San Diego Padres 2018 Season Preview: The Padres Will Be Ok. Literally and Figuratively.

by Jason Avant-

In my introductory post, I discussed Padres fandom. It is actually a thing. We exist, despite the increasingly hard-to-argue fact that we have little to cheer for. Last year the team's record was 71 wins, 91 losses. The Padres were not good. But at least they were better than the Giants.

What will the upcoming season bring? There are 162 regular season games...so I'm going to predict an 81 and 81 record.

I have no stats to back this up, no special insight into the players and manager Andy Green, nothing but a guess. As far as guesses go, it's a good one. The Padres will not suck, in the strictest sense of the word. Nor will they be contenders, even if we get earthquakes in LA and San Francisco that open up beneath Dodgers Stadium and whatever it is that the San Francisco ballpark is called this year, swallowing both teams, leaving only the Padres and the Rockies and the D-backs to compete for the NL West. The Pads will merely be OK. Literally. Here are a few reasons why.

1. The Infield

Eric Hosmer seems like a good acquisition. He has won a Gold Glove, played for Kansas City when they won the World Series in 2015, and has a .284 career batting average. He makes no secret of the fact that he wants to be a (or even THE) Team Leader. Also in the infield: Chase "It's" Headly at third base and Freddy Galvis at shortstop, both of whom literally fit the definition of "OK".

Hedy Lamarr, not to be confused with Hedly Lamarr or Chase Headly.

2. The Outfield

Wil Myers is a fan favorite - I like to think of him as the Padres' version of the D-backs' Paul Goldschmidt, in that he's a pretty good player who non-fans have never heard of. If you say the phrase "Myers and Goldschmidt" to anyone outside of San Diego and/or Phoenix they will assume you're talking about a law firm that specializes in injury claims. In a weird coincidence, I have a lawyer friend, Mike, who specializes in Worker's Comp claims and kinda looks like Wil Myers. Here, see for yourselves:

Myers used to play first base, but he's been moved to right field. Joining him in center will be another fan favorite, Manuel Margot. He's a developing player who has power and speed, meaning that once he gets really good the Padres will trade him.

3. The Bullpen

The Padres will never have another Trevor Hoffman. BUT they do have Brad "Mister" Hand. Hand had 21 saves with 104 strikeouts last season. That's pretty good! (They'll probably trade him in a couple of years.) The rest of the pitching staff ranges from Middling to OK; I make no secret of my mancrush on Adam Cimber, and if he stays with the team he'll at least make things interesting.

4. The Rest of The Pitching Staff

It might be too much to hope for great things out of the Padres' starters. But...Tyson Ross might actually be good. He did well against Kansas City on March 12th (allowing one hit and on1 walk in four innings), and did the same against the Dodgers yesterday. Actually, he's had a pretty good spring training: 10 hits and five earned runs over 15 innings pitched. Cautious Optimism - for Ross, anyway -  might be in order. Also, he can hit the ball pretty hard.

So, an OK Season. Again, it bears repeating: this is not a team of superstars. Or regular stars, for that matter. Expectations must be level-set. The headline of this piece alludes to a possible bright future for the Padres. In my research to prepare this piece (Google Search: "Will+Padres+suck+2018"), I came across something interesting: apparently the Padres have a pretty good farm system. So even if - and the chances are good! - the Padres suck this year, have faith. 2025 isn't that far away.

Clayton Richard is San Diego's Opening Day Starter, and Padres Facebook Seems Thrilled.

by Jason Avant-

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?

The Diamondbacks Are Trying to Kill You (or make you huge)

By Jason Franz-

According to the 2017 ACSM American Fitness Index, Phoenix ranked as the 33^rd healthiest city in the US. Not too shabby, right? I mean, that's way ahead of our national education ranking. But your Arizona Diamondbacks are looking to tank that ranking even further.

