This Team Makes Me Drink

Baseball is back, folks! This offseason was like the fourth season of Breaking Bad: we thought we would be getting constant breakneck action, but much of the time our domaine-craving minds became frustrated because it was much more slow and plodding than we desired.  However, this offseason was a masterclass in suspense: you'd be lying if you said you weren't on the edge of your seat most of the time, waiting for the next big shoe to drop. As the months and numerous thoughts of "finally-something's-gonna-happen-oh-wait-nevermind" ( Noah Syndegaard! Dallas Kuechel !! wtf is debt reduction ???? lmao we really signed  Ian Kinsler ? BROWN UNIFORMS !!!! DINNER WITH BRYCE HARPER IN VEGAS !!!!! ) passed, we all expected SOMETHING to happen, we just weren't sure what.  But thankfully, much like the Season 4 finale of Breaking Bad, our patience was rewarded when everything climaxed in an absolutely thrilling crescendo: by signing Manny Machado, the Pad...

ITS BEEN ONE WHOLE WEEK AND MANNY MACHADO IS STILL A PADRE AND REALITY DIDN'T COLLAPSE UPON ITSELF!!!!!!! *deeply inhales and exhales* I needed to get that out of my system. We're only .002% of the way through Machado's 10-year contract, and it's already been quite a week for the MLB since the Padres broke through baseball's  frozen hot stove. White Sox nation   is so incredibly salty about missing out on Machado that all of their kidneys have been collectively ruined. Baseball has a, uh, pitch clock now ? It's a thing for spring training at least, but the league has the ability to implement it unilaterally this season. Vice , which was the closest thing to a Baseball Movie™ at the Oscars this year (George W. Bush's fallback plan if he didn't win the 2000 presidential election was becoming MLB commissioner, according to the movie) was shut out of the major awards categories. Bryce Harper, despite some vague rumors th...

Guys....... MANNY MACHADO IS A SAN DIEGO PADRE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! If you're looking for thoughtful analysis, you won't find it here. I've already written that article . This is a celebration of today: one of the best, if not THE best, days in Padres history. This fanbase, and San Diego sports in general, has been through SO much this decade. We NEEDED this and we DESERVE this. It almost feels surreal, but it's not. It's crazier than that . Surreal implies that the present reality might seem implausible and bizarre, but is still reality nonetheless; in this situation, Manny Machado being a SAN DIEGO PADRE still doesn't feel real. This moment has an ethereal (see below) feeling to it, which is really the only way to describe it: Tha...

Unless you've been living under a rock since the start of the calendar year, the historically penny-pinching San Diego Padres- yes, OUR San Diego Padres- have been connected to two free agents, who also just happen the two of the best players in the game: Bryce Harper and Manny Machado. The team has been linked to Machado for several weeks now , and met with Harper in his hometown of Las Vegas on January 31st. Surprised? Well, so were the Padres too, apparently- per The Athletic's Dennis Lin, the  Padres pursuit  to land one of the two superstars began upon realizing that the market for the duo was surprisingly thin - traditional big spenders like the Red Sox, Dodgers, Cubs and Yankees were not opening up their pocketbooks, leaving Harper and Machado- who are looking for 300-million dollar plus contracts- in limbo with the start of Spring Training just days away. If you're a fan of this team, you're almost certainly checking Twitter and MLB Trade Rumors at l...

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'...

Hey A.J.- are you listening? There's an idea out there for how you can best utilize all of those starting pitching prospects you've been hoarding over the last three years. It might just change the game forever. Well, we'll see about forever. One thing is clear though: teams are now longer bound to the long-held conventional wisdom that has dictated how the game is played. Nowhere is this more evident that in how teams are managing their pitching staffs. The Tampa Bay Rays were at the forefront of the "opener" revolution, which involved starting games with a relief pitcher. The "opener" would simply pitch the first inning, and then hand the ball off to the actual starting pitcher. The logic behind this? Well, in equal parts due to fatigue and batters familiarizing themselves with the pitcher after multiple at-bats against them, pitchers appear to be markedly less effective after they pitch through an opposing team's lineup three times....

That's a wrap, folks. The Padres' 2018 season is in the books. It ended on a walkoff-strikeout to beat the Diamondbacks, which is the most predictably 2010's era Padres-thing I've heard in a while (see below). Speaking of 2010's era Padres, 2018 was more or less representative of your typical Padre season this decade: they were bad, but not the worst . They didn't win 78 games like I predicted all the way back in April, but they also didn't lose 100 games, which is also nice, I guess. Let's recap the good, meh, and the Eric Hosmer ugly in the year that was: The Good A.J. Preller was able to flip Brad Hand for an elite prospect in catcher Francisco Mejia. While the team now has a logjam of talent at catcher, that's never a bad thing, and more teams are beginning to use two starting-caliber catchers to their advantage. Despite some struggles with breaking pitches, Mejia's bat already looks legit- in one of the high points of ...