Well guys, here we are again.  Another FUN year of Padres baseball and “building” is underway.  And really, we all expected this.  Only the most delusional fans (I’M LOOKING AT YOU RON FOWLER) thought this season was going to go much better.  The Padres outplayed their Pythagorean record last season by over 10 wins, and still, people thought of 71 wins as the starting point for a linear progression to more wins this season.  My favorite thing so far is the VERY SERIOUS media types that look at this assload of terribleness so far this season, look down at us over the Oliver Peoples glasses frames, and condescendingly drop a “well it’s not like any of US INTELLIGENT MEDIA TYPES expected them to be good this season, what did you expect?!?!?!?”  The thing is, yeah, we thought the team would be bad, but we all hoped for… NO… expected to see progressions and development on individual levels for key players.  And we just aren’t.  We expected Austin Hedges to utilize his fancy new swing to not be the worst hitting catcher in baseball.  We expected Manuel Margot to capitalize on last season’s increase in launch angle and Matt Stairs’ preaching of patience and not have a huge increase in ground ball percentage and abysmal hitting and on-base skills.  These are the guys the team NEEDS to take a next step in a lost season, otherwise what are we even doing here.  At least there are bright spots.  As Marver and I talked about on last week’s podcast, you watch Lucchesi and you see a pitcher that looks like a quality Major Leaguer.  AJ discovered Adam Cimber who is both eating innings and providing productive innings.  The season isn’t lost, Margot and Hedges have plenty of time, but to not call the season a total waste, it will require those two to establish themselves as bonafide playoff caliber Major Leaguers.

Days Since Marver Actually Wrote Something: 311 days

It’s very feasible Marver hits the year mark here.  It seems like just yesterday Marver was blowharding about his Keith Law manifesto coming out before 2017 ended.  Marver is about as trustworthy as Ron Fowler talking about uniform studies.

Gwynntelligence Posts:

I guess just this.  We should be developing some content around the Monterrey Padres-Dodgers series though.

Padres Blogosphere Posts:

If there’s one thing I care a lot less about this season, it’s reading Padres blog posts.  Sac Bunt Dustin was the star of 2017 blogging and he got absorbed by The Athletic, and I don’t want to blow up his paywalled content or his paywalled newsletter.  But let’s take a moment here to realize the momentousness of this.  One of our own, a blogger that was once one of our peers on Padres Public (RIP), was producing content SO GOOD that a major corporation wanted to bring him on board and make him peers with Ken Rosenthal and Eno Sarris.  Especially impressive after his humble beginnings of being peers with Padres Jagoff and Ghost of Ray Kroc.

Madfriars – Interview with El Paso Chihuahuas Manager Rod Barajas

This is behind the Madfriars paywall but if you’re not subscribed, you might as well eat glass.  John Conniff added serious value by visiting El Paso and getting some surprisingly candid answers to questions about Guerra, Jankowski and Franmil.  I’m used to seeing interviews with Padres employees that offer nothing but vague, cliched answers and masturbatory back patting about what a good job they’re doing so this was a refreshing change.

Union Tribune – Padres Offensive Explosion Preceded By Players-Only Meeting

This infamous Kevin Acee fluff piece has been a big topic on Padres Twitter and on Padres podcasts this week.  So the basics have pretty much been beaten to death: Acee took a hilariously small sample and attempted to make a profound, season changing conclusion out of it.  It epitomizes everything about Kevin Acee as a writer that’s terrible.  Acee used his classic tactic of using the tone, diction, player quotes, and Twitter promotion to clearly push conclusion that this would be a pivotal moment for the season, while leaving a nugget that Acee can use as an out for when he is called on the poor analysis; this is when he resorts to a “did you even read the article” as a defense instead of arguing the merits of his article.  What hasn’t been mentioned is that he took an Eric Hosmer individual performance of 6 for 6 with 4 base on balls, which drastically influenced the single game stats that Acee relied on for his conclusions.  The majority of the problems with this article are tied to just bad analysis, a part of it is his lack of understanding of basic high school level statistics that lead to erroneous hypotheses and conclusions.  In the end, Acee seems to approach being a beat writer as if he’s a columnist where he needs to inject a storyline to make things sexy when his job is to report news.  Paired with his loss of credibility from providing his services to the Chargers and Dean Spanos’ productions, as well as his shameless shilling for the Chargers ballot initiative and accusations he was too close to the Chargers, it’s difficult to take anything he writes seriously at this point.

