We’ve seen in the past year that Mayor Faulconer is totally inept at doing anything. He’s basically the corpse from Weekend With Bernie with a terrible smile glue gunned into place. The ONE thing Faulconer ever accomplished he did when he was in the City Council and personally spearheaded banning beer at the beach. Well here’s an admission guys, I drink at the beach all the time. Here’s my secret so you can feel like you live in a free country again: can covers and Bottlekeepers. What I’m trying to say is I went to the beach a lot last weekend, drank a lot of beer, and didn’t get around to writing a This Week In Padres Twitter. Let’s get to it.
Days Since Marver Actually Wrote Something: 16 Days
Remember those grandiose proclamations from Marver about how his Top 375 Padres Prospect Ranking was like a day away from being posted? Meanwhile we’re all settling for the other 9 top 200 Padres prospect lists that have been published since. Do we think other fanbases are obsessively debating the 76th best prospect in the system? They barely know who the 7th best prospect in their system is. And I get it, the Padres have a deep system, but at some point the law of diminishing marginal returns kicks in and enough is enough. I’m almost craving the pendulum to just swing back to a once yearly top 10 prospect list so we don’t have to debate whether Diego Goris or Lake Bachar is the 92nd best prospect or deserves to be in the top 90.
Gwynntelligence Posts:
Like I said, drinking beers on the beach really makes you feel like a free man.
Padres Blogosphere Posts:
Padres Prospectus: Trevor Cahill: To Trade Or Not To Trade?
I’m including this post more as a discussion point. The answer to the post’s title questions, and I can’t stress this emphatically JESUS YES FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST YES TRADE CAHILL. This isn’t a statement about Trevor Cahill as a pitcher, he’s fine. Even though he went to Vista High, he’s even good, better than fine. That isn’t the point. He’s pitching on a one year contract, isn’t going to get a qualifying offer, holding him won’t get the team a compensatory draft pick, and he is actually worth something. He absolutely has to be traded. If the trade deadline passes and AJ pulls his usual “we just didn’t see the value we were looking for” garbage after holding onto Cahill, my head will explode. I don’t think this will happen, I think AJ will end up taking the highest offer at the deadline regardless of internal valuation of Cahill, but you never know.
One of the great treats of Padres Twitter is when the Kept Faith guys actually write something because it’s usually so good. Nick wrote a great post on how important Austin Hedges is to our Padres fandom and our penises. He is everything we could have hoped for and more, and I just can’t imagine life going on without him.
Gaslamp Ball: Padres Owner Still Insists Team Will Study “Uniform Situation”
Between Andy Green and Peter Seidler, the Padres have a lot of people that can speak for a really long time without actually saying anything substantial. Seidler gave a 45 minute interview to Scott and BR on 1090 which featured largely terrible questions about when the team would sign Bryce Harper. He did receive a question about bringing back the brown and gave a wishy washy answer that includes his usual refrain of “I’m not involved in it”, which is what he also said about Soccer City which he was a major investor in (guys that got rich making investments don’t usually invest a ton of money and “not get involved in it”), aside from the fact that maybe as majority owner, he could maybe try to get involved in an issue that his customer base is clamoring for. Jbox does a great job, as usual, discussing the interview in this post.
Gaslamp Ball: An (Overdue) #SotTJ Post!
As we all know, I love the Sisterhood of the Traveling Jersey. This post slipped through the cracks but Crazy Charisma did a great post on her trip to Boston and New York with the jersey. As the coffee table book makes slow progress, I get to reread a lot of the posts and it is amazing how a small thing like an old Dave Staton jersey has created and fostered a community of fans.
Padres Public: Padres Find More Prospects
The Padres just maximized what they could do under the penalty imposed on them by signing a metric buttload of $300k bonus players. Sac Bunt Dustin dove into the signings, of which we know very little about since they aren’t heralded or well scouted 16 year olds, but he did find interesting conclusions about where AJ was digging: Venezuela and Mexico. As I wrote about last year, AJ has a long history of succeeding with players from Venezuela and failing with players from the Dominican Republic. Given the security situation in Venezuela causing many scouts to pull out (ha ha pull out), it’s an environment ripe for AJ to take advantage of a market inefficiency. As both Dustin and I wrote about, The Mexican Loophole also opens up Mexico for exploitation as well, which it looks like AJ is doing. Of course, Ramon Urias, Luis’ brother, is OPSing .971 this season and is averaging a home run every 25 at bats while playing on the surface of the moon in Mexico City. Did I mention he plays for one of the Padres owners who owns the Mexico City team? And he plays shortstop? Do I need to connect the dots for you?!?! I’m just saying that one Urias is better than two.
