It was been very busy here at Harold James Preller Handjob Manor, what with balancing a major backyard remodel and pool installation project, a day job, a four year old, and summer travel, so it’s been unfortunate that This Week In Padres Twitter has had to sit on the backburner the past few weeks.  Who could have guessed that Marver would have contributed nothing since he’s moved back to San Diego?!  I will put this open invitation out there for the summer that anyone that wants to is welcome to write a This Week In Padres Twitter and I’ll publish it.  Just follow the basic framework and you can do whatever you want with it.  Especially if you want to write one in late July/early August when I’m in Belgium.

I mentioned summer travel, and it was at last partially Padres related.  For the second year in a row, I saw Tri-City Dust Devils play the Spokane Indians at Avista Stadium in Spokane.  Spokane had a long history of being the Padres’ short season A team from 1983-1994.  If you get a chance to go, it’s a nice park, with an enthusiastic fanbase.  On the Thursday night I was there, they drew 4,600 fans, which is more than double what Lake Elsinore pulled on Saturday night.  I was lucky enough to meet up with David Jay from Madfriars who sat in a rickety looking press box while I bought a full box behind home plate.  First, the important part.  Avista has a much better variety of local beers than Lake Elsinore has.  I had the No-Li Born and Raised IPA which was excellent.  The thing about short season A is there are a lot of guys that throw in the mid 80s that will never sniff the Majors.  Cole Bellinger started the game for Tri-City and only gave up 2 hits in 6 innings.  He’s really, really slight and looks like he needs to hit the weight room.  I sat next to the Padres player development staff and got to listen on the radar gun call outs.  He sits mid 80’s, was around 86 most of the time, and touched 89 a few times.  He snapped off some loopy curves.  Despite his effective night, he looks like a guy that needs to build strength and add some velocity to become anything more than Cody’s brother.  Shortstop Owen Miller went 3-3 and looked good at the plate, nothing special in the field.  2018 fourth round pick Dylan Coleman pitched the 8th, a couple days before being called up to Fort Wayne already.  Coleman had two hard hit singles hit off of him, but flashed easy 95-96 mph fastballs.  If you get a chance to/have to go to Spokane, try and catch a game at Avista, it’s a good time.

Days Since Marver Actually Wrote Something: 386 days

Marver has officially moved back to San Diego County, where he now resides basically on the East County border of Pomerado Road.  Shockingly, he is still finding it impossible to write anything new for Gwynntelligence.

Gwynntelligence Posts: He’s also found it impossible to find time or the desire to podcast.  The kick Marver in the nuts welcome home party at Rouleur Brewing will really be something. Might I suggest everyone wear a pair of these?

Padres Blogosphere Posts:

The Kept Faith – This Is Not A Post About Sports: I’m not sure if I’ve said it before, but when Dallas or Nick sit down to write something, I believe they are hands down the best writers on Padres Twitter.  Their pieces are almost poetic in how well written they are.  Dallas was deeply affected by the Annapolis newsroom shooting and wrote some really amazing analysis on how the new media news cycle dulls the pain and then forgets the event, and no real change seems to come about.  These are systemic issues that I’m not sure, nor does Dallas probably, how to fix this.  I found Dallas’ piece thought provoking.  While Padres Twitter has it’s share of fights and scuffles, I truly believe, in the end, it’s a community that supports its own.  Events like Annapolis give that belief pause, but also makes me grateful for what we’ve all worked to carve out for ourselves.

Gaslamp Ball – Brad Hand Is Your 2018 Padres All-Star: Brad Hand, who has the fourth most fWAR of Padres relievers, was selected as the Padres token All Star.  Most of the discussion around Hand has been about whether he’ll be traded and for whom.  Word has it Preller is asking for the world for him again, and the oft-repeated refrain of “it’s no problem if AJ sets his price for Hand high and won’t settle for anything less” which reveals a thrilling lack of knowledge of market economics.  My guess is AJ won’t budge on price and the contenders look elsewhere for a more reasonably priced high leverage reliever; maybe even from San Diego, where Yates and Stammen have both been more valuable.