So far this preseason we have seen the D-Backs roll out their 2018 food menu that includes - I kid you not - a funnel cake fried chicken sandwich, had their all-star third baseman give tips on how to optimize a nap and introduced their new dugout cart to ferry their relief pitchers to the mound saving them from trotting that 125 yards to the infield. I can’t wait for the Snuggie giveaway night, complete with built-in bib. Look, I’m totally chill with the fact that you can’t properly enjoy a ballgame without a dog and beer, but I’ll admit I’m one of those beer snobs who will readily walk the extra section length looking for a good local brew than settle for an $8 Pisswater Light.

The baseball fan experience is intended to allow you the joy of a lazy afternoon while the young studs on the field burst into occasional sprints to chase down that ground ball with eyes or steal second (or third, if you’re nasty!). I mean, only the Padres can really allow their thick fans to squeeze into those loose units like the likes of David Wells or John Kruk.

But what is with this concerted marketing effort by the Diamondbacks to overtly promote stuffing yourself with serving sizes that will make The Cheesecake Factory blush and throwing back to a player perc trend last embraced in the early 70’s? I mean, what’s next – disco nights and players laced on cocaine? Perhaps now with the D-Backs re-introduction of the cart, we’re already there. In the meantime, I’d like one of those 18-inch chicken enchilada dogs, por favor.

Adam Cimber Is Freaky. He Needs to Be a Padre.

By Jason Avant-

The exercise bikes at my local Y are the fancy kind. They have built-in TVs, which makes the act of pretending to ride a real bike much more bearable; you can plug your headphones in and listen, or just read the captions, which I do when watching sports. I was pedaling away; on the screen in front of me, the Padres were playing Kansas City. A gangly young man was on the mound for San Diego. Adam Cimber. I wonder how that's pronounced. Simber? Kimber? Khymber, like the famous pass? Baseball names are usually weird. I bet it's Khymber. Or maybe Kim-BEAR. 

Then Adam Cimber did his thing. If you watch baseball on TV, you will of course hear the announcers describe particularly difficult-to-hit pitches as "nasty". To call Adam Cimber's whole deal - windup to pitch to post-pitch attempt to keep himself from flying off of the mound - "nasty" is charitable. It's more than nasty. It's gross. It's disgusting. Here, this is him in 2011 playing for something called the Green Bay Bullfrogs.

Sidearm! Pitchers who throw the ball using the same motion that you used to chuck dirt clods at stop signs, houses, and your friends when you were twelve are always cool. Sidearmers are not terribly uncommon, from what I understand, but what sets Adam Cimber apart from any that I've seen are his feet. I don't understand what he does with them. Take a look at this Cimber Tribute Video.

That's not right. In fact, I said as much to Adam Cimber on Twitter:

Me watching @A_Cimber throwing some truly nasty sidearm stuff against KC today #PadresST pic.twitter.com/Ft2WFYlEW6

— Jason Avant (@PetCobra) March 3, 2018

He appreciated it.

Appreciate it!

— Adam Cimber (@A_Cimber) March 4, 2018

As of this writing, I'm not sure if Adam Cimber is part of the Padres' 2018 roster. He's gotten four strikeouts this spring, which seems pretty good. At least two of my NL Worst colleagues will be writing stuff about how the hopes and dreams of their hometowns are riding on the shoulders of their respective teams, how they've had their hearts broken so many times by the Rockies and the Giants and the D-backs, how The Management should sign some players that will help win ball games. Meh. I don't know if Cimber is the guy for that, nor do I care. He's a freak (in the best way) and he's entertaining. Get him in a Padres uni.

UPDATE: I don't want to jinx the man but things are looking good for him.

Tour De Cactus League - Baseball by Bike

By Jason Franz-

Let's face it, there's no place better late February, early March than the Valley of the Sun. Ever since the Detroit Tigers migrated southwest for the spring in 1929, Arizona has been one of two primary destinations for shaking off the rust. But those in the know can attest that the desert is best - just ask the LA Dodgers who moved from their long established home in Vero Beach, FL to share a stadium with the freakin' Chicago White Sox.

