Well guys, we made it. We made it through another year of middling-to-terrible quality baseball. We made it through another year of team management taking its customers for granted, employing dickheads, and ignoring suggestions and pleas from their fans. We made it through another year of the local media covering the Padres finding their readers detestable and talking down to them. The thing that helped us get through it all was the consistent quality of snark on Padres Twitter, the amazing coverage provided by the Padres blogosphere, and the consistently great content being put out by Padres podcasters. And for this, we can be thankful. Without the community built online, being a Padres fan would be far more dismal. Luckily, we have each other to make the experience more fun, and to sling a dick joke when it needs to be slung. This Week In Padres Twitter will probably slow down a bit this offseason, although we all have the annual wrap up This Year In Padres Twitter to look forward to next week. We also have an exciting announcement that after three years of this being a two man operation with me and Marver (and if we’re being honest, the past year has been a one man operation with Marver being a totally worthless jerkoff), Gwynntelligence is welcoming it’s first new writer: Chad Hamner, who you may know as @TheChamner. You may recognize him as Marcus’ counterpart on the Padres Prospectus podcast, the podcast and blog that shone bright this summer and then burned out in a slow fizzle, only to have parts of it acquired by Madfriars this week. Chad was left on the curb like a bunch of broken Ikea furniture on the day everyone moves out of the dorms for summer, and we jumped at the chance to dumpster dive. I told Chad I don’t care what he writes, how often he writes, and in general, just don’t care what he does. So carte blanche. Stay tuned!
Days Since Marver Actually Wrote Something: 105 Days
We’ve done it guys! We’ve seen Marver crest into the three digits TWICE this year. What a worthless blob of garbage!
Gwynntelligence Posts:
Nothing this past week, but this week will have the Part 2 to our miles and points series focused on Mexico. I wrote it a while ago but thought it was in bad taste to publish it on the day of the Mexico City earthquake. There should also be a mediocre quality podcast early in the week also.
Padres Blogosphere Posts:
Gaslamp Ball: Padres Host Social Summit and Town Hall
Roydjt at Gaslamp Ball wrote a great wrap up of the Social Summit held for the On Deck prospects game. I have mixed emotions on the Social Summit. I haven’t gone since it shifted over to the team curating who can go, even though Wayne Partello has offered an invite privately after the whole Fire Mike Dee thing. In a way, I think it’s patronizing to separate out blogs that cover the team more extensively than the local media from the media. Garfinkel used to invite Gaslamp Ball and Padres Public to media nights, while this regime chooses to invite local morning zoo radio DJ’s instead. To their credit, at least they’re doing SOMETHING with social media, but it’s always come across to me as a HEY NERDS HERE’S SOME SCRAPS type thing. Anyways, they wheeled out Ron Fowler who revealed that not only has he never seen the undoubtedly expensive research Garfinkel commissioned on uniforms, they’ve literally lost it and there is no hope of anyone EVER reading it. Instead, Fowler will supposedly commission more research which is exactly what Partello promised on Social Hour THREE YEARS AGO. There is no chance that Fowler releases the sampling data or methodology of the “research” so when it’s released, it likely has little to no actual value other than to support whatever decision Uncle Ron has likely already made. This attitude is the result of the notable credibility gap caused by repeated empty promises by Wayne Partello, Ron Fowler, Mike Dee, and Peter Seidler over the last four years. Basically what I’m saying is don’t go jacking each other off over the promise of “future study” and “research”. It’s been promised before by this very management team and ownership group with no results other than being a successful delay tactic.
Padres Public: The Padres Franchise Draft
Sac Bunt Chris did a fun exercise of drafting players out of the Padres system with pals. It is an interesting look at assets in the system but in my opinion, they all left out a player I am now adopting as the next Jagoff Big Thing Because Life Is Terrible And We Need Something To Look Forward To Watching (TM). This is of course Matt Strahm, who I think gets overlooked because when people do these exercises, Strahm doesn’t show up on the midseason top prospect rankings. Strahm was a Fangraphs top 75 prospect this season, has a hammer curve ball and 95+ velocity, but is injured, not with an arm and shoulder injury, but a knee injury. There’s a lot to like with him, especially on a team that will likely roll Luis Perdomo out as a #2 starter and Clayton Richard out as an Opening Day starter. Strahm is a guy that could be part of The Next Good Padres Team (TM).
East Village Times: Should The Padres Sign Another Shortstop?
You’ll see a lot of posts like this one by Mike Ursery this offseason. If there’s one thing that’s #ThatsSoPadres, it’s the eternal search for a Padres shortstop. Marver and I discussed this on our most recent podcast and it comes down to the question of “Does it really matter who plays shortstop next season?” I’ve said for a while that it doesn’t. At all. Just stick Solarte out there again, or call up some tomato can from the minors like Rondon or Guerra to eat innings and be terrible. It doesn’t matter. If you think an Alcides Escobar or Adam Rosales would really matter in the grand scheme of things, go right ahead, but you’re wrong. All of these options suck except POSSIBLY Solarte, so if you’re going to suck anyways, just do it cheaply. Tatis is the golden boy Shortstop Of The Future (TM), there is nobody else that matters at the position. So buckle your safety belts for some goddamned Rondon, bite your tongue, grin, and bear it.