East Village Times – The First Impression of Dust Devils’ Grant Little: Adam Brault wrote a nice piece on Padres draft pick Grant Little, who I saw play on Thursday.  To be honest, he was one of the very few players on the Tri City roster I actually cared about.  Little has started hot, which you’d hope for from a seasoned college hitter.  He had a solid single in the first, and looks like a guy that will skate through the lowest levels before being tested.

The Golden Age of Padres Podcasts: I’m way behind on podcasts, let’s get that truth out of the way.  I’m only going to include the podcasts I actually listened to this week, sorry to those left out.

Hells Belles – All Star Spangled Podcast: Let’s get to the happiest story on Padres Twitter first.  Roy (@roydjt) and Angela (@bullpenbabe) got engaged in front of the Tony Gwynn statue during a Padres social media night.  I’ve met Angela many times before and I think it’s just wonderful that Padres Twitter was able to bring Roy and her together in real life.  I hear Brady on Zero Chance, Posner, and a lot of old media refer to Padres Twitter like it’s some kind of cesspool of human waste, but what it is in the end is a community of like minded people.  Communities bicker, disagree, fight, but in the end, they support each other and create common ties that bind it together.  Posner says derisively that it’s not representative of the Padres fanbase as a whole, which has no basis in research or proven reality, but I argue it’s not only representative of the Padres fanbase, it’s representative of the San Diego area in general.  And so, it’s only fitting that two people meet and fall in love in our little online community.  Congratulations to Roy and Angela!

Make The Padres Great Again – A Sweltering July Podcast (mostly) Aout The Padres’ Offense: First, the baseball portion of the podcast.  John has really gotten kicked in the nuts a lot lately with the whole Lord Podcast thing, and more recently, for his Adam Jones for Wil Myers trade proposal.  He dug into this more in this episode, explaining that he feared Wil Myers/Eric Hosmer were going to be this generation’s mid 2000’s era Phil Nevin/Ryan Klesko, citing the problems with them having to play out of position.  To me, the focus on Wil Myers is the wrong focus.  Myers has a lot more potential to be the 2-3 (maybe MAYBE 4 once or twice) WAR player we think he can be, and this is ignoring the small sample size power surge this weekend.  He also has more potential being an OK defensive player.  The real problem is Eric Hosmer.  Hosmer is featuring a whopping NEGATIVE LAUNCH ANGLE this year, and it shows, with a ground ball percentage that has crept above 60%.  His line drive percentage has stayed consistent with last year, which is good, but his fly ball rate has dropped in a 1 for 1 trade off with more ground balls.  Hosmer leads the team in double plays grounded into, which is both a factor of having runners on base in front of him, but also his prodigious ability to hit grounders.  And this is year one of a seven year contract (remember when everyone just assumed it would be a five year contract and he’d opt out at age 34 LOL LOL LOL).  For a team that doesn’t have too many sure fire position players coming up through the system, it seems folly to toss away a guy like Myers that is very arguably the best hitter on the team.  $20M a year?  That’s nothing in today’s world.  It’s time to stop looking at payroll as if $100M is acceptable still.  It’s barely an ante.  If the team fields a league average payroll LIKE FANS SHOULD DEMAND, $20M for a 2-3 WAR player like Myers is fine, just fine.