As we are back in the full swing of Spring Training, I think back to when I scribbled some words for The Phoenix New Times, our local alt paper, on the local bicycling scene and how to enjoy our dusty, cactus strewn flatlands. One particular spring, I decided to map a route around the 10 baseball complexes that act as springtime transient homes to half of the boys of summer.

While the Cactus League promotes the convenience of AZ's sites being no more than 47 miles apart, it sure takes much more than that to link them together in any rational, much less convenient route. Therefore, I bisected the Valley in half, as most residents do anyway, and created an eastside tour hitting the stadiums for the Diamondbacks, Rockies, Cubs, A's, Angels, Giants and Arizona State Sun Devils, and the westside spots for the Reds, Indiands, Royals, Rangers, Padres, Mariners, Dodgers and White Sox. (I bypassed the standalone site of the Milwaukee Brewers because, well, it's the Brewers and they're in, well, Maryvale - Phoenicians, you get me.)

So for those so inclined who like to mix their baseball with some cycling or just want to experience the Valley in a way no other rational person does, here are the two stages of the 2012 Tour de Spring Training:

Stage 1 - The East Side

Stage 2 - The West Side

There Is No God And The Padres Are His Prophets

"I ain't an athlete, I'm a ballplayer." - John Kruk, aka "Mr. Padre"

Like all white sportswriters named Jason, I haven't played organized baseball since the 4th grade. My position: right field. My lifetime average: .000 (I'm told that getting to go to first because the ball hit you in the hands doesn't count as a hit, even if it happens in multiple games). I did play Work Softball for my department's team; there I played first base, and I was a rarity - a contact hitter who used speed to get on base. My team was The Fighting Dugongs: a dugong is a type of manatee, and my Work Softball League was the SeaWorld Coed Recreational. If you live in San Diego at some point you're required by law to work at SeaWorld. Living in Paradise carries with it a heavy price.

Dugong. This particular dugong was acquired by the Padres in exchange for Adrian Gonzalez, a deal that some Padres fans still question.

San Diego, of course, is not a Sports Town. I'm told that many years ago we had a professional football team - NFL, not XFL, even! - but apparently they moved to Los Angeles, which if you're not familiar with it is the blighted vomitscape where the two "Blade Runner" documentaries were filmed. There is a minor league hockey team that plays in the same arena where the San Diego Clippers used to play before they became the LA Generals. Football, basketball, hockey...these are sports that require passion, commitment, and lots and lots of jumping up out of one's seat and yelling. This is anathema to San Diegans. Look outside. It's nice out. It's always nice out. 72 degrees and sunny, 364 days out of the year. I'm in my seat. I'm drinking an IPA produced by one of our 120+ local brewers. I'm eating a fish taco. I don't want to jump up out of my seat. I'll spill my citrusy-piney-dank-with-slight-sourness-must-be-the-Brett-yeast beer. And yelling? It's So Not Chill. It's nice out! You should chill.

I will be discussing my deep and unabiding love for the Brown Jersey in a future installment.

No, we're not a Sports Town. We have beaches. Miles of them. Most of the time we'd rather be there, thanks.

But we are a Baseball Town.

Tony Gwynn. Dave Winfield. Trevor Hoffman. Tony Gwynn. Steve Garvey. Rollie Fingers. Goose Gossage. Ozzie Smith. (How 'bout that?) Ed Spiezio. Tony Gwynn. And Mr. Padre himself, John Kruk. Actual baseball players! A few years back, a really nice stadium went up in the heart of downtown San Diego. An actual baseball park! It's quite nice. They sell fish tacos. The Padres have even been to the World Series. Twice! Some of you reading this may have even been alive at the time.

Ed "The Splendid Speez" Spiezio, known to most fans as "Uncle Padre".

