The 2011 San Diego Padres

There is a great line that Michael Corleone says to his brother, Fredo, in the movie, The Godfather: Part II.   The line is:  “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart.” Substitute the words San Diego Padres for Fredo and you know exactly how I feel about this baseball team.

Once a year for the last six years, I have written on the state of a very sad minor league baseball team that plays in the majors called the San Diego Padres. This will be my last post relative to this team. This year, there are so many things wrong with the Padres that it is hard to figure out where to start.  They are 11 games under .500 (at this writing), have no offense and their bullpen has failed them regularly this year.

I won’t call for the firing of Buddy Black (last year’s NL Manager of the Year) because I honestly think he’s done all he could with this team. Besides, this team is so bad that firing the manager won’t do anything to shake it up.

Last year, I correctly predicted that the Padres would have a winning record, but not win the division. This year I will predict that the team will finish the season more than 15 games under .500 because they can not win the close games. Need an example? How about five San Diego pitchers combining for a no-hitter for 8 and 2/3 innings and losing the game 1-0. I can’t watch them anymore and I don’t think the ownership can either. I am predicting that they will start the dismantling of this team right after the All-Star break.

Last year’s team was built to play 161 games in an 162 game season; hence they didn’t win the division that they led most of the year.  This year’s team has some pitching, but it doesn’t have any power bats and that is a big problem. Pitching arms get tired as the season wears on and they tire rapidly when a team constantly lose games 1-0 or 2-1.  When your pitchers think that they will lose a baseball game because they give up 2 runs, they make mistakes under pressure that your team can’t recover from. That has been the state of the San Diego Padres for two years. No, that’s not quite true, that has been the state of the team for almost a decade. And during that decade, I’d hope they’d learn from the previous year and improve, but they didn’t. Most of the time, they’d get worse.

There is no floor to how bad the San Diego Padres can be and that is the reason I am leaving my abusive relationship with them. They have broken my heart for the last time. I wish them well, but I have sadly joined the ranks of many Padres fans who can’t wait for the football season to start.