Second, the non-baseball portion of the podcast.  Craig went to bat for his media pal Kevin Acee, and to be honest, this is fine.  It’s admirable that he’s sticking up for a friend and I don’t think Craig should get any flack for it.  But that doesn’t mean we have to agree.  The whole Dunking On Acee phenomenon is the culmination of years and years of Acee doing a disservice to the community covering the Chargers, placing his own interests above his readership’s interests, questionable journalistic ethics, contributing to Chargers’ team produced propaganda WHILE COVERING THE TEAM AS A JOURNALIST, and acting as a Spanos Family propaganda minister.  He was then rewarded with the Padres beat writer job after being blinded to Spanos’ intentions to move after getting to close to the subject he was supposed to objectively cover, and then overseeing Measure C’s pummeling at the polls.  And make no mistake, Chargers fans have dunked on Acee for years, but he is now before the more intelligent, organized, competent cabal that is Padres Twitter.  The issue isn’t just that Acee is a terrible beat writer.  It’s not just that he thinks a team meeting can be a turning point in a baseball season.  It’s not just that he takes Partello’s suggested talking points and turns them into “journalism”.  It’s not just that he writes articles rife with errors while providing no real insight or analysis.  Kevin Acee is a condescending dickhead to his readers who believes it’s impossible that there could ever be another viewpoint or opinion that’s correct.  Craig, in a follow-up discussion with professional Acee dunker @calvesfordays, stated that it was a great thing that there could be a discussion on the issue, despite differences in opinion.  Yet, Acee has proven that he is generally unwilling to have these discussions.  In the most condescending way possible, instead of engaging in a discussion to enlighten and broaden his views, Acee in the most condescending way possible accuses them of not reading the article.  This is a defensive tactic he’s used for years:

And here’s the thing, Padres Twitter is a different animal.  It’s full of highly educated, highly informed, highly engaged, highly intelligent fans who all have come to the realization that Acee knows far less about both the game of baseball and about the team that they love.  The only thing Acee has is access to players and management and he routinely wastes it by asking puff questions and puff pieces.  I said on the podcast when he was hired, despite my strong distaste for his conduct as columnist, that I had a real hope that Acee would shake things up, ask the tough questions, and display real journalistic courage.  Instead, Acee became an access merchant, highlighted by him being slipped the entirely worthless journalistic scoop of Hosmer signing by whom many presume was Ron Fowler.  Craig is asking intelligent readers to ignore that Acee regularly talks down to, belittles, and insults the Padres fanbase in the name of “civility”.  In an age when many San Diegans are disgusted by the local sports media after the self serving push for Measure C, after they choose to continue covering the former local football squadron after citing asinine “studies”, after the airwaves continue to be filled by former NFL players, treacherous charlatans, and repugnant, racist, misogynist windbags that seem to have nine lives as they are all recycled over and over.  This on top of irrelevant, past their prime writers like Nick Canepa and Bill Center still holding court in this town.  Acee may be a nice guy away from the job, I have no doubts about.  But Acee having nine lives in this town and being forced on an unwilling readership is a symbol for everything that is wrong with sports media in this town.  Craig asks what the goal is with dunking on Acee?  I doubt there’s any organized goal, some may want a writer that respects the readers, some may want to express their displeasure with the local media environment, some may just want to treat a dickhead like a dickhead, and some may just want to appear in TWiPT’s Dunking On Acee section.  To accuse Padres Twitter of dunking on Acee only for the likes, validation, and attention condescends and ignores the long history of disrespect, ethical foibles, and substandard work from Kevin Acee.  I respect Craig’s opinion here, but I think it oversimplifies things if he thinks this is just a response to three months of substandard beat writing.

Padres and Pints – Episode 41: In the second iteration of the revamped and previously left for dead Padres and Pints, Avenging Jack Murphy again makes his case for Padres Podcasting Comeback Player of the Year.  Before he devolves the episode into a long discussion of the College World Series that led me to hit the skip 15 seconds button about 60 times, AJM shined by bringing a fresh perspective on things like the Machado “rumors”.  I like hearing the perspective of someone that hasn’t been entrenched in the last four years of mediocrity, and sees things with wide, born again virgin eyes.

Bluntly Padres – 5.5 and Bluntly CrossoverBluntly Padres – 5.5 and Bluntly Crossover: The hot new trend in the Golden Era has been podcast crossovers and collaborations.  Here, Devilish Danny Ortiz and Eric head over to The Ganja Dome to record with the two Matts from Bluntly.  From what I can tell, the boys got very mota-vated to talk about the bad rap Wil Myers is getting, while managing to make high baseball talk uninteresting as they devolve into adult baseball league chat.  I enjoyed Eric showing a lack of knowledge about the 20-80 scale as he rated Danny as a 65 FV adult baseball league player.  It sounded like much sensimilla was enjoyed, much coughing was had, and a fun podcast collab was born.