If the Padres are not beloved by San Diegans, in the way that the Dodgers are beloved by their fans, they are certainly...beliked. Petco Park sells enough tickets to keep the team here. Most of the games are televised. I suspect that the love isn't there because the Padres are what the actual sportswriters call a "small-market team"; the owners will never have enough money to pay for the great players, and when they get really good ones, they're usually out the door in a season or two. (Waves at Jake Peavy, Adrian Gonzalez, Chase Headley, Heath Bell...) Thus are Padre fans' expectations and accompanying emotions level-set. Like the Cubs and Red Sox fans of yore, we root for perennial Likable Losers, a team with little hope of World Series Glory; unlike them, we are generally happy folk who lead physically healthy and emotionally rich lives thanks in no small part to our beautiful climate. Padres fans are bereft of hope, our prayers to the Baseball Gods go unanswered, but at least there are burritos stuffed with French fries. I am a Padre fan, which is to say that like most San Diegans I enjoy watching them when the surf is flat, I'm hoping that they don't trade Wil Myers, perhaps this year I'll finally buy an authentic jersey, but it's more likely I'll opt for a cap. They're considerably cheaper and can help prevent sunburn.

Jason Avant
aka The Other White Jason

Greetings from AZ, Where the Air Conditioning Is More Important Than the Pitching Depth

In a million, bajillion years I never thought I would be a baseball writer, much less asked to be a baseball writer. But, when the Greatest Living American Writer asks you to serve, you report to duty without any regard to potential charges of collusion or election tampering. Perhaps I am chasing a tangent. Regardless, my sense of commitment to the national past time beckons.

My appreciation of the game reached its zenith in my 13^th year of age, as a scrappy, gangly, defense-oriented first baseman with mad slap hitting skillz and a more than decent baseball card collection. My knowledge of the meaning of stats began and ended with whatever was on the non-glossy sides of those rectangular slivers of glory. Understanding not only what ERA stood for but how to actually calculate it felt like I moved from Algebra 1 to pre-calculus, skipping right past that geometry nonsense.

National Geographic

I grew up a Kansas City Royals fan. That was based in the fact that I was born in Kansas City, lived there for a hot minute and my entire lineage was rooted there. That allegiance was nailed into place by my being 7 in 1977, right as the Royals were peaking as one of the three best teams in the world for the next eight years, led by the greatest GQ manly man of them all, George Brett. Brett was the king of the 80’s, flirting with .400, smearing pine tar, joking with Letterman and hauling in trophy over trophy like it was no big deal. Dude was The Boss, screw Steinbrenner.

I also loved to go to Royals Stadium when I visited my relatives in the summer (I became a full-time Arizonan in ‘72, not including a 7-year dalliance with the entertainment industry in LA in the 90’s). The sea of bright green artificial turf and the majestic array of fountains behind the wall in right center field dazzled me while those coked-out men in whiter-than-coke uniforms filled the time between inning breaks. I could not have been more prepared for what Jerry Colangelo and the Arizona Diamondbacks would bestow upon my non-traditionalist baseball sensibilities in 1998.

Look, baseball can be the most zen distraction in the world, defensive players shifting and gliding in their prime field placements, the dance between pitcher and catcher, the movement of hitter and baserunners on a square that operates in a mutually exclusive syncopation with the rest of the yard that is never the same between two home fields. Whatever, I need to know that I can get a beer and a dog and air conditioning for 2-plus hours. I’m a Diamondbacks fan. Sure, we’ve had the fortune of a world championship and multiple playoff runs, but we have seen the cellar more than once, too. For every Randy Johnson or Paul Goldschmidt we’ve endured an Russ Ortiz or Shea Hillenbrand. Through it all we get to sit in a warehouse converted into baseball stadium that truly is optimized each offseason when the monster truck rally comes to town.

If you’re looking for keen insights on how to best build your fantasy baseball team from a Diamondbacks angle or why Mark Grace can’t seem get Yasmany Tomas’ swing in order, I am not your man. But I can’t wait to tell you how the new Bahn Mi sandwich tastes!

