In what should be unsurprising to everyone, Marver did not prepare this week’s This Week In Padres Twitter.  This week I planned on his lackadaisical attitude to the hot new Padres Twitter digest and went ahead and prepared the post.  It was a great week for the Golden Age of Padres Podcasts (despite Pads Pod being a no-show yet again; someone should drive over and check their house to make sure there’s not a decomposing corpse).  Spring Training is just about over and I’m expecting the Padres blogosphere to really take off next week when we can all write posts analyzing Erick Aybar’s dreadful regular season performance.  Let’s get to this week’s digest.

Gwynntelligence Posts:

Let’s Check In On The Blashwagon

Being a long time Padres fan teaches you to ignore the piling losses and look for little things that you can root for and get excited for.  For me, that’s Jabari Blash.  And he’s giving a lot of reasons to get excited about him with his worthless Spring stats.  But hey, if it’s enough to get him playing time in the regular season I’m all for it.  I have a nagging suspicion he’s a John Roskos but Padres baseball is all about wishing for unrealistic outcomes, so I’m wishing away over here.

The “Revamped” 20 Game Padres Season Ticket Package: A Review

The Padres swung the pendulum a little towards the customer by bringing back a crippled version of flexible ticket trading for 20 game season ticket packages.  It’s a definite improvement, but let’s be serious.  What is the benefit of locking your money into even this improved package?  Just the good feeling of saying you’re a season ticketholder?  The Padres are going to be bad and tickets on the secondary market are going to be cheap and plentiful. You’re better off buying the absolute cheapest seat on Seatgeek/Stubhub and upgrading your seat on MLB At Bat to Omni Premier Club for $20 – bingo, you’re sitting in Omni Club for a total of $30 and you can be totally flexible on which games you go to.  The sales guys will tell you about how exciting the rebuild plan is as a reason to buy packages this year, which is logic I don’t get.  How does a bright future in 2020 convince me to buy a package in 2017 for a 100 loss team instead of a cheaper, better ticket package at Lake Elsinore where those future stars are actually playing?

Padres Blogosphere Posts:

Padres Public: What’s Brewing On the Farm?

Padres Public’s regular feature writing up Padres prospects covers Franchy Cordero, Javy Guerra, and Fernando Tatis Jr.  It also features a sick picture of Tatis Jr. watching either a home run or fly out to LF.  Let’s say it was a home run and go home.

Gaslamp Ball: My First Padres Spring Training trip: Dog Night at Peoria Stadium

Jodes continues her great trip report on Padres Spring Training.  I wish I’d gone now just to bring my wiener dog to Peoria.  I brought my dog to Phoenix in July once and felt like an abusive owner because she literally couldn’t walk because the pavement was about 9,000 degrees so it would be nice to expose her to an Arizona that doesn’t resemble the kiln that Negan throws disobedient doctors into.

East Village Times: The Padres Alumni Division

James Clark wrote a great post about the Padres need to embrace their alumni and history.  This needs to go way beyond regularly recognizing alumni that are currently front office employees, but things like old timers games and a grassroots campaign using alums to get people out to the ballpark.  Of course, the second option would involve a Padres Marketing Department that actually tries, which, given that they canceled Padres Caravans, canceled Social Hour, and sleep walked their way through this year’s promotions, it seems unlikely.  Clark mentions the departure of Padres Social Hour also means the loss of Kurt Bevacqua’s Padres Social Hour After Dark show that aired after Padres home games and regularly featured Padres alums and other old timers in a candid, relaxed environment.  It was truly the best show in late night.  I got sad thinking about this, but then landed this sweet scoop:

Great news for all of us.

Madfriars: Q&A with Sam Geaney

David Jay conducted a great interview with Sam Geaney from the Padres front office.  I liked reading about the ins and outs of scouting and development that these interviews.

Padres Public: Let’s Get Extended

Oscar from Padres Public does a great look at some of the Padres’ internal extension candidates and what some of those deals look like.  While I agree with the premise and the idea of extending a Hedges or Margot early, I’m not sure that paying a guy like Spangenberg $10M a year in the option years is something that would work out that great, but hey, that’s why they’re club options, right?

The Golden Age of Padres Podcasts:

Dave and Jeff Podcast: Steven Woods

A couple things on this podcast episode.  First, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Woods should have been the guy running things at Padres Radio.  This podcast gives a little detail into what he wanted to do with it and using John Gennaro and Dallas McLaughlin to do pre/post game, paired with Woods and Cantore in the morning providing some additional 94.9 audience tailored Padres talk would have been ideal.  It’s a shame that 94.9 and the Padres leadership missed the ball here this badly, although it’s not all that surprising given track records.  Second, Jeff Dotseth, who I get is busting balls and telling it like it is, made an argument that basically led to the conclusion that doing a Padres podcast is kind of a loser scenario, where winners wind up on the radio.  I think what he misses is that a lot of podcasts have no ambition to get on the radio or get paid for their work.  I certainly don’t want to be beholden to anyone in what I write or say, and I’m definitely not selling that freedom for the trash pay that radio stations are giving out these days.  Let’s just say I’d rather do what I do now than to be Dan Sileo slinging softballs for Ron Fowler in an interview at 1090, and I have a feeling a lot of bloggers and podcasters feel the same way.  Anyways, the Dave and Jeff podcast is arguably my favorite local podcast, so I’m just picking nits here.

Baseball America: Padres Prospects

Tune into the 37:40 point of the podcast to hear 20 minutes of discussion on the Padres prospects by BA’s prospect experts.  They have good things to say about Adrian Morejon, going as far as to say he would be a top 10 or even 5 draft pick this season.  It’s pointed out he’s sitting 94 mph.  They also talk Quantrill for a while, predicting he’ll start the season at Low-A.

The Kept Faith: Brady Phelps Returns

Brady Phelps guested on The Kept Faith and provided a refreshing look at Padres fandom in 2017.  While I fall in the camp of let’s lose 100 games and strengthen the long term rebuild (which is an opinion largely shared by most Padres podcasters), I like to hear differing opinions like Brady’s that sometimes it feels good to hope for a winner, or to hope to not trade favorite players like Ryan Schimpf (even though it makes all the baseball sense in the world).  I think as intellectual fans, it’s important to hear different opinions.

Make The Padres Great Again: Season Preview

On Make The Padres Great Again, John and Craig preview the 2017 season, and spend a lot of time going through the Fangraphs article we included in last week’s digest positing what it would take for the Padres to make the playoffs.  This involved eleven players that needed to reach their 90th percentile outcome, which would be a mathematically infinitesimal chance, but made for interesting listening.  Also they discuss Terriers, the one season wonder on FX that takes place in OB, but fail to mention that it has the best theme song maybe in TV history:

Tweet Of The Week:

Terrible Marver Tweet Of The Week:

Everyone knows the correct answer is Phil’s BBQ whose resulting farts resemble it’s flavor on the way in.