outs, amirite?!? – in exchange for maximizing the fake value (fWAR) by which they appear to get compensated. It shouldn’t surprise that players continue to trend towards “three true outcomes” given this dynamic.

This bastardization of an otherwise helpful metric is not something foreign to baseball. In fact, these perverse incentives abound in real life and are the root of many major scandals in recent memory. Take the Wells Fargo Account Opening scandal, as a prime example.

Internally, Wells Fargo started assessing and compensating their employees based on how many new accounts they opened. Shortly thereafter, Wells Fargo employees started opening accounts for existing customers without their consent. Millions and millions of them. Perhaps number of accounts opened was a good metric when the employees themselves were not aware that this was how they were being assessed.  But as soon as Wells Fargo made this a known metric, it shouldn’t surprise that unscrupulous activity followed. And whatever value the metric may have had in assessing employee performance before the metric was known, it certainly didn’t have the same meaning when employees started opening millions of accounts without consent.

The same thing has happened in baseball. The second we started assessing players with a bunk set of assumptions which completely devalued productive outs and situational hitting, we incentivized players to strike out hundreds of times, so long as they hit a few more dingers in probably meaningless situations. We finally have someone to blame for Ryan Schimpf. Good riddance, Dave Cameron!

What it all boils down to is quite simple: in our noble quest to upgrade from boomers talking about pitcher wins and “ribbies”, we’ve literally removed any semblance of what actually decides games – how much an event impacts the odds of winning and losing – from our player assessments. We’ve gone all the way off the deep end. As Kirk Lazarus would say…

So where do we go from here? Should we use fWAR? Should we use any of the new-fangled statistics at all? My answer is a resounding yes, with a caveat. We use the tools provided to us in the way that they’re supposed to be used: for the problems they were designed to solve when the assumptions within them are satisfied.

In one sense, Fangraphs giving the world fWAR was like giving the world a hammer. The problem is that the world includes Padres Twitter, with the mental capacity of a toddler. While a hammer is a great tool for a narrow set of use-cases, if you give a hammer to a toddler, they’re just going to break a ton of shit and only rarely will they actually strike a fucking nail. Put down the hammer, boys, and consider using the wrench or flathead every once in a while.

In the case of Eric Hosmer and similar players with a history of overperforming in important situations and making productive outs, we can’t run around quoting fWAR like it’s some divine truth. At the very least, for these players we should be adding up their fWAR and Clutch values, and making other minor adjustments for things like productive situational grounders.

Speaking of which, we need a term for productive situational grounders that isn’t ten syllables or thirty characters, if it’s ever going to become part of our vernacular or used on Twitter. We can’t just go the acronym route either because it (PSG) conflicts with French soccer club Paris Saint-Germain and will never be taken seriously.

Wait a second…productive situational grounders.

Productive. Situational. Grounders.

Productive. Situational Grounders.

Prestige value! FINALLY!

The Padres collapse of the second half was epic. And complete. They reached 17 games over .500 by mid-August, and then had the worst record in MLB since. St Louis earned the second wild card spot while finishing 18 games over. That stings. I think the overall feeling for me for this season is pain. It really hurt to be so invested in a team that showed such promise last season, and then carried that promise into solid production to start this season. The Padres had the best record in MLB at the 60 game mark. Maybe they can only play 60 games. Maybe the grind of 162 is too much for this AJ Preller built team.

And what of AJ? Will he fire his little buddy Jayce? Will he fire the entire coaching staff too? He fired his farm director Sam Geaney. And replaced him with another buddy of his from the Rangers. I’m not sure why Peter Seidler is allowing Preller to build out the Rangers West front office. The Rangers never won a championship. And they are currently one of the worst run teams in all of MLB. But Preller poaches from there unabated. I read this morning that Dave Cameron quit. Probably because he was mostly ignored by the front office. He should have blogged about the Rangers instead of the Mariners.

Preller has his work cut out for him this winter. He’ll probably have to hire a manager. This time he probably should let the manager hire his own staff. Preller has to stop his micro-managing ways or he’ll be gone by next fall. It should be sooner. Really Seidler should cut bait now and fire Tingler and Preller and bring in a GM to hire the next manager. He won’t, as he inexplicably extend Preller to 2026. That is almost as bad as the Eric Hosmer contract. Almost.

So Preller needs to rebuild a player development department, I’m sorry, “build” the department, as the Padres prefer to say. Build actually works better here, because you can’t build what didn’t exist before. He also needs to build an analytic department, as Cameron’s departure has opened up a vacancy there. Then, he needs to improve the roster quite a bit. First order of business is to rid the team of the quitters. This team quit on Andy Green and then two seasons later, quit on Jayce Tingler. I’m guessing the ring leader is Eric Hosmer. Launching Hos into the sun would go a long way in showing the fans their 20% ticket price increase just might be worth it.

The Padres need to acquire a first baseman, need to get rid of a second baseman, find two corner outfielders, bolster the bullpen, and add to the starting pitching depth. Preller will probably add a couple of more middle infielders and call it a day. The man can’t build a competent roster, so there really shouldn’t be an expectation that he will this winter either. I’d love to see him prove me wrong, but he won’t. This is the Padres. All you get for your fandom is a great setting to watch games. A terrific fan experience. Now at much higher prices too!

It’s hard not to be all doom and gloom when you live through the months of August and September with this team. And then the Athletic publishes an article confirming all your fears about how poorly this front office is run. Preller is basically portrayed as an East Coast frat boy who hired all his buddies and made sure they were yes men to boot. The part that cracks me up the most is this persona of him as some “super scout.” He’s an East Coast frat boy. He’s not a scout. He was allowed to run rampant through his frat buddy’s farm with the Rangers, but I’m sure most in the scouting department just looked at him as Jon Daniel’s frat brother. He ran himself afoul of the rules. He did little of consequence with the Rangers. He has no rings.

Bring on the off-season though. The payroll is at luxury tax levels and has two immovable contracts with Wil Myers and Hos. I hope Ol’ Papa Pete is hungry because he is going to have to eat an awful lot to be rid of them. Seeing as how Preller likes to buy high for his free agent acquisitions, it will be really interesting to see how he attempts improvement. He’s assembled some talent, but that talent couldn’t get to 80 wins. But I’m ready to have hope again. Being disappointed is secondary in nature for us Padres fans.

