This Team Makes Me Drink

Former Padres General Manager Kevin Towers passed away today after a long battle with cancer at 56. This is unbearably heartbreaking news. Towers, while not a perfect GM, oversaw Padres teams for 15 seasons (KT was a member of the organization for nearly 30 years, more than half his life! )- and he was one of the most gifted talent evaluators of his generation. When he needed to, he could bring stars players into town- like Kevin Brown, who had one of the best seasons of any pitcher in baseball history. Brown was worth almost 10 WAR in his lone year with the Padres after Towers pulled the trigger and acquired him from the ( surprise! ) Florida Marlins...some things never change. Towers turned throwaway players like Heath Bell, Rondell White, and Mark Loretta into All Stars, and acquired franchise cornerstones Adrian Gonzalez, Ryan Klesko, Phil Nevin, and Brian Giles. This is just a shortlist- one could build entire rosters of overlooked players that Towers turned i...

W ell, all is right with the world: despite going an impressive 9-3 after starting the season losing 4 consecutive games, the Chargers will miss the playoffs for a fourth consecutive year.  The Chargers became the laughingstock of the NFL after the team got off to that miserable 0-4 start, highlighted by rookie kicker Younghoe Koo missing two straight game-winning field goals. Poor Koo was promptly savaged by social media as a result, and his football career is likely already over . But that was just the beginning:  Announcers, referees, commentators (mostly just Tony Romo), and even their head coach kept referring to them as the San Diego Chargers.  Every single game at the StubHub Center was invaded by opposing fans, leading Keenan Allen to remark that every home game there felt like "a road game" .  In a Veterans Day tweet, a poor social media intern attempted to crop out the words "San Diego" from a picture, but inadvertently cropped out the...

So the Japansese Babe Ruth, Shoehi Ohtani, collectively disappointed the Padres and the city of San Diego and picked the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim . A lot of fans are rightfully disappointed, bemoaning that in a year where the Chargers lost their soul and chased the money all the way to LA, SDSU basketball missed postseason play for the first time in seemingly forever, Steve Fisher retired, and All-American Rashaad Penny was horrendously ignored in Heisman voting, a snub from Ohtani- one of the most coveted Japanese imports in recent memory- especially feels like another kick to our collective groin. But guys... relax . The calculus for next year doesn't change that much. Ohtani or no Ohtani, the Padres probably still would have endured another losing season. Ohtani would've been a luxury that certainly would have at least somewhat accelerated the rebuild process, but losing out on him to the Angels does not change the fact that we have a promising young core that...

As we've all heard by now- Roy Halladay tragically passed away this week in a plane crash. Hearing that news was absolutely devastating- Halladay was similar to Tony Gwynn in that their considerable greatness on the field was surpassed only by how humble and kind they were off it off it, and as such, (aside from Jake Peavy and Trevor Hoffman) he was one of my favorite pitchers to watch growing up. I first began watching baseball in 2003- and my first memory of Roy Halladay was hearing that he had won something called the "Cy Young Award"- so I was fortunate enough to see the beginning of Halladay's dominant career. Prior to his death, there was some debate on whether or not Halladay was a first ballot Hall of Famer because his career was cut short by a torn rotator cuff- but when you look at the numbers, there really isn't a debate: Roy Halladay was the best pitcher of his 2000's .  Let's say that again: Roy Halladay was the best pitcher of...

Hey y'all- it's been a while since I've posted on here, so I wanted to share with you a brief post about this  SUPER COOL thing I got to do. Grad school life has taken up 99.999999% of my time- but in the .00000001% of corresponding free time I've had, I got a chance to check-off one of my bucket list items: going to the World Series . Admittedly, I was hoping that my first World Series game would be one where the Padres would be playing ( I can dream ), but I'll settle for Dodgers-Astros, especially considering that this series will be considered an all-time classic 20 years from now. I was lucky enough to get a ticket to Game 6 (thanks Mom!!!)- and as I walked into Dodger Stadium, I was honestly rooting the Astros to clinch their first championship. On the other hand, though, I also felt like it was only right for that series to go to a seventh and final game, considering how competitive every game that preceded Game 6 had been. Admittedly, because Ga...

Aztec football just knocked off Stanford (!!!) and the Padres are on the road to being good... eventually !!! So things are kinda looking up for the San Diego sports scene.  But the Chargers are still in LA. Which even 9 months later, still totally sucks.  "Sucks" really downplays it, actually. The Chargers in Los Angeles is wrong- in a visceral, primal sense. There is something fundamentally not right  about the Chargers playing in a soccer stadium in front of 25,000 fans, more than half of whom are rooting for the opposing team. Now, I don't hate the Chargers as a team, or the players that comprise that team.  People like Antonio Gates and Philip Rivers will always   be a part of the community in San Diego , even if the team isn't. They are forever San Diego  Chargers- playing their last 2-3 seasons in Los Angeles doesn't diminish that. I hate Dean Spanos.  I hate that Dean tried to exploit the taxpayers of this city to ...

The MLB is putting on their first-ever Players Weekend, featuring unique jerseys for all 30 teams- the Padres iteration of which is proudly displayed at the top of this article. I think we can all agree that normally, the Padres uniforms are painfully boring, so this is a nice change of pace.... these are certainly anything but boring. Are they good jerseys? Eh..... not really. I'm no fashionista, but the blue and yellow definitely clashes, and they're concerningly identical to what the Brewers will roll out for Players Weekend.  But they're certainly not boring. And historically, "not boring" has been in very short supply for this franchise over its history. So... all things considered, even though the color of the yellow hats have an unsettling resemblance to urine ( could you imagine those with an all brown jersey? lol #poop #jokes), I feel pretty good about how these uniforms look. Now, I know you may be thinking to yourself,  "Well, those j...