In a year which was meaningful and had many significant negative sports moments, culling down a list of the five worst moments in San Diego sports for 2010 turned out to be tougher than imagined. After all, both pro teams collapsed in key spots, the top two players in San Diego sports both left town, the greatest player in the city’s sports history got cancer and the city’s greatest coach died. Oh, and L.A. might swoop in and grab the Chargers. No big whoop.
I actually changed this list several times today in refining the second half of this two-part year in review post. Your list may be significantly different than mine. For example, trading Adrian Gonzalez is not on this list. So feel free to leave your revisions and submissions in the comments section. Here we go down the slippery slope…
5) Tony Gwynn has cancer. He’s on the Mount Rushmore of San Diego sports heroes, has a statue at Petco Park, and was fresh off the high point of his college baseball head coaching career. But 2010 was a challenging year for Mr. Padre, Tony Gwynn. First, his SDSU baseball team stumbled from the start of an injury plagued season and wound up failing to even win a game as the host of the Mountain West Conference baseball tournament. It was a trying spring, but nothing like what was to come.
In early October Gwynn revealed he has parotid cancer, near the salivary gland. He is now months into radiation and chemotherapy treatments. While Gwynn has stayed out of the public eye since starting his treatment, I’ve heard from back channels he’s lost weight but is staying positive and doing better. Sadly, Tony believes the cancer has come from dipping chewing tobacco, a nasty habit which is pervasive in baseball even at the college level. Kids start dipping and see their coaches do it, while the coaches are years into the habit and can’t quit. It’s a vicious cycle.
As the Aztecs baseball announcer I get to spend a lot of time with Tony Gwynn each spring and always relish the interaction with one of the sport’s true gentlemen. Here’s wishing Coach Gwynn a much better 2011 and many healthy years to come.
4) Adrian Gonzalez goes out with a thud. Say what you want about Adrian Gonzalez’s career as a San Diego Padre, but you have to admit: he saved his worst for last. As the Padres stumbled into their final week of the season, they were 1/2 game behind the San Francisco Giants in the NL West. The lowly Chicago Cubs were in town for a four-game series, the perfect opportunity to get right before heading to the Bay Area for the season’s final weekend.
On Monday night, Carlos Zambrano and the Cubs blanked the Padres 1-0. Gonzalez went 0-for-4, striking out twice. The next day, Gonzo was 0-for-4 with a strikeout and a throwing error in Chicago’s 5-2 victory. Having led the NL West virtually all season, the Padres were now two games behind the Giants with only five to play.
This is where the team’s best player and supposed leader would be expected to step up and say something. Adrian Gonzalez said something, all right. A whole bunch of things in fact. In a column which was run in the Chicago Sun-Times on that Tuesday morning, Gonzalez talked up playing for the Cubs in the future, the city of Chicago, the shopping districts his wife likes in the Windy City…everything but asking to sing the seventh inning stretch on WGN.
That night, Gonzalez couldn’t be bothered to hustle out a double play grounder and spaced out twice on defense. Even after the Padres won the next day 3-0 (Gonzalez 0-for-2), they flopped in the home finale with another 1-0 loss. Adrian capped an 0-for-13 series with an 0-for-3 night, striking out swinging in his last at-bat at Petco Park, the second out of the bottom of the ninth. It was a hapless, frustrating end to a great Padres career which came up fittingly just two homers short of Nate Colbert’s franchise homerun total.
3) A.J. Smith sets an unnecessary June contract deadline, sets stage for Marcus McNeill/Vincent Jackson holdouts. Here is where I struggle to narrow San Diego’s sports misery in 2010 down to five points. How do you pick from the mess that was the Chargers 2010 season? Certainly, losing to the Raiders and ending The Streak has to be on the list. But then again, the Raiders went 6-0 against the AFC West. What about losing at KC with punt returns in the rain? Or at Seattle, with fumbles and kickoff returns galore? Or at St. Louis in a flop of a performance? Or at Cincinnati with the season on the line? Or getting two punts blocked against New England?
The on-field flubs all melt into one another, so I will instead pinpoint the moment this past summer when you started to see a promising season become threatened. Marcus McNeill and Vincent Jackson wanted long term contract extensions. The Chargers offered the two Pro Bowlers the maximum one-year tender offers allowed under the collective bargaining agreement. Marcus and VJ didn’t sign them right away.
Up until this point, it was just negotiations as usual, but Chargers general manager A.J. Smith changed the tone with one cold push of the pen. In letters sent to the players’ agents, McNeill and Jackson were given until the middle of June to sign their tenders, or else the offers would be slashed by approximately 80% of their value. With months to go before training camp, A.J. drew the hard line in the sand and said take it or leave it. Naturally, proud players that they are, both McNeill and Jackson did not sign.
“We’ve lost a couple of great players today, and it hurts,” Smith said insincerely after the “deadline” passed. Signaling what would happen in the months ahead, Smith spoke of McNeill and Jackson as if they were lost at sea instead of in contract negotiations. Because A.J. had no interest in negotiation, only capitulation.