Jason Franz

Desert Dweller

Welcome To The Least-Visited Sports Blog In History

In an era where streaming video content pours across your social media whether you want it to or not, where score updates flash on your phones, when you can hide the details of today's game on the Roku until you're good and ready to get drunk and watch it, I've decided to start a baseball blog, like it's 1999. 

Why?

I'm a semi-famous writer. That's about as significant as my teenage son saying "they know me at the gas station because I buy Icees there so often." Once upon a time, it might have mattered, but it doesn't anymore. No one knows and no one cares but me. 

I recently submitted an entry to an open staff-writer call at my favorite Los Angeles Dodgers fan site. I figured the fact that I've published 10 books and the fact that I was published in Best American Sportswriting, for a Slate essay chosen by Michael Lewis, of all people, might carry a little weight. Maybe I'd finally get to fulfill my lifelong dream of writing about my favorite baseball team.

Instead, they hired the usual assortment of guys who like to write about Matt Kemp's UZR or whatever and how it indicates that Matt Kemp might still be a productive outfielder. Instead of writers, they chose coders. While I do believe in advanced metrics, I also believe in entertainment. And writing about Logan Forsythe's fWAR is not entertaining. 

But not only wasn't I selected, I wasn't a finalist. I didn't even get a rejection email. Nothing. Bupkus. Denied. Like a former Major Leaguer attempting one last shot at Spring Training, I was sent away to stock boxes at Home Depot or whatever the hell it is I do these days.

But instead of saying "Why don't the Dodgers love me anymore?", I said "Fuck it. I'm going to start my own baseball blog." I put a Facebook post up complaining about how I got rejected by the Dodgers Digest. It received a decent amount of sympathy, and more than one comment saying "you should do your own site." So I did. Here it is: A fan's perspective, only lightly statistical, on rooting for and watching what has been more or less the best team in baseball over the past decade, even though, like me, they have won nothing. That's the Dodgers for you. Always the best man, never the groom. 

In an attempt to mock more than one baseball team, and in an attempt to do as little work as possible, I've teamed up with my high-school friend Jason, who will be covering the obnoxious Arizona Diamondbacks and their terrible shopping mall of a ballpark, and with a guy named Avery from my Facebook page, who I've never met even though he lives in the same town as me. He will be covering the San Francisco Giants, the living embodiment of Satan's hordes on Earth. Here is a scene from their most recent Spring Training game: 

Jason has, in the past, written for The Phoenix New Times, so I know he can put together an entertaining sentence about urban bicycling, which is exactly the same as watching baseball in that it goes nowhere fast. I'm going to trust that Avery can do the same, given that he is a Giants fan, and Giants fans tend to be literate and evil.

We're currently looking for people foolish enough to cover the Colorado Rockies, a baseball team that requires you to believe in Jesus to play for them, and the San Diego Padres, the worst baseball team of all time. The Padres assignment might be kind of fun, as you'll be able do things like make fun of great Padres throughout history like Ed Spezio.

We are not Dodgers Digest, so pretty much the first applications to come in will be the ones that we accept, assuming they display basic knowledge of grammar and punctuation rules. This actually rules out most Padres fans, but we can hope.

So welcome to the NL Worst, a mostly stats-free carnival of shit-talking and fan-based whining, which is what Internet sports writing was before sentences like "Barnes — rate-wise — is the 2nd-best framer in baseball. Overall, he was eighth, but that was in just 2,931 framing chances." As Mr. Spock would say:

I'll let Jason and Avery introduce themselves, and then after that I'll chime in with my Dodgers season preview, which will be almost almost entirely based on me watching 12 Spring Training innings of Dodgers baseball, six of them pitched by Clayton Kershaw, on MLB League Pass. Get ready, this is going to be huge. 

Best,
Neal Pollack