An Idea For A Yankees Reality Show During The Postseason; A Note For Chris Lincecum

• Since they're not going to be playing this October, maybe there's a way to keep the Yankees in the public eye:

In general, I can't stand reality shows; the only ones I watch are Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares or whatever my fiancee watches that I happen to catch a glimpse of out of the

corner of my eye while doing something creative and intelligent that I'm benevolent enough to share with the townspeople. That being said, I have an idea that will keep the Yankees in the spotlight this October and that is having cameras follow the principal players in former manager Joe Torre's departure as they watch him managing the Dodgers in the playoffs. It could work and it could work BIG!!!
Think about it. What kind of reactions would Randy Levine, Hank Steinbrenner, Hal Steinbrenner, Felix Lopez (they could film him taking care of the lawns on the fields in Tampa) and even Brian Cashman elicit as the Yankees are cleaning out their stadium without any post-season revenue and Torre simultaneously has his new team receiving the national exposure and is cementing his

reputation as a "wizened baseball genius" with his thirteenth straight post-season appearance? It was Levine and the Steinbrenners who wanted Torre out and Cashman didn't go out of his way to save his longtime partner, so why not give them a forum to vent as their decision, in the short-term at least, looks horrendous?
They could even extend the coverage to broadcaster Michael Kay, who did the equivalent of dumping on Torre's Yankee managerial grave only after the manager was gone indicating some vague sense of protectiveness over the Yankees organization by not saying what he really felt about Torre over those long years as if that was part his responsibility as a supposedly "unbiased" broadcaster.
It would be even better for the show if the Dodgers had to play the Mets at some point during the playoffs, so those that are embittered enough to wish ill-will on Torre and loathe the idea that the Mets are still playing and the Yankees aren't would have to make a choice

between rooting for their former manager or rooting for the Mets or even at some point having to root for the Red Sox. Just imagine...
I'm half-kidding about this, but there is a point. While I'm sure that the majority of the Yankees organization wishes Torre nothing but the best, you can't tell me that it's not going to make those that pushed him out the door crazy if he coaxes the Dodgers into the playoffs after their handpicked successor, Joe Girardi, had such a struggle in his first season as the manager; you can't tell me that many of the players still in that clubhouse who fondly remember Torre's handling of everything inherent with the job of managing that team don't miss him and wish he were still there.
I'm trying to imagine the irony of the Yankees hierarchy sitting in their offices watching the

playoffs in either the NLDS game five or NLCS game seven and chanting, "Let's Go Mets!!" over and over again so they don't have to hear about Joe Torre managing in another World Series with the Dodgers while the Yankees are plotting a way to overcome the embarrassment of a $210 million payroll that finished in fourth place. After everything that happened, it would be kind of appropriate...and a ratings winner!!!

• Chris Lincecum should strike now and write a book about his son Tim's workout regimen:

With the number of blog hits I get from people looking for information about Tim Lincecum's

workout, mechanics and stretching program, Chris Lincecum should write a book about how he taught his son to pitch. I've already advised those that end up here looking for information not to follow advice they find on the internet without truly understanding what they're doing----Blog 8/31, but they're still searching for it and doing so at their own peril. There's a market for such a guide and he should get it out there while his son is still healthy and it's such a hot topic.

• Rays 4-Red Sox 2:

Here's something I don't quite understand, Troy Percival was removed from the game because his back tightened up from all the warming up and sitting down throughout the game; but if he wasn't feeling right, why was he well enough to start the bottom of the fourteenth inning, but suddenly not well enough after he'd loaded the bases with nobody out and needed to be replaced because of the injury?

• Giants 4-Diamondbacks 3:

I generally don't question pitch selection unless there's an egregious and obvious error; many times, the pitch is the right one, but is in the wrong location; but after the latest Diamondbacks loss, I

have to wonder what catcher Miguel Montero was thinking in calling for closer Brandon Lyon to throw a high fastball instead of another curveball to Giants utilityman Eugenio Velez with two outs, two strikes, two runners on base and a one-run lead.
Maybe the Diamondbacks scouting reports said that Velez was vulnerable to a high, hard fastball and Lyon does throw in the upper nineties, but Velez had also looked clueless on two curveballs thrown by Lyon; Montero called for the high fastball; exaggerated the call by making a rising motion with his catcher's mitt; and was only in a half-squat because he wanted the pitch so high. Lyon made the pitch and Velez ripped it into the gap to score the tying and winning runs and send the Diamondbacks spiraling out of San Francisco.
And where was Diamondbacks manager Bob Melvin during all of this? During his playing

career, Melvin was a defensively minded catcher who only lasted in the majors as long as he did (ten years) because of his defense and handling of pitchers; doesn't he see what's happening on the field and let his catcher know what he should be doing not just based on scouting reports, but by observation? I guarantee if Lyon had thrown a hard curve in the dirt, Velez would've struck out; but he threw a fastball up in Velez's eyes and the results are there for all to see, especially for a Diamondbacks team in full and apparently unstoppable free-fall.

