Skip to main content

Padre Bloggers Are Idiots

Hey, friends! Baseball is back, and that means it's time to point out how our fellow Padre fans are IDIOTS sometimes- especially our friends at the prosaic Gaslamp Ball, who published this gem decrying Bill Center's number 19 and 20 entries on his list of Top 100 Padres: current owners Peter Seidler and Ron Folwer.

Which, I will be the FIRST to admit.... this might be a little high for the two. But some of the comments the anonymous author of the GLB article makes are incredibly foolish, like this little snippet:

"These two have only known failure since coming to Petco Park. They are peddling the same vision that other executives formulated and they’ve only been following this vision for all of 6 months."

 I mean, yeah, the team still hasn't won yet. But this team NEVER wins- we've had 14 winning seasons in a franchise history that spans nearly 50 years! So if we're going to use winning as a benchmark, Seilder and Folwer look like Robert Kraft in comparison to some of their predecessors. A brief history:

  • Jeff Moorad embarrassed the organization by failing to get the required number votes from the other owners of the league, and promptly resigned as CEO in disgrace.
  • John Moores milked the city for millions in tax dollars towards PETCO Park under the promise of building a team that could contend for a World Series,  and then proceeded to promptly cut the team's payroll to under 40 million dollars. Moores eventually attempted to sell the team to the ineffectual Moorad. After that fell through, the former finally sold the team to Seilder and Folwer's investment group for a 300 million dollar profit. (For the record, Moores ranks 16 on Center's list).
  • C. Arnholdt Smith, the first Padres owner, who almost sold the team to a group intent on moving the team to Washington after the bank he owned failed. Smith was eventually convicted of embezzlement and tax fraud relating to the sale of the Padres, and was sentenced to federal prison.
  • Tom Werner, who gave the green light on the infamous "Fire Sale" of 1993 in an effort to maximize profits, to which Padres season ticket holders responded by filing a class action lawsuit against him.  Werner was also responsible for the disgraceful Roseanne Barr national anthem incident:  


If Gaslamp Ball is going to rip on the current ownership group, they should at least keep the past ownership history in mind- nothing Folwer or Sielder have done even remotely approach the sheer incompetence or maliciousness of their forerunners- they've actually done some pretty cool things:
  • Brought the All Star Game to PETCO Park, which was very well received.
  • Opened their pocketbooks spend a record-breaking amount of money on elite international prospects, and to extend Wil Myers and Yangervis Solarte
  • BROUGHT BACK THE BROWN*                                                                                         (*okay, the home uniforms still suck. but small victories are better than nothing!!!)
  • Made massive improvements to PETCO Park
  • Revitalized the Padres Hall of Fame, and actually LISTENED TO THE FANS; as evidenced by their reverse-course on naming it after Bud Sielig
Under Siedler and Folwer, the Padres have made significant investment in the future of the ballclub through upgrades to the fan experience and the minor league system- which, like, no owner has EVER done, so while they might not yet deserve to be number 19 and 20 on Centers list- they definitely belong on it. Shame on you, Gaslamp Ball.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Padres Sign Eric Hosmer

After enduring the most boring baseball offseason in recent memory , the Padres took a metaphorical sledgehammer to the frozen free agent market and signed first baseman Eric Hosmer to an 8 year, 144 million dollar contract- by far the largest and most lucrative in team history . Obviously, the prospect of signing Hosmer has been an extremely polarizing subject amongst Padre fans, but he does indeed have a nice resume; he had an All-Star season last year (25 home runs and 4.1 Fangraphs Wins Above Replacement), won two Gold Gloves, will be a clubhouse leader ( essentially a worthless construct, but whatever lol ), and was a key contributor to the Royals' 2015 World Series-winning team. The Padres even got him for less than we were expecting- the first five years of the contract are front-loaded and will pay him 20 million dollars annually, in addition to a 5 million dollar signing bonus . After the fifth year, Hosmer can opt out of his deal. Should he decide to sta...
Post a Comment
Read more

.500

So.......... Raise your hand if you thought that 10 games in to the season, the Padres would be at .500? *waits patiently* Okay, now that we've gotten that out of the way: THE PADRES ARE AT .500! Not only that, but we've won two of our first three series- one of which was against the Giants, who have more or less dominated the NL West this decade. This is the same team that ESPN could not find a single reason to have hope for before the season kicked off. They couldn't be more wrong- this team is overflowing with reasons to hope.  First off, Manny Margot. The man looks like an absolute star in the making- before, we knew that he could be a first division regular easily. The only thing missing was the power- if it developed, he'd be a bona fide five-tool star. And boy, does it look like it's developing. He's currently tied for eighth in the league with three home runs, and has also shown impressive gap power.  Even though small sample size i...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Official Hall Of Fame Ballot of This Team Makes Me Drink

As winter approaches, so does another yearly tradition: arguing about who should get voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame now that the ballots are out. The Hall of Fame electorate is entirely comprised of members of the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA). Sadly, some of these voters are clearly very out of touch with the game or use the honor and privilege of having a ballot to make a spectacle of themselves. Consider, for example, the case of noted sabermetric-disbeleiver Murray Chass, who submitted a completely blank ballot in 2017 in part to (literally) to spare ceremony induction attendees the "horrible thought [of making] people sit through 10 speeches in the hot July Cooperstown sun." The man is literally the sports-writer equivalent of somebody who believes the earth is still flat. While I don't have an official ballot, I do write about baseball sometimes- I'd venture to say that I know more about the game than Mr. Chass and I'...
Post a Comment
Read more