This Team Makes Me Drink

Toronto Blue Jays closer Roberto Osuna recently announced that he's been dealing with an "anxiety issue" and will miss some time as a result. "I really don't know how to explain it. I just feel anxious. I feel like I'm lost a little bit right now," Osuna said in an interview, "I'm just a little bit lost right now. " On a very slight level, I can  relate.  I obviously don't play Major League Baseball- I didn't even play in high school.  In fact, my baseball career ended when I was around 11. I was a genuinely terrible player. Like, -3 WAR bad. Skills-wise, I wasn't an offensively bad player by any means. In practice, I could make good contact with the ball, catch pop-ups and field grounders. Maybe my running tool wasn't the best (I'd probably grade myself as a 40 on a 20-80 scale for Little Leaguers), but I was able to do all the things any seemingly competent Little Leaguer could. Until gam...

MLB draft #szn is upon us. The Padres, for the first time since 2009, are drafting third overall. Having such a high draft position is somewhat of a rare situation for the Padres. Considering how much of the media and the causal fan consider the Padres to be one of the most consistently bad teams in baseball, they've only drafted in the top five- signifying the worst of the worst- six times since 1988. Over their last 30 draft picks in the first round, their average draft position has been 14.6, which is a pretty impressive achievement of baseball mediocrity. Of course, the Padres' track record with top 5 draft picks hasn't exactly been stellar. With the exception of Andy Benes ( who ranks 5th all-time in WAR among Padres pitchers ), all of their top 5 draft picks failed to make a significant impact at the major league level. For reference, their most recent third overall pick, Donovan Tate, is now a walk-on quarterback at the University of Arizona . The Padres are ...

If you haven't been paying attention to Padres baseball- you probably should. Which, I suppose, a fair amount of you are guilty of; they haven't exactly been playing the best baseball this season. The Padres are almost universally ranked at (or near) the bottom of every major power ranking , and they sit in the basement of the competitive NL West, after all. Well, time to get out from under the rock. The Padres have won five straight, and swept the Chicago Cubs- the reigning World Series champions. Watch that above video if you still don't believe me. Yeah, me too, Patrick. Me too.  (See what I did with the rock reference earlier? Somebody give me an award! If you were born before 1980 and reading this, that pink starfish looking character you can see above lives under a rock. Hope that clears things up.) Anyways, this "winning" thing probably isn't sustainable for the rest of the season. More than likely, the Padres will regress t...

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...

The Opening Day roster 2017 Padres has been set- and boy, is it....... unique? I don't know how I would describe it. I mean, for starters, all three Rule Five draft picks made the team, and Christian Bethancourt is a pitcher now. So that happened. Anyways, let's take a look (via rostersource.com ): Starting Lineup Travis Jankowski, LF Manuel Margot, CF Wil Myers, 1B Yangervis Solarte, 2B Hunter Renfroe, RF Ryan Schimpf, 3B Austin Hedges, C Erick Aybar, SS The starting lineup is undoubtedly the most exciting part of this roster. After all, they'll be very proficient at the two most exciting things in baseball: hitting home runs and stealing bases. Everyone in the middle of the lineup- Myers, Solarte, Renfroe, and Schimpf, (maybe even Hedges too!!!)- has demonstrated an ability to hit the long ball- this could be one of the Padres most powerful offenses in recent memory. The top of the lineup (Jankowski, Margot, and Myers) will also be very fun to w...

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 i...

As you all know by now, the Chargers have left town, making the Padres the sole team in San Diego. The Chargers' vacancy leaves a tremendous hole in the community, and given the state of the current Padres roster, the outlook for professional sports in San Diego has never looked bleaker. There is no sugarcoating the current state of affairs here-  this is our rock bottom. With all due respect to Mayor Falcouner for beginning negotiations with Major League Soccer about possible expansion, the San Diego sports community can only be revitalized by one thing: a successful San Diego Padres baseball team. Make no mistake- this is certainly not something that will be achieved in 2017. Ownership partner Peter Seidler himself told the LA Times that "2019 is probably the earliest"  fans can expect the current rebuild to yield a winner. Seidler's honesty is refreshing, especially after hearing the disingenuous stadium runaround from Dean Spanos and his cronies for the ...