I don’t care what anyone says, one of the highlights of Padres Twitter in 2018 has been the emergence of @Sweeney_sayz.  Some would say Sweeney is a parody of himself, offering inane, Captain Obvious style analysis.  @Sweeney_sayz perfectly captures this and cracks me up everytime I see one of their tweets pop up.  Whoever is responsible deserves some kind of medal.

Sweeney seems like a really nice guy.  He has always been really nice to me and my family, and we share a taste for the same Encinitas bagel shop.  He’s also a really underwhelming analyst that ends up patronizing the audience with his lowest common denominator analysis.

Days Since Marver Actually Wrote Something: 343 days.

We are at the point where we can start projecting when Marver hits the one year point!  Mark June 18 on your calendars everybody!  We actually discussed Marver’s long awaited Keith Law Manifesto on the new podcast episode.  In the course of the discussion, I realized that Marver had not even opened the draft since LAST YEAR.  This does not bode well for Marver to avoid hitting the one year mark.  We should probably pick a brewery to host the party to celebrate that momentous one year anniversary.  I’m open to volunteers that want to plan this.

Gwynntelligence Posts:

Gwynntelligence Podcast – 5/24/18 – We finally welcomed Marver back on to his own podcast.  Marver revealed that he doesn’t care for podcasts that are non-Padres or non-baseball related, putting a real kibosh on the proposed HJ and Marver Life Tips segment to close out each episode.  C’est la vie!  The other part I found interesting was the reveal by Jeff Dotseth about just how many people are listening to sports talk radio at any given time, and how this compares to traffic for the #GoldenAgeOfPadresPodcasts.  With Posner and Partello believing that Padres Twitter is irrelevant, it was a little surprising at how sports radio listenership was dwarfed by weekly podcast listenership of the Padres podcasts

Three B Zine Podcast – Pale Ale Night: I was HONORED to be invited onto the Three B Zine podcast with Cody, Ryan, and Mike.  If you’re not aware of Three B Zine, they are one of the leading local craft beer podcasts producing weekly podcasts.  I find them incredibly educational, informative, and really funny.  They are also huge Padres fans (except for disgusting Giants fan Mike, also well known as San Diego’s Pasta King), and we realized there is a lot of crossover between the craft beer and Padres Twitter communities.  We got to talking about craft beer in Petco, the Gwynntelligence war on control the message, as well as tasted a ton of great American pale ales.  The session was so fun that it ended up going past two hours.  These guys are big time enough to get invited into breweries to do collaboration beers while Marver and I are sitting here making dick jokes into the void.

Padres Blogosphere Posts:

East Village Times – The Padres’ Defense Is Actually Good: Look, I don’t think this post is very well written or well reasoned.  It’s here because it organized DRS and UZR data pretty simply for us to look at.  It then notes that there are discrepancies between generally good DRS numbers and generally bad to terrible UZR numbers, and then totally ignores it to lead to a predetermined conclusion that the Padres defense has been “actually good”.  I’m not really prepared to say if they’re good or bad, but it’s pretty clear that there is a really big inconsistency between what DRS and UZR is showing.  In a discussion between myself, Marver, and Sac Bunt Dustin.  Marver stated:

I found this interesting because we’ve had some discussion on Padres Twitter about the poor results from Andy Green’s shifts and fielder positioning.  Last season, the Padres were dead last in shift runs saved, and this season, Green has largely abandoned shifts, with the Padres at the bottom of the league in shifts used.  It appears that, if the UZR and DRS discrepancies continue, it would indicate that the fielder positioning utilized by Green is hurting the team and the pitchers.  This will be an interesting thing to watch develop the rest of the season.

Fangraphs – Top 43 Prospects: For some reason, Fangraphs finally released their Padres top prospect list.  Not sure why it took so goddamned long, but many of the write-ups and rankings are out of date.  Eric Longenhagen stated that the rankings were locked in February.  While a few write-ups have been updated with Spring and early season results, the rankings themselves have stayed the same.  This means guys like Paddack are ranked too low, and guys like Austin Allen are not in the list at all.  What is apparent is that the Padres have a lot of mid-level prospects, way more than anyone else.  This depth is really useful as you hope that some of them get a breakout.  I tend to focus at the top of the list only, maybe 50 Future Value and above.  50 FV guys project to be average Major Leaguers, or 2 WAR players.  The Padres have a plethora of 40 FV guys, which project as 1 WAR or bench players.  These matter in that it’s good to have depth that may have a small chance at breaking out or packaging in a trade, but I tend to think most other teams’ fans don’t jack themselves off to future bench players.