Madfriars: Joey Lucchesi Interview
Marcus Pond did a good job getting this interview with Joey Lucchesi, arguably the Padres minor league pitcher of the year. It’s a fine interview, but it’s not being featured here because of that (I think most interviews with players and team officials are generic and don’t reveal much of anything interesting). It’s being featured because Padres Twitter had a major merger this week as Madfriars bought up the assets from Padres Prospectus, the little blog that stormed onto the scene this summer with primo coverage of Padres minor leaguers and an outstanding in-depth podcast with Marcus and new Gwynntelligence writer Chad Hamner. Travis Barnett and Marcus give Madfriars some on the ground presence in Fort Wayne and central Texas which is great for all of us readers. Special accolades are deserving for what the Padres Prospectus team built in a very short time. And now they are one of the elite”Paywall bloggers” that have a fancy expense account and can freely make fun of Marver David Jay style.
Union Tribune: Wil Myers’ 29th homer not enough to lift Padres to win in 2017 Petco finale
This was the U-T’s version of the Wil Myers is going to see a sports psychologist again story. It was one of many instances where the U-T and padres.com post a nearly identical post within a few hours of each other because they just post whatever is fed to them by the team. There are a ton of cases with the U-T where they take a marketing press release, reword it, and post it as original content on the Union Tribune hoping to suck a few clicks away from padres.com. It’s sad. Anyways, the IS WIL MYERS ELITE argument has been litigated enough. We know what he is offensively, a 110-115 wRC+ kind of guy. We aren’t sure what his defense is as it’s wildly fluctuated. But we’re pretty sure he’s not a superstar like the team branded him as to justify their own decision making to extend him. At the same time, in my opinion, the biggest issue with Myers is in the effort and professionalism realm. Tony Gwynn was well known to not only be physically gifted, but to work the hardest in the film room to perfect his approach. Meanwhile, we have Myers who by his own admission “took his foot off the pedal” for an entire second half of 2016, and he’s quoted here as saying “You can’t try harder because you’re not going to be any better”. I have doubts that this would be a successful mantra for anyone in any walk of life.
The Golden Age of Padres Podcasts:
Make The Padres Great Again: Previewing The Padres/Rangers Prospects Game
The MTPGA gang takes a look at the 2017 season with a positive point of view, highlighting their favorite three things. Now that I’ve gone to one, the Padres Prospect Game is a stroke of marketing genius that would lead my list. It basically captures everything we’ve desperately asked for during the rebuild years with cheap concessions (not cheap beer), cheap (free) seats, and fan service. There is no greater thank you for putting up with garbage baseball than the Prospects Game. But what makes it so baffling is how the team buries the lede in marketing it: IT’S FREE AND THERE’S ONE DOLLAR HOT DOGS. This is enough to get any fan to go to Petco, get a trial size portion of The Padres Ballpark Experience (TM), and start bonding with players management is desperate for us to somehow link in our heads to buying tickets for 2018 garbage quality baseball. But of course, Wayne Partello and Co. fail to mention the most important part of the game in all marketing materials, in all radio appearances, and in all advertising. It’s amazing just how inept the Partello led marketing department has been, which makes it particularly baffling when Fowler and Seidler praise the business operations performances that most fans detest.
If we’re being honest, this podcast has literally nothing on the Padres. Instead it covers America’s current favorite sport: POLITICS! If you never came across it, Dallas and Travis used to do an excellent politics podcast and this TKF episode brought back fond memories, although it was lacking in Travis’ usual hardline libertarian stances that make him a perfect pairing with Marver for a pull-your-hair-out-in-anger Libertarian podcast.
Tweet Of The Week:
And the Jaggy goes to…
Travis deserves some type of greater award for his work this season with the series preview illustrations (hint hint, tune in for This Year In Padres Twitter). This one is particularly noteworthy for its inclusion of Bob Chandler, a man that will be continually buried in Padres Hall of Fame discussions as long as noted local blowhard Bill Center is acting as the gatekeeper.
Terrible Marver Tweet Of The Week:
This is like a teller at your local Chase branch saying “I MAKE IMPORTANT DECISIONS FOR A MULTI BILLION DOLLAR FINANCIAL SERVICES COMPANY!!!!!”
On another note, Marver produced the best publicly sourced research we’ve seen on the Padres uniform issue.
Nick Canepa Is An Irrelevant Out Of Touch Old Timer Or Possibly Doing A Bit:
In the world of just dreadful Canepa plays on words, StubYourToeHub is arguably the worst. It’s like when a band needs to fill out a lyric and lazily resorts to saying “yeah yeah yeah” to fill out syllables. I can’t stress how awful this “joke” this. But hey, that’s just me, a member of the UNSOCIAL MEDIA.
Catnip For Morons Of The Week:
This was a banner week for catnip for morons as the local media starts sniffing their own demise as the numbers fall for people purportedly interested in consuming Carson Chargers content. Ryan Phillips has been all over producing as much catnip as possible.
This was immediately followed by about ten reasons why the Chargers could move back. I call this method The Acee, perfectly executed by this catnip blog.
This is a classic tactic in delivering catnip for morons. The old I’M NOT SAYING THEY’LL MOVE BACK BUT HERE ARE TONS OF REASONS TO STRING YOU ALONG method. The Acee method is beloved because the people using it can deflect criticism by saying I SAID IT WOULDN’T HAPPEN!!!! and ignoring the “but…” that is always inserted into the conversation to provide false hope to dummies.
The Big Lead has been a leader in providing catnip for morons to local morons.
But the worst case of catnip for morons this week goes to…
See you next week for THIS YEAR IN PADRES TWITTER. Get those tux rental reservations in now.
Gwynntelligence 