The 5.5 Podcast – Galvis Hindsight, Myers On A Tear, And John Conniff: I’m going to be honest, I remember very little about this episode.  Danny and Eric do have a nice discussion about how wasteful trading for Galvis was.  It reeks of a short term, instant gratification move to satisfy Uncle Ron as he doesn’t have to hear about shortstops (even though Freddy Galvis is in fact a terrible hitter) as much this year.  Regardless of how DLS ultimately fares in the Major Leagues, DLS was prospect capital that could have been traded far more productively for pieces that actually matter in years of contention.

Zero Chance Podcast – Slobshots! King of the Haters!: First, there was some great #DadChat from Brady in this episode.  He told a story about traveling with a one year old to Hawaii, which was met by a comment from Rick along the lines of why would you do that?!  I can’t express how glad I am that I acclimated by four year old to air travel at an early age.  We took our lumps, had two straight hours of holding her and bouncing her back in the lavatory area while she cried, but now, after logging over 35,000 miles in the air, she’s a pro and we are looking at a trip to Europe next summer with her.  Don’t be afraid, just go for it, it’ll pay off.  Brady is also correct in that ages 2 to 3 are the worst to travel with a kid.  Mine was too young to focus on a tablet, squirmy, and needed entertaining.  That age is way worse than an infant where you just strap them to your chest, feed them, and let them fall asleep.  Brady also passes on a little secret that a lot of tourist destinations have services that will just rent you things like a crib/stroller/car seat/anything so you don’t have to haul them like a schlub.  Also, I can attest that Westin hotels usually have a courtesy stroller to use (and most hotels have things like cribs/pack and plays) which made our Seattle trip much easier.  A baby is also a nice way to get a fridge brought in if they don’t include it with the room, you just say it’s for breast milk and they’ll usually comp the fridge (thanks MGM Grand!).  Now, onto more important things.  I plugged this episode into the Podcastalyzer 5000 (TM), and it spat out 22% Rick in this episode, which aside from the outlier episodes, is turning out to be a bit of a mean and median value.

Apologies to the podcasts I didn’t get to, but this week is shaping up to be a big one.  James “Scoops McGee” Clark and Patrick Brewer are about to record their landmark 100th episode.  We will, of course, have full coverage of this momentous event.  I’ll hope to initiate coverage of the Los Hijos podcast as well.

Tweet Of The Week:

Congrats to Joe, who also wrote a wonderful piece over at Gaslamp Ball that I probably should have featured above.  Incredibly well written, emotional, and honest.  All this, and he can still bring the dick jokes.

Terrible Marver Tweet Of The Week:

Marver now lives in Rancho Bernardo, which is very much East County adjacent.

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

Holy christ is Canepa an irrelevant out of touch old timer (or possibly doing a bit).  NEW THINGS ARE BAD!  MORE IRRELEVANT GREGORY PECK REFERENCES!  WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH KEYBOARDS?!?!!?

Dunking on Acee Of The Week:

Obviously Craig introduced some controversy into whether to continue Dunking On Acee.  I just couldn’t kill the bit, it’s too good.

Lord Podcast’s Royal Proclamation of Superior Podcast Prep And Thus More Listeners That Will Want To Come Back Of The Week:

I enjoy running bits into the ground, and I think this bit is run into the ground.  I’m hereby retiring this bit, but may this MS Paint art live forever.  Please never forget the important advice to always prep, as this will surely lead to more listeners that will want to come back. All podcasters should most certainly did not just push record.  NEVER FORGET THIS, NOW GO FORTH AND PODCAST!

Alley-oop To Acee Of The Week:

As one bit dies, another one rises like the phoenix.  Taking Craig Elsten’s words seriously, Padres Twitter launched into a new campaign to pummel Acee with positive feedback, support, and encouragement.  This new face of Padres Twitter should help to uplift Kevin, instead of tear him down.  This is Padres Twitter at its best.