Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
May 10, 2008
Padres Criticism

Tim Sullivan in the Union-Tribune cuts the Padres management no slack:

Jim Edmonds was not the problem. He was the symptom. He was the bridge too short, another in a series of stopgap question marks by a ballclub long lacking in home-grown answers.

If the Padres are unwilling to compete for top-drawer free agents, and unable to push prospects through their pipeline on a regular basis, they are bound to put some square pegs on the payroll. You can't continue to rely on scratch-n-dent ballplayers without expecting a rude reckoning somewhere down the road.

That reckoning is here, though Edmonds is now gone. Cutting bait on a 37-year-old center fielder hitting .178 means management need no longer face daily reminders of its most expensive mistake, but it does not mean Padres fans can finally embrace a brave new world of ballyhooed phenoms.

It means that matters have deteriorated so much that the Padres have elected to stick with the patchwork approach while shielding their top prospects from the competitive squalor at the major league level. Rather than give fans a glimpse of the gifted Chase Headley, if for no other reason than to break the moribund monotony at Petco Park, management has temporarily imposed a restraining order to limit the exposure of its most promising farmhands to the contamination of the big club.

The Padres are a very strange organization. They put a lot of brain power in the front office, but they seem to find a long term plan. Are they a win now team? Are they a team that manages youngsters so good new talent is always coming into the system? They seem to be neither. Win now requires sometimes overpaying for talent. Managing youngsters means drafting well and trading well. As far as I can tell, the Padres do neither.


Posted by David Pinto at 02:05 PM | Team Evaluation | TrackBack (0)
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