A lot of the focus on the Padres humiliating 2021 season will center on Jayce Tingler and injuries, with the hope that a new manager, a talented core, and some key acquisitions will let the team run it back in 2022 with 10-15 more wins. While a new manager (or general manager!) would be a welcome addition, there are roster holes that desperately need to be addressed, either due to free agent departure (Melancon/Pham), or underperformance/injury (HOSMER/Myers/Lamet/Paddack/etc). One continuing area of interest for the Gwynntelligence conglomerate during it’s long and storied history has been team payroll, which has historically been embarrassing. One thing that cannot be said about 2021 is that ownership didn’t commit sufficient resources to this team. The team fielded a $180M payroll (including Kim’s $5.25M posting fee they paid out). Imagine two years ago sitting around thinking the Padres would EVER field a $180M payroll. We just wanted a league average payroll of ~$145M and were constantly told we were setting UNFAIR expectations on our small market owners. $180M!!!! In a lot of ways, I think we’re already taking for granted that the San Diego Padres have a $180M payroll. It’s easy to say Papa Pete should just commit another $40M to the payroll (and it would of course be great if he chose to do so), but I don’t think that’s an option that should be viewed as realistic or likely, just as a bonus if it happens. Honestly, I’d be happy if they were able to stay at this level of payroll, and even then, in today’s Rosenthal article, league sources doubt that it’s possible.

OK, so we just need the Padres to sign a few stars and baby, we’re back in business. This is where things get difficult. The Padres are backed against the wall payroll-wise. They have a huge number of ongoing, guaranteed commitments that are going to force a lot of tough decisions just to RETAIN many of our current players, before even talking about adding free agents. Let’s first take a look at our guaranteed money:

GUARANTEED MONEY

Manny Machado – $30M

Yu Darvish – $20M

Wil Myers – $20M

Eric Hosmer – $20M

Blake Snell – $13.1M

Drew Pomeranz – $10M

Mike Clevinger – $8M

Ha-Seong Kim – $7M

Jurickson Profar – $7.333M

Fernando Tatis Jr. – $5.714M

Buy-Outs (Stammen, Johnson, Melancon, Marisnick) – $3.5M

So, in guaranteed money, the Padres are on the hook in 2022 for ~$144.64M. It may be slightly higher because it isn’t reported how some of the [significant] signing bonus money is apportioned year to year). So, 10 players on the roster immediately consume $144.64M. There is obviously some fat to cut here, IF AJ is able/capable of moving Hosmer or Myers, and then the question is how much he’ll have to eat and just how much of that $144.64M he can shave off, but this is a separate discussion that we’ll have later in the article.

In those buy-outs above, Stammen and Johnson have club options. Kevin Acee has reported that the team plans to bring back Stammen, and it doesn’t seem unlikely that they’d also bring back Pierce Johnson, one of their most effective 2021 relievers. If they do, these additional salaries would be added, in addition to the buy-out totals above:

Craig Stammen – $3M

Pierce Johnson – $2M

If you’re following along, our running 2022 payroll total is now $149.64M.

Let’s take a look at the arbitration eligible players as well, as there are some key players that will have significant price tags associated with their third year of eligibility for arbitration (I’ll use back of the envelope arb estimates based on past data):

Joe Musgrove (A3) – ~$9M

Adam Frazier (A3) – ~$8M

Dinelson Lamet (A3) – ~$7M

Matt Strahm (A3) – ~$3.5M

Emilio Pagan (A2) – ~$2.5M

Victor Caratini (A2) – ~$2.5M

Dan Altavilla (A2) – ~$1M

Chris Paddack (A1) – ~$2M

Tim Hill (A1) – ~$1.5M

Jose Castillo – ~$1M

Trey Wingenter – ~$1M

Austin Adams – ~$1M

It’s an interesting list. Offhand, it seems 100% they will bring back Musgrove, Paddack, and Hill. It seems likely they’d bring back Frazier and maybe Adams and Yu Darvish’s personal catcher Caratini. This would total an additional $24.0M, bringing our running total to $172.5M. Given their expected salaries, there are difficult decisions on Lamet, Strahm, and Pagan. Lamet showed minimal progress in being able to shoulder a starter’s load in 2021, and Dennis Lin reported in his mailbag this week regarding his ability to start that “The Padres certainly aren’t counting on that. No one is ruling out the possibility that he will end up needing surgery in the offseason.” Given the payroll constraints, it’s hard to advocate to tender him a contract and have him eating up another $7M to be an average low leverage reliever. Given Strahm’s injury history and Pagan’s ineffectiveness, it’s easy to see them being non-tendered as well. Altavilla and Wingenter are recovering from surgeries and MAY be available in 2022, at $1M each it’s possible AJ rolls the dice on them. In the end, the Padres still need to have a fully stocked bullpen, and in this scenario, anyone non-tendered is going to need to be replaced, either from our weak upper minor league levels, or on the free agent market. But let’s assume the $172.5M payroll is what they’ll stick with and everyone else gets non-tendered, the Padres currently have a roster of 18 players. The other 8 players theoretically would be filled by minimum salary players (let’s assume $650k each for 2022), which adds another $5.2M, bringing our total to $178M. We are at $178M, and that’s to bring back 18 players, non-tendering Lamet, Strahm, Pagan, Altavilla, Castillo, Wingenter, and losing Melancon, Pham, and (lol) Marisnick to free agency, replacing all of them with minimum salary players. $178M!!!!!

You can see the conundrum here. This scenario has the Padres bringing back a weaker team to 2022 at the same cost! In this scenario, they have Frazier or Kim playing LF and who knows closing games and no added depth at all. This is not a path to success in 2022.

OK, so everything sucks and is hopeless, right? Not necessarily. While AJ has many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many faults, one thing you can say for him is that he comes up with creative trades and/or solutions. Not always good trades and/or solutions, but certainly creative. The most obvious deadweight salaries are HOSMER and Myers, each earning $20M, although Hosmer is due yet another $39M on top of that through 2025. AJ has tried to trade Myers’ contract for three years now, and Wil’s 1.5 WAR season isn’t helping the cause very much. As we all know, he tried to trade Hosmer’s contract as well at the trade deadline and failed. In either case, it’s going to take prospect capital to get someone to take on Wil’s remaining $20M or Hosmer’s remaining $59M. While we all know Hosmer totally sucks, a common refrain has been why pay prospects to make his contract go away, just DFA him. This would obviously help the on-field product, but given the precarious payroll situation the team is in for 2022, it doesn’t create any room to sign a new LF or closer or starting pitching upgrades or even to retain many of the arb eligible players. After taking a look at the 2022 payroll situation, I’m at the conclusion that they must dump one or both of these contracts, and pay what it takes to clear most or all of the salary. Wil’s is easier and cheaper to dump, and I have to assume AJ is going to try his best to get rid of his obligations. Even if they clear Wil’s $20M, if you assume Seidler brings back a $180M payroll, the team still only has ~$20M to spend to improve the team and/or fill roster holes, which isn’t a lot, but it also isn’t the $0 they’d have otherwise.