Padres Public: The Good Thing About Franchy
Well, the Franchy era has come to an end already, at least for now. He showed flashes of something, and certainly has exciting speed, but you can’t strike out over 40% of the time and be successful. In a tank season, I’ve noticed it’s really easy for fans to get too excited about a marginal player that puts up a good couple weeks and immediately start penciling him into the 2020 “competing team” lineup (cough, Allen Cordoba, cough). The problem with this is that the 2020 team needs to not only be better than past Padres teams, it needs to be better than the competition. I’m writing something much longer on the subject, but the Dodgers are a fearsome opponent. They’ve done everything the Padres have done but more. International splurge? They spent $100M in 2015 on international players, including two Cubans that each cost twice what Morejon did. Built a farm system that is churning out top flight talent that will be in their peaks and affordable during the Padres’ window of competition? Have you watched Bellinger and Seager? Have executives with a long track record of exemplary scouting of amateur and international talent? They have that, except also with an executive with a successful track record of assembling Major League talent also. And then tack on a payroll that has the potential to be 250%-300% higher than the Padres, and it’s just terrifying. What I’m saying is, let’s not get too excited about fringe guys when the Padres need superstar guys. Let’s save the excitement for a Tatis Jr., not waste it on a Cordoba or Cordero.
East Village Times: 14 Players Who Have Progressed Within The Padres System
There have certainly been a lot of bright spots in the minors this season. Anyone that’s gone to Lake Elsinore has gotten to see a great rotation that’s now advancing to more advanced levels. James Clark did a good job summing up some of these achievements in this post. I always preach let’s not go sucking each other’s dicks quite yet, and that’s true here too. Here’s a stat line from Lake Elsinore of a former top draftee of the Padres that’s actually still kicking in the Major Leagues:
K/9: 8.80, BB/9: 1.80, ERA: 2.64, FIP: 3.11, xFIP: 3.83
Looks great! 2nd round lefty draft pick out of college with a plus plus secondary pitch. Give up?
None other than Wade LeBlanc, who is now in his 9th year at the Major League level. LeBlanc had weaknesses even at the A+ level in his career that were pointed out by Madfriars at the time, and it’s not to say that Lucchesi is LeBlanc, but let’s not suck each other’s dicks quite yet about guys that aren’t top prospects that are performing at lower levels. Let’s just pray for Morejon and Quantrill.
Madfriars: Interview with Scouting Director Mark Conner
I don’t expect a team employee to ever say anything other than that they did an outstanding job doing whatever they do. But I think it’s interesting to hear the process behind the draft in interviews like this. David Jay did a great job in this interview and it’s must-read for those invested in The Plan.
Padres Prospectus: An Early Look At Who Could Out-Tank The Padres
Bottom line, the Padres need to step up the tanking. The drop in value from #1 to #2 pick isn’t awful, but the drop from #2 to #3 and below is huge. The Padres aren’t that far from tumbling into #5 or #6 range, and we can’t count on the miraculous tank game that got them the tiebreaker to get the #3 pick this season. Tank, baby, tank. Marcus does a great job at analyzing the tank competition.
The Golden Age of Padres Podcasts:
Make the Padres Great Again – Andy Green and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week
Craig and John did a good job of analyzing the Andy Green kerfuffle, or as Jbox of Gaslamp Ball deemed him, Cotton Andy. As Marver and I talked about on the podcast, I don’t think there’s any question Green is soft on a soft to hard scale (or as I prefer, the Aybar to Hedges Scale); the question that should be asked is if it matters if he’s soft, and I haven’t seen any evidence that it matters.
Kept Faith – Our Rizzo Episode
The Kept Faith gang threw their hats into the Rizzo Affair ring with this episode. I think I’ve come around more on the opinions stated in this podcast, that there’s a place for brushbacks and retaliation in baseball. I think the bigger issue is still Green publicly broadcasting that there would be no retaliation, which has no strategic value at all. Anyways, TKF did a great job here discussing the issue that we are finally close to putting to rest.
Make the Padres Great Again – Andy Green and the Concept of Masculinity in Sports
Craig and John stick with the Andy Green subject and dig into societal normative behavior related to gender categorization. More importantly, they dig into how the ballsack is really the most vulnerable of genitals, and should be used as an insult a lot more. This is similar to Adam Carolla’s notion that being called a douchebag isn’t as bad as a douchenozzle, since the bag really isn’t the business end of it. Great analysis on genital vulnerability by Craig, 80 grade.
Padres Prospectus: Maurer, the tank, Top 6 prospects, AZL
Padres Prospectus is putting out a TON of content. I say this every week. Their podcasts are really rounding into form and are the longest episodes out there. I think at this point, you could say their niche is minor league coverage, and no one is doing it better in podcast form than Marcus and Chad.
Padres Prospectus: Live at Lake Elsinore!
Chad and Marcus did a live episode from Lake Elsinore during Marcus’ trip out here. I’ll be honest, I’m saving it for my long run this weekend, but I have no doubt it’s great. We don’t see many on-location podcasts now that Padres and Pints has turned into a biannual affair, so I’m excited to listen.
East Village Times: Episode 47 with James and Patrick reviewing the Top 100 List
James and Patrick put out a great episode that went in-depth on their Top 100 prospect list. While I think these extended prospect lists are silly, this podcast is a great source of background information on a lot of the fringe Padres prospects so you can look cool at all the Padres Twitter cocktail parties instead of blankly nodding your head like a total moron when Austin Bousfeld comes up in conversation.
Tweet of the Week:
And the Jaggy goes to…
Terrible Marver Tweet Of The Week:
Probably flying coach.
This was a close runner up because of the terrible thread it created afterwards about literal vs. figurative.
Nick Canepa Is An Out of Touch, Irrelevant, Old Timer, Or Maybe Doing A Bit Tweet Of The Week:
I would have just called it The Jack.
Gwynntelligence 