Now, neither Marcus McNeill nor Vincent Jackson were going to play special teams, and neither were likely to prevent Ryan Mathews and Mike Tolbert from fumbling the ball, so it’s fair to say their absence wasn’t directly to blame for San Diego’s 2-5 start. But the tone was set and the locker room pushed into unnecessary drama by Smith’s decision to draw a line months before he had to, and the end result kept Jackson off the active roster for ten weeks of the regular season. If you’re going to blame A.J. and his stubbornness for the Chargers’ failures this year, then his most stubborn moment has to make the year’s worst list.
2) Padres collapse down the stretch, lose NL West on season’s final day. August 26th, 2010. The Padres are 27 games over .500 for the first time since their 1998 team surged its way through August and right into the World Series. They have the best record in the National League. Baseball Prospectus’ daily Playoff Odds calculator has San Diego’s chance of reaching the playoffs at 97.2%.
The Padres lost on August 26th 11-5 to the Diamondbacks, their only home loss to Arizona all season. Then they lost the next day, a dramatic 12 inning game against the Phillies in which San Diego tied the game on a 9th inning balk and seemed to still have the magic. Two days later, Philly had completed a three-game sweep. The Padres headed out on the road, got swept in Arizona, then swept by Colorado at Petco Park. A team that went five months without a three-game losing streak had lost 10 in a row.
After going 9-1 with a 1.49 ERA in 15 starts through the middle of the season, young ace Mat Latos imploded and then his stats exploded, going 0-4 with a 10.13 ERA in four September starts. Gonzalez (as noted extensively above) stopped hitting entirely, and Ryan Ludwick joined him in the whiff parade. The Padres’ speed game ground to a halt, and with Tony Gwynn injured in center field and Chris Denorfia stumbling around, the defense suffered as well.
Even when San Diego seemed to get back on track momentarily, sweeping the pathetic Dodgers, they promptly lost three of four to the Giants, their first series loss to San Francisco all season. They won on the road in Colorado then dropped three of four to St. Louis. And just as the schedule slipped back in their favor, the dreaded Cubs series arrived, and the Padres lost 1-0 at home twice in four days.
Then, even as the fan base (which did not reach 30,000 attendance for any of the four Cubs games) was ready to give up on the plucky Padres, San Diego went to San Francisco on the final Friday of the season and won. Then they won again on Saturday. Suddenly, a win on Sunday, with Latos on the mound, would set up a one-game playoff at Petco Park on Monday. Hope was back again. The Padres were going to use up most of that 97.2% but still make the playoffs.
But no, instead they got blanked 3-0, the third shutout of the season’s final week. Latos lost, again. Scott Hairston, inexplicably, played and explicably whiffed. Yorvit Torrealba wasn’t asked to bunt and grounded into a double play. The Padres blinked in the spotlight and then had to watch as the Giants went all the way to the end and won the World Series. They wound up as Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront, sitting in the back of the cab saying “I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody…”
1) Chargers lose to the Jets in the AFC playoffs. Hey, just because it’s furthest back in your memory banks doesn’t make it any less painful. Look at what a disaster 2010 was for the Chargers. When the new year dawned, the Bolts had won 11 in a row. Norv was being fitted for a genius suit, the blue and gold was primed to reach the Super Bowl and the talk of a Brees vs. Rivers matchup had sports talk hosts seeing ratings points in their sleep. All they had to do was beat a Jets team which had practically been given their playoff berth by the Colts and Bengals.
I remember the excitement in the air at Qualcomm Stadium when the game started. The Chargers would struggle early against that tough Jets defense, but they would get it together eventually. Then, Rivers lofted a jump ball, and Vincent Jackson went up to catch it, and as he came down the ball got tangled in his legs and popped out, flopping into the belly of the prone Darrelle Revis for an interception.
The Chargers panicked, choked, melted down. The home team was flagged for ten penalties, including four mind-numbingly stupid personal fouls. Shaun Phillips’ head-butt. Jackson kicking the officials’ flag. Nate Kaeding missing field goals. Antonio Cromartie shepherding Shonn Greene into the end zone for the game-winning touchdown then hitting him five yards into the paint. It was LaDanian Tomlinson’s final game as a Charger, and his final carry was met with resounding boos, as the home fans rejec
ted a conservative play call by head coach Norv Turner.
The Bolts had seemed almost invulnerable heading into the 2010-2011 playoffs, a battle-tested team which had matured from its mistakes of 2008 and was ready to take the next step. Then, they were exposed on national TV against a mediocre Jets team. Nothing has been the same since.
Was anything worse in a lousy sports year than this one result? Does anything sum up the year’s frustration more than its awful opener? I think not. Congratulations Chargers, in addition to grabbing two of the top three spots on the top five list of worst 2010 San Diego sports moments, you get the grand prize.
Craig Elsten -
Chainsaw -