The focus of this article is on payroll obligations, but it should be noted that with the upper levels of the minor leagues pretty barren, the Padres don’t have many internal options to fill bullpen spots, closer, LF, etc. unless you think Reiss Knehr replacing Pagan as a 7th inning guy is an attractive option. The Padres do have a number of 40 FV prospects at the A level or below that they could maybe cobble together a quantity vs quality trade for a team that wants an infusion into their farm system. But in general, internal solutions don’t appear to be ready in the near term to help the 2022 team (Gore maybe if you squint not withstanding).

The payroll situation is dire for the 2022 Padres. They can dump Wil or Hosmer, but those are new holes that need to be filled in addition to the current ones. And all throughout these scenarios, you don’t see a path to adding useful depth to things like starting pitching, in fact you see some options needing to be cut loose like Lamet. The idea of bolstering the roster and running back the core sounds good when you hear it on morning radio, but the nuts and bolts of doing so are a lot more difficult than it would appear. On the bright side, AJ has shown a knack for two things: creative dealmaking and using black magic on ownership to increase their payroll investment. Either option would fix the problem, but at least on the Seidler contribution front, it’s hard to expect that from him given his current very generous investment in the complete garbage that was the 2021 Padres. Let’s just hope AJ has a plan. A good plan, not one of his terrible plans.

P.S. Contrary to the turgid and passionate desires of “rival executives”, trading Manny isn’t the way out of this conundrum.

Oh, and the Padres suck.

Fire everybody.

Go Pads!

The Padres have a difficult schedule to overcome, and the Reds would seem to have an easy one. But the Tigers just took two of three from them this weekend, while the Padres won two of three themselves from the Astros. I don’t view the schedule as a hindrance to the Padres playoffs. In fact, I view it as the tool sharpening schedule going into the playoffs. The Padres need to be playing their best baseball come October. Playing winning ball against the Astros, Braves, Giants and dodgers is a great way to prepare for the playoffs.

The starting pitching is now fully staffed, though it is possible Yu Darvish is still hurting. At least Blake Snell and Joe Musgrove are themselves. And Chris Paddack is back and a perfectly cromulent 4th starter. Jake Arrieta’s spot could go to Mackenzie Gore. Gore has made four starts since being shelved earlier this summer. He has thrown 21-1/3 innings and given up six runs, no homers and struck out 27. The spot will most likely remain Arrieta’s, but one can dream.

The offense seems to have found new life as well. Eric Hosmer is now worth 0.0 fWAR! It’s been a long haul, but he finally made it to replacement level. Let’s hope they limit his opportunity for failure so he can finish the season at zero or a little better. Manny and Fernando came out of their mini-slumps this week. Wil Myers stayed hot. Jake Cronenworth has been ice-cold, but the Sunday walk-off dong means all is forgotten.

With pitchers back and the hitters coming around, can this team actually put themselves in the playoffs? They’ll need Tatis and Machado to stay hot. They’ll need Trent Grisham to set the table. They’ll need Wil Myers to continue his MVP of August campaign well into this month. Blake Snell needs to keep shoving. The shark needs to keep closing it out.

All of this means the Padres are playing fairly well over the last week, and it is crunch time for the final playoff spot. Meaningful games in September has been an elusive reality for Padres teams for so long that we should appreciate this race. Flawed as they might be, they are still in the thick of this and I plan to enjoy every bit of it. This is my ride or die team. And we ain’t dead yet.

Now no one is having fun. Fernando Tatis Junior? I can’t even remember his smile, it’s been that long. And can they please just move him back to short? If he gets hurt, let it be because he was doing what he loves to do. MLB would much rather see him happy playing baseball. Have you noticed how quickly he has dropped out of the headlines? There’s just not much to say. Unless you want to sell unhappy stories. It’s very obvious he’s got those to tell right now.

Thank the baseball gods Jurickson Profar brought his megawatt smile back because this team was about to be clinically depressed. Jurickson also brought his bat as he had a great week. He was joined by only Wil Myers. Wil is having a pretty nice August. It’s good someone is. Manny Machado is hurting. You can see him wince from time to time when that shoulder stings. He probably should take some time off. He won’t, but he should. Maybe put Tatis there if you are so worried about him getting hurt at short. I’m sure he would have a little fun at third until his friend is ready to go and he can then just slide over to short for the rest of the season.

The pitching looks to be coming back. Is it too late? They can’t catch the Giants or anyone else leading the West, but they can take the Reds. I mean, come on, it’s the Reds. The Padres are much better than the Reds. Right? The Reds? Come on! Anyway, Chris Paddack is back so we ride! Saddle up! Let’s go wrassle some Diamondbacks. I can’t believe I am looking forward to what Paddack can do now that he is no longer under the oppressive regime of the dark Lord Rothschild. Return to ‘19’s first half form maybe?

Maybe this season wasn’t supposed to be all fun and easy. Maybe the team and the front office had some lessons to learn about being a World Series contender. Sure, those things can be picked up this season, but perhaps they need an off-season to adjust and come back better and more prepared. Maybe. I still like this team though. I think they can still contend. I just heaved everything I had after last week’s debacle. And that was after the previous gut busting punches I took from the week before. I can take it. My core actually needs the workout. Bring it on.

It was disheartening to hear from a National writer known to scrutinize every facet of pitching from every angle one can observe the Padres coaching as severely lacking when it comes to feedback to the pitcher of the data they generate in season. They aren’t helping, so they aren’t coaching. When other teams’ coaching staff comment how surprised they are by the Padre players and prospects lack of use and understanding of pitch data.

A fairly pedestrian stat like Swinging Strike Rate by pitch type probably wasn’t a part of Rothschild’s vocabulary. I certainly hope the next pitching coach not only speaks the latest language to the front office and coaching staff, but also can be fluent with the players as well. Making adjustments seems to come slow for much of the staff. The Padres need a coach who can help tune his staff in real time.

So what do the Padres do? They fired pitching coach Larry Rothschild. Rothschild was not in charge of the development of minor league pitchers, but he was responsible for their tuning once they reach the big league club. The problem is further down the pipeline, but maybe people will feel better about this collapse knowing someone has taken the fall. I’m sure if the skid continues, Damion Easley, the Padres hitting coach, will be next. If the team slides further after that? Well, Jayce Tingler probably doesn’t want to think about that.

The season going sideways so fast speaks more to how difficult it is to win in MLB as much as how mediocre the team has been playing. They haven’t played winning baseball in months. But they hung around .500 and were 17 games over just ten days ago. Everyone is slumping. Okay, Manny Machado is slumping. I hate it here. Jake and Wil have been hot. Hos has been league average. They appear flustered, but maybe it gets old quick watching your starting pitching get their asses kicked three out of every five starts.