On the other hand, the Padres have 9 players rated at 50 FV or above, peaking at Fernando Tatis Jr. with 65 FV.  This is good!  I’ll take 4 WAR All-Stars all day.  And I’ll take 3 above average 2.5 WAR guys too!  These are good things, and it’s pretty clear that the Padres are doing great at finding and [hopefully] developing Major League regular caliber players or better, so let’s get excited about that.

Fangraphs – Adam Cimber Is An Outlier Of Outliers: Marver and I talked on the last podcast about identifying players that are difference makers between an average team and a high performing playoff team.  While there are players that might occupy a roster spot on future playoff teams, they are generally fungible; Adam Cimber is evidence backing this up (and also some testament to AJ’s skills at finding Major League level talent).  Cimber brings a unique delivery, a fighter’s attitude, and is finding early results, especially impressive since he was a non-roster invitee to Spring Training.  AJ’s acquisition of Cimber harkens back to KT’s ability to always find bullpen talent, which allowed him to showcase new finds at the Major League level and then spin them off via trade for more potential arms to showcase.  If AJ can continue finding guys like Cimber off the scrap heap (we need more Cimbers and Yates and less Makitas), it really provides hope for continued talent acquisition at the Major League level which this team will need to fuel a multi-year run.

Gaslamp Ball – Breaking Down Padres Plate Appearance Distributions: Roy from Gaslamp Ball and about sixty different podcasts does a great job of breaking down how plate appearances have been distributed among players by Andy Green.  No one expects Andy Green to spin straw into gold with this roster, but he has shown some very questionable decision making this season in his lineup construction, and I’m not sure we can expect him to flip a switch in 2021 and all of a sudden be good at lineup construction after being bad it for 3 years (so far).  Jose Pirela leads the team in plate appearances, and despite Galvis playing in more games this season, Galvis has 13 less plate appearances due to his position at the bottom of the lineup and Pirela’s spot at the top of the lineup.  This is a good highlight of how lineup positioning, theoretically, is a way to funnel more plate appearances to your best players.  Just for clarity, Pirela is not one of the Padres best players.  Over the course of a full season, you are talking about Pirela getting a bonus 40-50 plate appearances; that’s a big deal!  Marver and I had a big debate on Pirela’s place on an Opening Day roster.  My arguments were never based on whether he was actually good, but more on the need, culturally, to allow him to earn or lose his spot based on his performance last season.  Well time is up.  Jose “Doctor Groundball” Pirela is not a Major League starter.  He shouldn’t be starting and he sure as hell shouldn’t be at the top of the lineup and accumulating the most plate appearances on the team.  Anyways, Roy’s analysis here was really interesting and really well researched.  I don’t see these types of posts on GLB as often these days so it was nice to find this one.

Madfriars – Josh Naylor Interview

Madfriars – Buddy Reed Interview

These are both subscription only but worth reading.  It’s always nice to hear things from the player perspective, especially from the minor league player perspective since they aren’t trained to be mindless PR automatons quite yet.

The Golden Age Of Padres Podcasts:

Gwynntelligence Podcast – 5/24/18: It was a good episode!  I promise!  It even inspired Sac Bunt Dustin to write something that builds off of our discussion!  I’ll even tutor readers on how to buy Zilliqa!

Three B Zine Podcast – Pale Ale Night: I can’t stress how much I enjoy listening to Three B Zine on a weekly basis, and how much I enjoyed taping with them.  I think there was a really nice mix of Padres talk and San Diego craft beer chat in this episode.  If you’re not listening to Three B Zine yet, go ahead and start.

Make The Padres Great Again – Are The Padres Playoff Contenders (No They Are Not): Craig and John do a fantastic job of highlighting not only why the last place Padres are not a playoff contender, but also how the local media is doing a disservice to the fanbase by hyping up “playoff contention” by this team; more succinctly, they are serving up massive portions of Catnip For Morons (TM).  John also did a great job breaking down his Matt Adams (and Mark Reynolds) vs Eric Hosmer analysis, and the underlying reasons behind it.

