Calling them the “Whale’s Vagina Padres” is neither here nor there; I just wanted to be splashy. Anyways, it’s a good thing no one in San Diego knows the Padres are still there because, if they did, they’d be upset.
I’m starting to think GM Jed Hoyer made an agreement with previous GM Kevin Towers to continue his legacy of intentionally remaking the Padres into the most anonymous team in all of MLB. Except I think Hoyer will take it one step further and turn it into some sort of avant-garde performance piece. By June he’ll have dealt away Chris Young, Adrian Gonzalez, Kevin Kouzmanoff and Heath Bell, strictly accepting obscure Double-A players only. Then soon afterwards he will arrange to have all the players’ names removed from the backs of their jerseys, rendering them unrecognizable to the announcers and fans. There will be no media programs published; MLB.com and ESPN.com will be forced to sign confidentiality agreements agreeing to never post the identities of the Padres’ players on their sites. At the end of the season at some art show in SoHo there will be a retrospective of the 2010 San Diego Padres season to commemorate the team’s visionary artistic achievement.
But seriously, what happens if they trade Adrian Gonzalez and Kevin Kouzmanoff? Will the league have no choice but to demote them to Triple-A? Will they be put up on foreclosure, bought by Mark Cuban, and moved to Las Vegas, San Jose…Dallas? I kind of want this to happen the same way people want the government to get so corrupt it collapses on itself in a fascinating wreck of dysfunction and chaos.
What would the city of San Diego do with that stadium they worked so hard to make the centerpiece of the downtown landscape? Would they just remodel it into a football stadium and let the Chargers play there? Would they upgrade to stainless steel appliances and granite countertops and hope to find a buyer willing to pay full price (desperate Southern California homeowner joke)? It does have great curb appeal…
The most amazing part is that despite all this, the Padres vastly outperformed their circumstances. They overachieved like a bastard in 2009. Their 2009 Pythagorean W-L record was 67-95. Long story short, that’s what their record SHOULD have been based on the team statistics. Their actual record? 75-87 – 8 games better than what it should have been. In baseball that’s pretty significant. Then if you look at their season month-by-month, you see that if they had just managed to go .500 for June and July they would have ended up 85-77 – above .500 and better than the Cubs, Brewers and Reds – and finishing 5th versus 8th in the wild card standings.
I suppose that’s all hypothetical gibberish since they DIDN’T do any of that, and were a pretty crappy team that in a fluke went 17-9 in September. But it begs a question for the management of the organization. You really can’t just do a little bit better? Is the team really that bankrupt? How can you be totally unable to keep any veteran good players? How much of this is simply the ubiquitous corporate mentality of profit-not-product first? I don’t know the details of the team’s financial situation. I know the owner went through a nasty divorce this year and was allegedly…apparently…trying to devalue the team since it was his biggest financial asset so that he would owe less to his wife.
So my second question is for someone like Mark Cuban, who kicked the tires on a franchise that would cost him about a bajillion times more to buy (the Cubs), why not put in an offer on the Dads and spice up the NL West a whole lot? Good time to do it with the ridiculous 2011 free agent class looming. Carl Crawford and Joe Mauer would look good in those Padres fatigues uniforms...*
*No, they wouldn't. I was just saying that as an ending to my column. Those are the ugliest uniforms in the history of baseball.
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