Can the pitching rebound? Yu Darvish should be back to face the Dodgers. Blake Snell has had some solid starts both of his last times on the bump. Joe Musgrove is still kind of up and down, so maybe interim coach Ben Fritz can help him for this playoff drive. Chris Paddack should be back next week too. Mackenzie Gore is alive. I believe that is all I am legally allowed to report about him since the cease and desist order after my last piece about him. Let me just say Fangraph’s prospect writer Eric Longenhagen said Gore looked ready to get 12-15 MLB hitters out right now. Okay, I’ve probably said too much.

I admitted to saying too much about the playoffs and the baseball gods quickly sent the Padres into a tailspin of the likes the season may not allow them to survive. Somehow though, the Padres are in a playoff drive. September starts next week. This team will be playing meaningful games. It would be nice if that meaning was pleasant and resulted in victories. But I also hope everybody has fun. I’d prefer this fun not be alcohol fueled fun because this team drives me to drink, but hey, baby steps. It’s a long season.

It was a terrible week. It’s not looking much better either. Fernando Tatis Jr. is back, but he is playing in the outfield. Because every successful team moves their MVP candidate to a new position, as in no professional experience at all at the new spot, during a playoff drive. Sure all he has done is hit home runs as a right fielder. But did our shortstop? He did? Well all right then. Maybe it’s not all bad. It’s still bad! Yu is getting up there in age so I expect a full and complete recovery any second. Any minute now. Oh, and Pom’s arm finally died. They had a funeral and everything. Lamet’s next.

It’s tough to stay down on this team though. Tatis comes back and knocks the ball around and out of the park all day and you just have your worries wiped away. One player making that big of an impact is pretty unheard of in baseball. Otherwise Mike Trout would be a World Series winner. Multiple times. But Fernando is different. He really drives this offense. He makes everyone better. Him, and of course, motivational speeches by Hos. Hos throwing that prestige value all over that clubhouse Saturday night. If you ask me, he earned his paycheck, Chief. Note to all, time your big players only meeting just before your out of this world super star comes back to the team.

But I can’t start thinking positively. I am here to rant. I need to get this out of my system because we are doomed. The Reds are coming! And maybe the Braves! Or is it the Phillies? What are those last two teams, like four games over .500? This is starting to feel forced. Hey, what am I supposed to worry about if those teams I’m getting worried about suck? Oh yeah, the Reds. I’m really worried about the Reds. Have they even been 10 games over .500 this season? Just wondering.

Speaking of 10 games, the Padres are now 10 games in back of the Giants. The Padres have two starters on the IL, and one you really don’t want to give the ball. So we are at the Musgrove and Snell pick this team up and drive it to the playoffs portion of the season. I couldn’t imagine ever wishing for Paddack to hurry back and yet here we are. Mackenzie Gore is probably running out of time to make it to the club this season. Seven weeks left. I’m not sure we’re going to have enough time. Just like catching the Giants.

The goal at this point is not just making the playoffs. The goal is to catch the dodgers. Nine games left with those assholes. Darvish should be back for that next series too. It would be so great to start to put some pressure on the team that “won the trade deadline.” There would be nothing better than a play-in game at Petco Park against them. Last week I tried to speak into existence a 20-5 record for August. The Padres promptly lost 4 games. 7-6 start for August might make it tough to go 20-5. With the sky falling and all, maybe I need to cool it with the playoff talk.

Harold James welcomed on Padres Hot Tub host @CoreyAStewart to break down the Padres’ recent lackluster performance as we watch the opening innings of the Padres being no-hit by a starting pitcher that will wash out of the Big Leagues by next May:

1. Trade Deadline Flubbed
2. Can this team win a World Series as is?
3. Downtrodden discussion of a lost season

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

For Yu Darvish, this was a start his team needed him to perform. He was just about perfect. He made one mistake, so close enough. For Blake Snell, he had no hitter stuff. He was nasty and in the zone. Yes, he walked three, but he often was ahead early and putting guys away. Both struck out everyone. Being liberal with the Ks has been missed around here for a little too long. The 25 this tandem just put up should satiate the needy.

The Padres kicked off August with a “more of the same.” They play brilliant for three fourths the week, but then Friday night happens and you question everything. Or worse, you call in to a radio show. You know you are a lost soul when you call into a radio show. Call in a podcast instead. Certainly you gotta know someone.

They have started August 4-2. As dire as things were after the Friday night meltdown, they are playing pretty good baseball and are off to a decent start. This is a month they realistically need to win 16-17 games to try and hang in the NL West. These upcoming series with the Marlins, Diamondbacks again and then the Rockies are a solid chance to get this month rolling and the team looking like a serious post season club.

Do not look at the Giants. Pay no attention to the fact that they are 30 games over .500. The Padres are 15 games over .500 and look poised to push it to 20 this week. No really, sometimes you just have to speak this shit into existence. There is no doubt in my mind the Giants are using some hoodoo or something crazy to keep winning with their collection of old asses. *cough – BALCO lives -cough *

The Padres also received some positive news concerning Fernando Tatis Junior and his shoulder injury. He should be back just after his 10 day IL trip and possibly playing a new position? I don’t understand moving Tatis to the outfield at all. Outfielders dive on a daily basis and run into walls, fences, teammates, swarms off bees, etc. Of the Padres are serious about moving Tatis to protect his shoulder they should move him to first. It’s the safest position and they finally address benching Hosmer. Can you imagine the stretch plays he will make? Do you need a cigarette?

The pitching is what’s going to drive this playoff chase. Yu Darvish and Blake Snell seemed to have got the message. The bullpen is adding Daniel Hudson this week. And Dinelson Lamet will join the pen soon as well. But the starters, the big three, we need those horses to start pulling this wagon to the post season. I have no idea who is going to help them as Paddack is hurt and Weathers looks pretty lost right now. But someone will. Can they send Gore back to El Paso and get him ready?

Reiss Knehr will make a couple more opening starts and my friend Jed will have a conniption. This fact means almost nothing to anyone but it does crack me up when fans get pissed when the team has to bring up a decent minor league arm to open a game here and there during a long season. Really, it is fine and the bullpen is so deep it makes sense to play to the strength. And if you want the name of a prospect arm to watch for it’s Joe Beimel. The 44 year old is currently carving them up in San Antone and could join the big league team when needed.

They just need to get Paddack back and going six inning per start. Weathers is probably down to his last few starts if he can’t get outs. If ever there was a time for an advanced, highly regarded and at the peak of readiness prospect pitching for this organization! I’m not saying Mackenzie Gore needs to step up, but my god, does he ever have a golden opportunity to step up right here. So?