The Golden Age of Padres Podcasts:

The 5.5 Podcast – Don’t Jinx It

Danny and Eric have Madfriars Overlord John Conniff on the show to talk Padres podcasts before digging into no hitter jinxes and how awful Bryan Mitchell is.  And man is he terrible.  Who could have guessed that straight fastballs and terrible control aren’t a recipe for starting pitching success???!?!?!?  If only there were more than two years of mediocre Major League service time to evaluate before investing $13M into the Bryan Mitchell project!

Make The Padres Great Again – Forever Jinxing No-Hitters

The MTPGA gang records at the Summer Studio and provides the best analysis of the Tyson Ross no-hitter jinx chat.  Craig provides an announcer’s insight, and brings copious amounts of logic to the discussion.  John also provides some great analysis of Kevin Acee and why he’s so bad at Padres beat writing.

The Kept Faith – Zero Faith Kept!

I’m going to be honest, I haven’t listened to this podcast collaboration between TKF and Zero Chance Podcast.  I’m sure it’s great.  I was unable to attend the meet up at Cali Comfort, and I probably should look up where Spring Valley is someday.  I’m a little surprised that our little ol’ #PadresMeatTwitter hashtag is now commercialized and being used for promotions at restaurants, and I’m trying to decide if I like it or not (this is nothing against Cali Comfort who appear to be upstanding supporters of Padres Twitter and putting out quality meats).

Zero Chance Podcast – Lisa Lane

Do I initiate coverage of Zero Chance?  It’s self proclaimed as not a Padres podcast.  It’s best when it’s Brady and Rick (mostly Brady) riffing on non-Padres subjects.  But it’s also a podcast I make sure to listen to every time it pops up in my podcast app so I might as well cover it.  As part of the coverage, I’m able to use the new piece of technology I’ve personally developed: The Podcasteralyzer 5000 (TM).  This device measures the quantity of podcasting content from each host, in this case, Brady and Rick.  This week’s Podcasteralyzer 5000 scoring showed that Brady had 94% of the host talking this episode, with Rick taking 6%.  This is actually a 13% Brady decrease from last week.  I’m excited to track these results each week.  Also, they had Lisa Lane on the podcast who was interesting.  I’ve watched about 4 minutes of Padres POV this year and I’m sure it’s great.

There were a few podcasts that came out last week that I’ll mention but won’t do full coverage of this week because I’m tired of writing.

East Village Times – James and Patrick do a great job of discussing Perdomo’s demotion to AAA and upcoming potential roster shuffling.  Great job as always.

Hells Belles – Hells Belles brought the fire in this episode, and were especially great discussing Carlos Asuaje’s eyebrows.

Working The Count – Roy and Angela had some good Lake Elsinore talk.

Bluntly Padres – The Bluntly gang records the day before 4/20 and if we’re being honest, didn’t get as high as I was hoping for this holiday.  Still entertaining as always.

Gwynntelligence Podcast – Marver explains his Tatis stance and how he isn’t predicting he’ll be a bust, just that all stats count.  We should note that Tatis had a 2 HR game this week, but then followed that with an 0-9 over the last two games with SEVEN strikeouts.

I think I caught all of them, but there are so many goddamned #GoldenAgeOfPadresPodcasts at this point, I’m doing my best.

Tweet Of The Week:

And the first Jaggy of 2018 goes to…

This was just masterful and no one is trolling Acee better than Mensie.  Job well done by noted Jaggy veteran @calvesfordays

Terrible Marver Tweet Of The Week:

Beans in chili are for Yummy Phase amateurs.

Nick Canepa Is An Irrelevant Out Of Touch Old Timer Or Possibly Doing A Bit:

THE SECRET WAS AN ENORMOUS PENIS!

Catnip For Morons Of The Week:

Can we stop this please?  The NFL isn’t coming back here.  Only morons think it’s coming back here.  1360 is catering to morons.  This is catnip for said morons.