Scott Kaplan Solo Podcast – Heath Bell: Whatever your feelings are on Kaplan, he’s one of the most influential old media figures in the local sports world.  He had on Heath Bell and they were fine.  I’m only highlighting this podcast this week for this quote, which builds on something we’ve said for years here in regards to control the message infiltrating old media: “When the Padres were here at 1090, it was drilled into me by the ownership that if they’re bad, we can’t kill them, because they’re our business partners, and killing them is killing us.  For years, when we had the Padres on 1090, I’d rather ignore them and not beat up on them and not talk about how bad they were… When you’re in business with someone, you need to watch a little more.”

Woods With Friends – Dave Palet: Similar to the Kaplan pod above, this one is here not for being a Padres podcast, but for something interesting in regards to Padres Twitter.  Woods tells a story about how after the Kevin Klein debacle, Entercom executives accused him of being a puppetmaster of Padres Twitter, perpetrating the outrage against Klein’s suicide joke.  High level Entercom executives said “Steve Woods is responsible for this, he turned all of his twitter people [against The Machine]”.  This ties into something I wrote about last week in regards to Jay Posner’s Kept Faith appearance where he said that Padres Twitter was only a vocal minority, and there was no need to take it seriously on the aggregate.  The Entercom executives think that the #PadresTwitter collective isn’t capable of leading an organic campaign and influencing change without having our strings pulled by an old media personality.  Now ask Kevin Klein, Entercom executives, and their Padres partner Wayne Partello if #PadresTwitter is toothless and powerless.

Make The Padres Great Again – Playing FMK with Liddy Loree from Hell’s Belles: First off, can we stop with the FMK now?  I think we can file FMK into the Mount Rushmore and is a hot dog sandwich bits (we get it, IT’S A SANDWICH).  It was fine here, and then Dave and Jeff did a good one this week, but let’s go ahead and let it rest for a while.  Liddy was delightful as always, but to be honest, I’ve drank a lot of Alchemist products and did a craft beer podcast between then and now, so my memory is faded.  I do recall Craig discussing my write-up highlighting Enyel De Los Santos’ 2018 performance versus the fleeting Freddy Galvis Experience.  I must implore Craig, for his own santiy, DO NOT LOOK UP ENYEL’S LAST START.  In fact, for all of our sanity, let’s all just close our eyes and plug our ears to Enyel’s 1.39 ERA or his 9.75 K/9 in AAA.

The 5.5 Podcast – Where Art Thou Luis Perdomo: When I listened to this, I was already in full agreement that Perdomo deserved to be up in the Major Leagues instead of having starts go to Erlin or Mitchell or whoever else sucks that Andy Green forces into it.  And we were so close to this happening, with all signs pointing at Perdomo pitching on Sunday.  And then this snuck out in a Friday news dump:

WELP!  It looks like we need to start making funeral arrangements for Luis Perdomo’s sad case of, as diagnosed by the Padres Injury Translator 5000 (TM), Incurable Shoulder Malaria.  It’s so fun being a Padres fan sometimes.  IT’S JUST SO FUN!  Also, I’m just going to say it, everyone underestimated Jeffrey Wright’s character in Hunger Games because he was the nerdy, brainy dude, but he held out pretty well.  Danny and Eric’s assertion that Team Gwynntelligence would be the first dead in a #GoldenAgeOfPadresPodcasts Hunger Games was awful at best, grounds for podcast war at worst.  I look forward to building a tesla coil powered off of a swamp battery while out in the battlefield wilderness that fires a direct shot into Danny’s bum hamstring.

East Village Times Podcast – Eric Longenhagen: I always enjoy these podcasts from EVT with national prospect writers.  I greatly prefer the ones with Longenhagen and Glaser as I respect their work a lot more, and just generally find them interesting to listen to unlike the sheets of cardboard from MLB Pipeline.  These EVT prospect writer interviews generally go the same: “Hey here’s a prospect, what do you think?”, and Longenhagen comes through with a lot of good analysis on Lawson, Mason Thompson and Josh Naylor.