What truly is needed here is a hype video. This team needs some hype! It is time for this team to get it into gear and a hype video fills the bill. And so I have just the video. Justice Parman (@justice_parman) is creating incredible Padres video content and this week’s was just brilliant. Check out the YouTube video here: https://youtu.be/sQfkywN8wtQ

The Twitter post is below. I’m so hyped right now I’m ready for six wins this week. Big six!

So whether you imbibe or are a teetotaler, I think it’s best to just go into this month focused and start grinding toward the playoffs. It’s a race now. Time to drive. No need to dwell on all the negativity that comes up when you reflect on July. Lessons learned. Time to win some ball games. Run with what brung ya here. I still hate Hos. But he’s our Hos and we hope he helps. In a fairly limited role from the bench but still.

The trade deadline was last month, so we are moving on from that as well. We got a good second baseman, because they are the new market inefficiency apparently, and we got a real backup center fielder and more bullpen help. That’s it. Nothing else to discuss. AJ Preller basically said in a press conference that it doesn’t matter if they add another starter as long as the other starters don’t get it in gear. So I am just echoing my GM here. Time to get it in gear. Go win a playoff spot.

It will be a bit more difficult of a task with the Padres losing their MVP for a stretch. He’s probably the NL MVP if he can play enough to stay around eligible. Fernando Tatis Junior being on the IL for ten days of August is tough luck. And I understand if it turns out he doesn’t recover well and they need to shut him down. Get him well so he’s out of pain and can go full throttle. He’s an MVP at full throttle. He’s also at great risk to crash and burn that beautiful body at full throttle. It’s going to be quite a ride with him for fourteen seasons. Strap in.

It’s not like the Padres lack depth if the potential MVP needs a couple of weeks to recuperate. Jake Cronenworth and Ha-seong Kim both look terrific at short. And Frazier looks solid at second. It’s pretty remarkable to say Manny Machado is probably the fourth best shortstop on the team. And that’s not a knock on Manny. Preller, who celebrates his seventh anniversary of being with the Padres this week, loves collecting shortstops.

But what an August it has been! Undefeated this month. We still have a hot blonde shortstop and he is hitting dingers and playing stellar defense. Our first baseman is on pace to hit 50 doubles this month alone. We call up a prospect starter and he gives us three solid innings and only surrenders one run. There is a lot to like here. Tommy Pham and Trent Grisham are going to wake up any second now. Any second!

I am sure the starting rotation got the message loud and clear. “Thank you AJ may I have another?” Just you watch Blake Snell and Yu Darvish turn it on this month. I’m pretty sure Blake said “dominate” in his last response to the press when asked his second half expectation. Yu said he is a little off with his feel. Well, how’d he feel with AJ’s boot kickin’ his ass?* I’m positive he didn’t like it. Doesn’t want it again. I expect great things from Yu and Blake. Great, great things.

This bullpen is probably the best ever assembled in Padres history. Easily the deepest. There might not be the flashiest “closer” at the tail end, but this assembly can be compared favorably with any Trevor Hoffman or Heath Bell led group. These guys are ready to nail down 20 wins this month. Easy. I’m telling you, Preller has assembled a pitching staff better than even Kevin Towers could. And all he needed to do it was a meager 200 million dollar payroll.

So sit back and sip on whatever you like. Try to stay cool because it’s bound to be hot. Watch them march toward the playoffs, the race is on. Catch as many games as you can, it’s the fun part of the season. Time to grind. Time to win a playoff spot. Last year was a good start. This year they need to push farther. I know high expectations can lead to bigger disappointments, but I’m all in. I want a big winner. I want it all.

*The thought of AJ Preller wearing boots and thinking he’s gonna put one in someone’s ass just cracks me up. He’s from Long Island fer christsakes. I know he was with the Rangers in Dallas for eleven years, but I bet you he only had boots to play dress up at the rodeo. Because everyone plays dress up at the rodeo. It’s what Texans do. And even if he still has the boots, his little 165 pound butt is not kicking any six foot five dudes.

What did the Padres give up for the upgrade? Honestly, a tweener utility/AAAA guy who’s bat might carry him to an MLB starting role, a minor league reliever, and an okay OFer having a good campaign in AA. Only Tucu is ranked (5 by MLB), (Fangraphs has him at 33 fwiw). The Padres probably maxed out MLB value from those three in this acquisition. Frazier is now a Padre through ‘22.

This is the kind of trade you make every time if you can. Trade some marginal minor leaguers for all-stars. Do this a couple more times and this roster will be unbeatable. Where has this formula been all our lives? AJ Preller really is a genius. He just needs to get Max Scherzer and Craig Kimbrel and they are set. What could it cost, a few prospects that aren’t helping this team this year or next? Done. Build a championship caliber roster. Win a championship caliber World Series.

I admit I have been on the fence about trading. I was worried about chemistry and also believed this team is built to win plenty of games to get in, but also strong enough to win once there. I still believe but can see where a few strong moves makes this team a serious competitor. More production from the ‘pen, rotation and offense will not only add to the win total, but add to the chances of winning a play-in game and some series too.

This is the last week for trading. The deadline is Friday at 1:00 PST. I love that the obvious objective for Preller is to make this roster elite. And he is just two moves away. It could happen at any time. It’s so exciting and yet I am ready for it to be over as well. I’ve read way too many proposals. Seen too many arm chair GMs try to trade away Jake Cronenworth. Everyone seems to want to trade Ryan Weathers. Preller has figured out a better way. Minor leaguers with limited ceilings and no clear path to MLB playing time get traded for all stars. It is so simple. Stick to that brilliant plan, AJ.

This offense is playing like they actually are hungry for more. Even Hosmer is hitting. Hos is so hot for July, Kevin Acee had to fluff him again in his Saturday notes. Hos is slashing .409/.480/.636 for the month. He even hit a home run this weekend. He’s now back on a two homer per month pace. Those 12 he’ll hit this year are HUGE.

Everybody else decided to come out at the start of the second half swinging. Tommy Pham is proving that the gold plated statue commissioned in his likeness for future installation might not be opulent enough. Wil Myers has decided to re-enter the MVP SZN sweepstakes. And Jake Cronenworth now owns the third Padres cycle. Fernando Tatis Junior quietly had 5 hits this weekend. Manny Machado had six. The lineup is seven deep right now. And Austin Nola soon should make it eight.

