We - rather, Neal - made some sort of promise that The NL Worst would not be a Baseball Statporn Site. I don't know about the rest of the NL Worst gang, but I'm going to stick to that promise. I know very, very little about Statistical Baseball - the empirical analysis of baseball, especially baseball statistics that measure in-game activity. It's not even called Statistical Baseball. Baseball people refer to it as Sabermetrics, and I only know that because I Googled the phrase "Statistical Baseball" and the Wikipedia entry for "Sabermetrics" was the #2 result. Yes, I absolutely copied / and pasted Wikipedia's Sabermetrics definition.
Statistics are important to this particular bit of Padres news, however: the team has made it official, via Facebook, that Clayton Richard will be the Opening Day starter. Now, we should all keep in mind that any pitcher who makes it to the Majors is probably better at throwing a baseball than you or I are at anything. That said, Clayton Richard did not have a very good 2017. And Padres Facebook remembers.
Boy, do they remember:
Some commenters seemed too stunned to form coherent sentences:
Still, there are those who are cautiously optimistic about Richard's 2018 season; the team's last two Opening Day games were disasters (a 15-0 loss to the Dodgers in 2016 followed by a 14-3 loss to the goddamn Dodgers in 2017), so why not go with the guy who is for better or worse seen as the leader of the Padres pitching staff? (Yes, he's probably the leader because at 34 he's the oldest dude on the pitching staff.) Perhaps this is Richard's time to shine, to be born anew, a Phoenix Rising from the ashes of 2017 into the Green Fields of a Spring Awakening, like Tennyson's Ulysses thrust into an A. Bartlett Giamatti fever dream. Right, Padres Faithful?
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