I go back a long way with the San Diego Padres. I am a San Diego native and when I was a kid I would go downtown to Westgate Park and see them play in the Coast League, when they were a Dodger farm team. The star back then was a guy named Roberto Pena. A thick fog would roll into the ballpark, sometimes making play impossible to view. I was there the day Chub Feeney gave the team the bird and also there when Ray Kroc got on the loudspeaker system to apologize to the fans for the team's poor play.
Well the 2008 edition is in a thick fog as well. This team is a fish that's rotting from the top down. We have an owner, John Moores, who somehow successfully played the Ken Lay card and was practically the only senior member of his corporation, Peregrine Systems, who didn't get indicted and plead guilty. He is going through a messy divorce but has been reluctant to spend money for years, quite content to field a perennial third or fourth place (and now last place) team while he reaps the benefit of a cushy real estate setup around the stadium.
The President and Director of Baseball Operations, Sandy Alderson is a soulless automaton with a sabremetrics book shoved up his ass. This dour beancounter has managed to turn the great prior manager, Kevin Towers, into a toothless eunuch.
This guy, along with another failed Dodger manager with a pocket protector, Paul Depodesta, have managed to create a baseball boondoggle of Leontine proportions. They have no advance scouting department and no intuitive feel for the intangibles of the game, preferring to rely strictly on Bill James and mathematical percentages.
We have a park that is so big that our hitters, who have put up decent numbers in other organizations, can barely make the warning track. This is quite emasculating, I am sure.They have built a team with absolutely no speed and traded away the few guys who could really get knocks, guys like Russell Branyon and Derek Lee. The outfield is abysmal defensively and the closer is an aging once great warhorse who can't seem to hear the final bell. The team can't hit left handers and they just drafted a first round pick with a bad hip.
We trade great players like Loretta and countless setup men at the peaks of their career. There are some great players on this team, Greene is a jewel defensively at short, the Gonzales brothers, Peavy. This team is about to get blown up and its a shame because these guys deserve better from management, who have failed both them and the fans.
Last night, the Pads lost for the sixth straight time, the eleventh loss in the last thirteen. They now stand seventeen games under .500. Pathetic.
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