The starters are stumbling. There I said it. Chris Paddack Blake Snell and Joe Musgrove all had a rough weekend. Yu Darvish and Ryan Weathers are hurt. Yu should be back this week but someone will need to fill in for the fifth spot and I wish that was MacKenzie Gore’s music. He’s in Arizona on double secret lockdown where he is supposedly tweaking his mechanics. I’ve got some shitty and unsolicited advise for everyone concerning Gore: ditch the fucking leg kick already. Do we really need to waste another year of this kid’s career screwing around with his mechanics? Simplify and let his athleticism come through. He should be the one stepping up to help out the rotation.

The real help to the rotation is coming from the bullpen. And they are looking like they are working too hard. The need for at least the majority of the starters to go at least six innings is becoming a glaring issue. Maybe a high leverage arm would be welcome. It certainly won’t hurt. But the real help would come from working less. Jayce Tingler needs to stretch out his starters. Maybe Larry Rothschild needs to bring in a yoga instructor.

One more thing I’m worried about is where AJ Preller will find all the prospect capital to acquire the two starters, one late inning shut down arm and slugging outfielder? Have you looked at the top 30 prospect list? Have you seen the state of the farm? They have enough for probably one item from the above wish list. The extraordinary action during last season’s deadline just can’t happen again this season. Preller is about out of bullets. My money is on an innings eating reliable starter. But even if he can’t land one, I’m not worried about it.

Harold James welcomed on Twitter megastar @CoreyAStewart to discuss just how confident we are in the Padres prospects for the season:

1. How are the Padres doing
2. This Trevor Bauer character is a real jerk
3. Who do we get?

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Or, they could collapse in an epic fashion where the boos rain down like a Chris Paddack Wednesday night home start. You almost can’t tell with this team anymore. They are very good, but they are the Padres. I’m not betting against AJ Preller standing pat with the hand he’s assembled. He could quite possibly improve the roster and not break the bank. He might damage the farm, though it’s pretty picked over at the lower levels of the top 30. Actually anyone top four or below are probably all being shopped as we speak.

But have no doubt this is a really good and really fun team. It’s not every team that can slam it’s way back into a Max Scherzer game. The Padres can do it because they are getting on the bases at a good pace. They are a top three NL offense and seventh over all of MLB. They have the likely NL MVP playing at a never before seen level of production at shortstop. Fernando Tatis Junior is playing like a god. A minor god, like Loki, god of mischievous. He’s Tatis, god of lagniappe and he’s hungry. He has whimsical powers of which he’s only shared a few. Like the ability to jump plus a little more. This occurs when he jumps and at some point mid-jump, jumps again higher and for longer than any mere mortal can. It comes in handy in ballet and baseball and fortunately for San Diego he chose our beloved sport.

The pitching has held up fairly well. The grind of the first half taxed the starters but more so the ‘pen. The break comes at a good time for Yu Darvish to rest and relax that hip and lower back. Hopefully Blake Snell can recover fully from his illness too. The staff could use a boost from him rounding back into himself. The bullpen will welcome the break and the number of off days in the second half. They come into the break with the best ERA in MLB. They are getting back Matt Strahm soon, which is nice. But I’m pretty sure Drew Pomeranz’s elbow died. Probably Dinelson Lamet’s too. Maybe they can get a discount or BOGO with Dr. Andrews. Isn’t it weird how when your elbow dies they put a dead guy’s elbow in you to replace it? Hopefully the guys’ donors were into hiking. Maybe some light snow boarding. Jogging. Those elbows are pristine.

The Padres have five at this year’s ASG. I hate how it happened, but I’m glad Manny Machado is there. Five all-stars means MLB sees how good this team is. Sure there are worries, like how it seems they’ll play down to the level of the competition, but typically this team plays better than that. You don’t get to a .580 winning percentage by “always sucking against terrible teams.” I actually think the team is going to be better in the second half. I think they are just getting warmed up.

They are coming out of the break in good standing. I remind myself not to let the doubt creep in. I’m more telling myself all this because I must admit I am a tiny bit concerned with this team. They need to keep hitting and then some, and find some pitching, internally or externally. They are good, I say again. I think I’ve shown that they are and yet I know they need to be great. They just need that little bit more.

Oh the beer? It’s fantastic. World class. We drink good beer. I’m currently drinking the flagship IPA from Brash Brewing, thank you very much. We have a fairly large and eclectic collection of suds suckers in the thread and IPAs seem to be the beer of choice. As it should be.

I have seen a ton of trade discussions invade my timeline when I really just want to know if the new Fieldworks taproom is as magical as it looks in pictures (it is). Some idiot suggested trading Jake Cronenworth and Ryan Weathers for Max Scherzer. Yes, trade for Scherzer, let’s Max this rotation out. But don’t overpay twice fold for him.

I have also seen reasonable discussions about improving the roster at the margins. These are my people. When those people discuss beer I end up wasting way too much time on that hellscape. I mean, some fans want to trade Cronenworth. Like no problem, trade the best second baseman in the National League. Oh, and he’s controlled for like the rest of Tatis’ contract, but sure, he goes for a one year rental.

I would be remiss if I didn’t at least give a shout out to the Joey Gallo fan club. He would look so good in brown pinstripes. Give up the farm. Anyone and everyone from five down. There isn’t much there, but maybe quantity can do it for Texas. It worked for Chicago. This team needs slugging. I’m looking at you, Wil Myers and Eric Hosmer. When 40 HRs is reasonably expected of the pair and they are at 15 coming into the break, you can assume the offense could use more power.

Adding a starter is one of the better topics I’ll see on the timeline. I am in the camp that believes in adding an innings eating competitor that gives the bullpen a breather and keeps the team in games they can win by out-slugging everyone. The staff is pretty good already. Darvish and Musgrove can pitch against any top two of any playoff team. Snell has the second half to round into shape and Paddack has the same to keep progressing his third pitch, his promising curveball.

Besides trade talk there is quite a bit of soccer talk what with UEFA Euro ‘20, the Olympics and CONCACAF Gold. I like to cheer on the USWNT so I’ll be enjoying the Olympics. I just think women play the beautiful game in the most beautiful way. I’ll probably let the men’s team break my heart again. In the Euro, I have no real rooting interest. The Lybarger’s are from the Palatinate. England did us in. My mom’s side hails some from Spain. Does Sergio Ramos need another fan?

Another fun topic on Twitter – Where did all the podcasts go? Content is plentiful when the team sucks and cynicism is easy. But how many times must we jerk off to Fernando Tatis Jr.? Listen, I’m not going to give you an exact number, but it’s probably much higher than you think. He’s young. And if you get restless use Manny. His defense alone should be a weekly topic for all podcasters. “Can you believe this dude plays for the Padres?” That never gets old. I still barely believe it.

But it is strange the way most content has dried up. There is still plenty to talk about. It’s trade season ferchristsakes. And winning is fun. Podcasters are allowed to talk about the good times too. Have fun. It’s been too long since we had a good team. Enjoy this ride for all it’s worth.