Zero Chance Podcast – Tabitha Lipkin: First off, Tabitha Lipkin has been a pretty frequent guest around the Padres Podcast Community, and she is always great to listen to.  Judging from her podcast appearances, it seems like there is probably no one more fun to hang out with.  With that out of the way, let’s get to what you’re really here for: how Rick this episode was.  I plugged the episode into The Podcasteralyzer 5000 (TM) and it showed that the percentage of Rick decreased to 22% from an all-time high last week of 36%.  For the purposes of this, I told the Podcasteralyzer 5000 (TM) to only analyze the Brady/Rick split, ignoring Tabitha Lipkin (this is consistent methodology with what we did for Lisa Lane’s appearance).  We are tracking Rickness week to week and finally have enough data to produce our first graph:

As you can see, after a steady increase in Rickness, we saw a decline this week.  It’s possible that increase was because of mindfulness of the #FreeRick movement, but it’s also within the realm of possibility that it was based on outliers like discussion of Rick’s trip to New York.  Of course, more data is better, and you can count on TWiPT to continue offering the best analysis on the subject.  It will be interesting to see if the data normalizes around a dependable trendline or Rickness, or if it begins to wildly oscillate like Wil Myers’ career.

As is the case when the #GoldenAgeOfPadresPodcasting continues producing incredible amounts of content each week, I wasn’t able to get to these podcasts, either due to being released late in the week, or just sheer volume of pods to get through.

Express Lane Podcast – Padres Jungle: This appears to be an offshoot of the Express Lane Podcast, featuring Gim Roehm.

Hells Belles – Bobbleheads, Bull$h!t, Cupcakes, & Cursing: This one just hit my Apple Podcast app too late in the week.  Hells Belles isn’t an unknown quantity at this point so you can pretty fairly expect quality female driven content with lots of cursing.  Can’t wait!

Update: Hells Belles was great!

Tweet Of The Week:

Mark down Jaggy veteran Oscar for his first win of the season.  Also a fun time to remind everyone that part of the problem with the Padres isn’t that they suck this season, it’s that the front office refuses to price the product in accordance with the product they are offering.  Of course, what they want you to think is that you’re spending $150 on tickets for a family of four to gain access to the hallowed food court of Petco Park where you can get all of the local restaurant food and beer you can buy outside of Petco Park while focusing your attention on the video board, your phone, the virtual reality gaming center, but definitely not the field, for the love of god DO NOT LOOK AT THE FIELD… Wait, this reminds me of my old Secrets Of Petco Park blog posts which I haven’t updated in a while.  But here’s a great one: did you know that you can buy Phil’s BBQ, Board and Brew, Buona Forchetta, Blue Water, Pizza Port, Hodads, Lucha Libre, Seaside Market tri-tip, Miguels and literally the entire lineup of beers at Petco outside of Petco Park?!  I’m not kidding here, not only can you find these foods outside of Petco Park they are half the price, in many cases, less than half the price, of what it is inside of Petco.  Another fun fact, almost all of these restaurants and beers can be found within 5 miles of Petco Park, in some cases, mere blocks away!  Anyways, this is a secret, don’t go spreading it around too much.  But this is the logical result of the team’s marketing department doing everything possible to get your eyes off the field and onto the food, drinks and video board, you start questioning why you’re paying $50 a ticket to buy non-ballpark unique foods that you can get anytime you want for less money.  For a fun time, here’s a spreadsheet I compiled of every ballpark ticket deal of note for every MLB team, including a lot of really generous ballpark pass deals, and then compare it to the trash offers from the Padres, all in the name of “valuing the product appropriately”.

Terrible Marver Tweet Of The Week:

I had to look up what PUBG because I, at first, assumed pick-up basketball games.  I found that it was a multiplayer video game.  This is important because this is what Marver has been doing instead of working on the Keith Law Manifesto, or let’s be honest, producing anything at all for the website.  Whenever Marver moves back to San Diego, if you run into him and meet him, feel free to just kick him in the nuts and then tell him Jagoff sent you.

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

Did you guys realize Canepa didn’t like the shift?  I did not realize this.  Real cutting edge stuff here.  Very edgy.

Dunking on Acee Of The Week:

After The Great Acee Mailbag Week of 2018, things have settled down, unfortunately, on the Dunking On Acee front.

This was followed by:

Great work on the dunks this week, butt pats!