by Chris Ello on October 3, 2009
Maybe trading Woody Williams to the St. Louis Cardinals for Ray Lankford finally caught up with him. Kevin Towers always used to say that was the one trade he would have loved to have back.
Wonder if new Padres owner Jeff Moorad will ever feel the same way about letting Towers go, which he did prior to Friday night’s season-ending series opener against the San Francisco Giants?
Maybe it has crossed your mind over the last couple of seasons, and maybe you even dreamed about it. After all, there are many in San Diego who have pointed the finger at Towers over the years every time the Friars have fallen.
But now that it has actually happened, now that baseball’s longest-tenured General Manager has actually been given the heave-ho, it really does feel like a shocker.
If nothing else, the timing of it seems puzzling. Sure the Padres are in the midst of finishing up a rather mediocre season in 4th-place in the National Continue Reading →
by Craig Elsten on May 18, 2009
I was driving home late Saturday night, thoroughly not expecting to hear a Padres game on the radio, but there it was. The 14th inning of a 5-5 game between Cincinnati and San Diego. Here we go again. Last year I was there in person for the longest game in Padres history, the 22-inning loss to Colorado that served as the start of a very long end for the 2008 team. I was shocked to imagine that Buddy Black had been able to cobble together even six innings of scoreless relief from his beleaguered bullpen. Did Bell pitch all six? What’s going on around here?
Just then, Luis Perdomo finished off a scoreless inning, and Ted Leitner went into one of his classic in-the-moment overstatements, gushing “this bullpen reminds me of the one we saw around here in ‘05-’06! The best in alllllll the league!”
I almost ran off the road laughing. Well, I thought, late nights can do things to you, make you a bit batty. OK, Teddy, maybe if you squeeze your eyes hard enough, so that stars are showing up in the corners, you can turn Perdomo, Mujica and Gregerson into Linebrink, Otsuka and Hoffman. Good luck hanging onto that statement, maybe it should go up on that hidden high shelf along with “you will be a STAR, Damian Jackson! A STAR A STAR A STAR!”
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