I think the topic most underrated is Eric Gruepner’s wardrobe. I thought AJ Preller needed a makeover but now it might be the entire front office. And it starts at the CEO. The man wears two checked sports jackets. That’s it. That’s his entire office ensemble. Two fall toned jackets when he is photographed most often in summer. Come on Eric, get some light summer suits. Maybe add some color to your spring collection. My advice: get Eric Hosmer to take you shopping. That man can dress. I mean it. Eric Hosmer is the best dressed man in MLB from what I’ve seen. Maybe the Eric’s can get together and make the CEO shine.

And speaking of Eric Hosmer, have you noticed pretty much all of PT has turned completely on Hoz? If he hadn’t brought most of it on himself with that horrible Acee interview a few weeks back, you could almost feel sorry for him. Almost. It’s like the dude gris-gris’d himself. But the vitriol now is loud. And getting angry. I think Hoz broke Twitter for a little while on Sunday. What have I helped create? evilsmile.gif

I have not seen enough Manny Machado love. At least not by the check marked folks. 15 HRs(+) .828(+/-)OPS going into the All Star break, he is now top three in the NL and pushing production numbers for the position. It’s so much fun when Manny gets hot and he has been on fire for a few weeks now. I still believe Manny is the best because his defense is just that good. He has the best arm in the league there. I like having him all to ourselves but I want more for him too. It’s tough. But he deserves more love. Like he should have been an all-star love.

The tweet of the week was a tough one to choose. I liked several great tweets and even bookmarked a couple. And my winner is: https://twitter.com/bdanhh/status/1410701116854063104?s=21 Go Pads!

Does Jayce Tingler even need to designate Manny as the captain? The only official duty for a captain is being able to present the line-up pre-game. Any obvious errors pertaining to the line-up can be discussed with the captain or manager. No team in MLB currently has a designated captain.

The Yankees last captain was Derek Jeter in 2014. The Dodgers haven’t had a captain since Davey Lopes in 1979. The Giants captain in ‘84 was Jack Clark. Remember that asshole? How in the hell do you make him a captain? He fucked it up so bad the Giants never had another one again.

Do the Padres really need a captain? Not having one has worked so well so far. What with their zero world championships. No need to mix anything up now. And is Manny the right man for the job? What if Fernando Tatis Junior wants to be captain someday? Manny will be captain hopefully through ‘28. Will Nando wait that long just to be captain through ‘34? Does anyone really give a shit what happens in ‘34?

I do believe the Padres should break with tradition and add a captain. And that captain should be Manny Machado. It’s his team. Watch him walk to the mound. You know who is leading that team right when he gets there. And he’s almost always the first one there. Watch how he has taken Ha-seong Kim under his wing. It must be absolutely wonderful for Kim to have such a Dojun guide him through his rookie MLB season. And you can see Manny beaming with pride as Kim’s play improves and when his moments of brilliance flash. Manny brought the Swagg chain. This is his team.

So sew a “C” on those number 13 uniforms. Let’s start a new tradition this season. Let’s hitch our (band) wagon to that incredible Machado wagon and ride. The Padres are committed to Manny Machado and he is all in with the Padres. Call him El Capitán and follow his liderazgo for years and years to come.

The trade deadline is finally in view. AJ has some tinkering to do. He really is in the tuning stages of this roster construction. There might be a spot or two that could use an overhaul, but most are running smooth and could just need some accompaniment. I guess we can go around the horn and then to the outfield and finally the battery. Doing so starts us with the biggest steaming pile of dung since Jeff Goldberg posed oh so pretty in Jurassic Park. I probably should have just used a gif for this paragraph.

Eric Hosmer is our stinking pile of dung. I know you are thinking that is disrespectful to the dung, but it’s shit. It doesn’t have feelings. It just stinks. Like the face Eric Hosmer makes when he is seeing a one hopper coming from across the diamond. It’s ugly. You just hope it’s not really bad. You know it’s gonna be bad. And that is just his … hahaha I almost said defense. At the plate he is not much better than THE WORST FIELDER IN MLB. He’s hitting like 20th out of 22 or so qualified. Sometimes a little better, sometimes worst, but it’s bad. And he can’t slug for shit.

So what to do about Hoz? How do we improve there? I mean maybe get literally anyone else. Literally everyone else. Just get rid of him and play absolutely anyone in an MLB uni and at one point employed to play first base there instead. Now Hoz, Chief, if you will, he has a full no trade clause. Probably have to trade Chief to the Yankees to get back a decent prospect. I think Hoz would dig NY. My other idea was the Olympic team. Just send Chief to the training site. Todd Frazier might be fun at 1B for a bit. But the Padres need to get better. Go for Colin Moran. He deserves to play for a decent team.

Second base is pretty well manned. Preller didn’t skimp on roster spots that could man the keystone. I know Jake Cronenworth has slumped a bit while hitting top five, but he’s back down and in a good spot to do damage with his pretty swing. And he is arguably the best defender on the field. If he hits well enough that kid might win a gold glove.

Shortstop just got your girl pregnant. Everyone is happy. Joe Musgrove drinks beer for free for the rest of his life. Fernando gets to do whatever he wants in the beautiful city of San Diego for 14 years. And then some. So short is set. Besides, what could you get for him in a trade? Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani? Would that be enough? The Angels would probably have to throw in Jo Adell. Maybe Brandon Marsh too.

Third is a lot like short. But with a lot more swagger. He’s bigger, he can pull it off. He hits the ball as hard as anyone in MLB. Those scorchers need to find some green space a bit more. I’m just ready to see Manny heat up with some power and start peppering the upper tank at Petco. Have you been watching him play third all season? He’s the best. He honestly is. If you can’t agree with this we might not be able to be friends. I’ll still love you but it will be different, you know?

Moving to the outfield, in left Tommy Pham has turned his season around and is now doing Tommy Pham things. He is once again an OBP machine and scoring runs. He is a strong table setter and looks healthy. He is in a contract season, so I’d expect his resurgence to continue. He’s not playing at a position in need of an up grade.

Center field is on lock down once again. Keeping Trent Grisham on the field will probably be a key to the Padres playing in the post season, so hopefully his heel is good to go for the second half. His nice combination of speed, power and excellent defense will be available to the Padres for years to come. He is a luxury the team has sorely missed since probably Steve Finley.

Wil Myers is still manning right field. It somehow feels remarkable he has made it this far through his contract. But Wil can still contribute. He is an above average hitter and no worse than neutral defender in right. Maybe it’s a spot to try and upgrade, but honestly I’d love to see Wil stick around and help this club win a championship. I think the position to upgrade is the fourth outfielder.

Which brings us to the bench. Jurickson Profar is all smiles. He lights up a bench, clubhouse or field. Unfortunately this season that smile is not lighting up his bat. He’s awful across the board. And they just signed him for what, seven years? I swear Preller is a great tipper. The way he doles out salaries you know he is a good tipper. I’ve seen arguments against him starting and yet he is still easily qualified for ABs. He’s probably be better as a fifth OFer and a utility guy in the field. Acquiring someone to take those at bats for Profar is a good place to try and get more production. I could see them moving on from Mateo if this happens.

Ha-seong Kim is a great bench peace to cover three spots. He’s also hitting at a solid clip this month. He might be figuring MLB pitching out a bit. Of course there will be the counter, as MLB pitching figures him out and he will have to adjust again, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. He’s playing very good defense and spot starting and covering for injuries. This is not a weakness of the bench.

Catching primarily is about health more than upgrades too. Getting Austin Nola back at the end of the month should be a boost to the offense. Victor Caratini has been a solid if not steady backstop in his enhanced role. Webster Rivas has been a perfectly cromulent replacement.

Darvish Musgrove and Lamet will be extremely formidable in the post season. Snell and Paddack will help get them there and be awesome in the pen once there. There is depth in the minors and of very high quality. This is the best starting pitching staff the Padres have ever had. I’d say they are good here.

The pen is strong and deep and about to add to the depth once Matt Strahm and Drew Pomeranz return. This is another area of strength for the Padres. Not that I would suggest trading from this strength. No, I say hoard it. It will serve you all season and post. Mark Melancon is a godsend. No team can have to many of them on a team.

So there you have it. You got yourself a cesspool situation at first, and can move Profar down a spot on the bench. Of course Preller will do something unpredictable because I am not a minion. I have no idea what is going on. I think his needs are minimal not like last season where he accelerated his build tremendously and pushed for his first post-season. The second half starts next week. Time to fine tune this team into a championship contender.

They’ll break your heart.

There is no such thing as a pitching prospect.

Most are busts.

But the one thing for sure about prospects, you just don’t know what you have with them. I could reminisce about Fernando Tatis Jr. and Marver pointing out the fairly high percentage for him possibly becoming a bust due to poor performance in Low A. Nah.

HJ is probably bummed that a piece would be published here about prospects during the year of our lord and savior AJ Preller 2021 leading us to the promised playoff land. Like quite a few of us, he has waited at least 10 years to not give a shit about prospects anymore. Who cares about prospects? They are now fungible assets to obtain better major league pieces to make the team better in the post season. The post season is all that matters.

The Padres have two prospects that could actually impact the big league club later this season. CJ Abrams and MacKenzie Gore are the Padres two best prospects they’ve had in quite a while and both have advanced to the upper levels of MiLB. Abrams could probably take all of Ha-Seong Kim’s playing time and hold his own defensively while producing more offensively. But that is another discussion for another time. Abrams could be added later in the season easily and might give them a boost toward the season’s end.

The dude we are here and right now to discuss is MacKenzie Gore. But who is Mackenzie Gore and who will he be when he is a Padre? Actually when reviewing his data and video content, you mostly end up with more questions than anything else. Gore is pitching for the El Paso Chihuahuas. He’s 22 now and is entering his fifth year with the Padres.

How he’s doing is tough to pin down in one sentence, but you could say he’s getting some innings and doing some work. He’s made five starts yet only thrown 18-2/3 IP while sporting a 5.30 ERA. FIP is decent at 3.81 and he has 17Ks to 10BBs. He has yet to give up a home run. You could easily make a case that he is mostly having bad luck and would benefit from an MLB defense. You can also state he does have some lingering concern with command issues, but those might have been connected to his earlier blister issues.

If the plan is to keep his workload light and steady to save him for a late (mid-late) season call up, I’d say it is not a bad idea. A lefty who can be a bit wild in the zone, but with plus pitches across the board, Gore has the stuff Snell is made of. Maybe they should spend some more time together. I don’t know. I hate hoz

Can Gore pitch at the MLB level and be productive is the question I’d like to examine because some modeled and forecasted data show he could be a solid contributor this season. Steamers says he could be worth a half a win over eight starts and at his current pace he probably could use the innings. Pitching for a playoff contender probably has benefits for him as well. I cannot quantify said benefits so we will qualify them as soft benefits and leave it at that. Of course, a playoff roster gets paid pretty well if you go far enough.

Gore pitching for an MLB team as a first round high school pitcher draftee in his fifth season is not unheard of nor without at decent data set. This could help us see how well he may perform. From 2014 to 2018 there have been 42 pitchers drafted out of high school. Of those to make it, 16 have thrown in MLB. Those 16 have averaged 23.2 innings in their first year and averaged 0.3 wins.

Gore could be a half a win guy, or maybe better?Possibly worse? Is he bettter than the average of his recent predecessors? Ryan Weathers, whom the Padres just announced will move to the bullpen, has amassed 0.5 fWAR. I’d think the Padres will have some innings in the second half to find out. If he can build up his innings per outing as the minor league season progresses, he should be the top contender from the farm to do so.

MacKenzie Gore has an opportunity to be a star rookie pitcher coming on to a playoff contending team. That’s pretty cool to even have. And how he’ll do is still a guess. But I hope he takes it and runs with it. I hope they put ugly boats in the bay. I hope he wins a game in the series too.

Harold James welcomed on new graduate from a semi-local safety school @TheChamner to break down what has been going wrong with our beloved Padres:

1. Pitching isn’t the problem here, hitting is the problem here
2. Eric Hosmer continues to be terrible
3. Spider Tack chat

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James was delighted to get to record with Corey Stewart to maintain some semblance of regular episodes:

1. Michael Paddack introduces COVID into the Padres clubhouse – SAD!
2. Lamenting Lamet
3. “Coach” Kentera totally sucks

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Marver are making great use of their MAJOR INVESTMENT IN NEW EQUIPMENT ENTIRELY FUNDED BY HJ with their third episode this month after a thrilling dodgers series:

1. The dodgers totally blow
2. Peeking: Why isn’t the entire team doing it?
3. Injuries

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Marver discuss the recent going ons for our beloved San Diego Padres:

1. Paddack: there is a place for him with this organization
2. Where is the offense?
3. The Post Partello era

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or on Stitcher.

Harold James and Marver discuss the highs and incredible lows of the first week of the Padres’ season:

1. Paddack and Morejon
2. The Tatis Tragedy
3. Going to games?

In addition to playing the link below, you can also listen to the the podcast .mp3 file at archive.org.

You are also strongly encouraged to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or on Stitcher.