• Heads must roll in San Diego for the good of the organization:

Buster Olney linked an article yesterday in which Padres GM Kevin Towers wouldn't guarantee manager Bud Black's return next season----Article. It would be of infinite arrogance and a total lack of interest in the remaining fans of the team if no one took the fall for this

soon-to-be 100 loss disaster, but should Black be the one to take the blame and pay the price?
The Padres, a Moneyball team led by their team president Sandy Alderson, install the manager and instruct him on just about every aspect of his handling of the team and pay him a relatively meager salary in comparison to other organizations. Black's done a bad job this year, there's no question about that; but look at their roster. With the lack of power that Black has is an implied lack of responsibility. If he doesn't get credit for the wins, then he shouldn't get the blame for the losses either.
I'm convinced the Padres are arrogant enough to move forward with the same crew that created this mess, but they're not that stupid (I don't think) that they'll move forward without doing something to placate an angry fan base and let them know that they're making a move even if said move isn't going to make much of a difference one way or the other. Heads are going to roll in San Diego; the question is if they're going to be the right heads; if they're sacrificing Black and no one else, then it would be little more than a sham to deflect blame from the real culprits who spawned this woeful and hapless organization into their current state, most prominently team president Sandy Alderson.

The Eerie Similarities Between The Padres Front Office And The Bush Administration

Strange things come into one's head at odd times; after the Padres lost another game yesterday in unique fashion----Aaron Miles hit a walk-off grand slam to win the game for the

Cardinals after the Padres came back with two runs in the top of the ninth to tie the game after Heath Bell blew a lead in the bottom of the eighth----to extend their losing streak to six games and their string of embarrassing ineptitude to 19 losses in 24. What's worse, they're not even living up to their record under the Pygmalion

Win Theorem anymore with an overall record of 37-62 and a Pygmalion Theorem Record is 39-60. It suddenly occurred to me last night, as I was watching The Pope of Greenwich Village on IFC, that there were eerie similarities between the Padres front office structure and the Bush administration.
Both are dogmatically driven, inept and historically disastrous, yet still insist that they're right and everyone else is wrong; that their view of how to run things would have worked had the delegates held their part in the bargain and done what was expected of them in their intricate theories and plans. What follows are the members of each failed management team and their counterparts:

• Vice President Dick Cheney/Padres CEO Sandy Alderson:

Both portray themselves as strong, silent believers in an ideology whose main focus is to get results. Cheney's public stance is to create democracies around the world by use of the

United States military might and thereby make the United States and its allies safer by creating allies where enemies once stood. The power, according to Cheney, should stand in a strong and unassailable executive branch led by the president and his proxies without question or objection from the inconvenient and inconsequential congress, media or voters.
Alderson, educated at Dartmouth and Harvard Law and a former Marine and an experienced executive whose modus operandi is to manipulate the strings of his subordinates from a behind-the-scenes position while not desiring credit for his work. Not wanting to hear about anything other than results, numbers and facts, he's been seen as a ruthless, corporate executive who lets nothing stand in the way of getting his operations in line with what he believes to be right.

Both have been back room operators whose previous incarnations----Cheney as defense secretary for the first President Bush (in other words, the competent one) and chief-of-staff for President Ford; Alderson as a lawyer and then GM of the Oakland Athletics, followed by stints in the commissioner's office----provided an aura of competence, evenhandedness and professionalism. It was only when they achieved a level of power and recognition that their true natures came to the forefront as did their blind adherence to unyielding principles that work in theory, but not in practice (and one would presume that both knew the theories were unlikely to work in practice, but did them anyway).
Cheney with his goal to "re-make" the Middle East and enrich his allies (radical right-wingers whose main goal in life is to accrue power and money) is seen as the "evil genius" behind the "Bush-doctrine", but is in reality a small, petty man whose main objective is to garner credit for himself and push forward his narrow agenda to benefit that small group with a sociopathic lack of concern about the consequences. Alderson desperately tried to shoehorn his way into the Moneyball story in which Billy Beane was seen as the architect and genius behind the way the Athletics organization was built. Alderson pointed out relentlessly that it was Alderson who hired Billy Beane as a scout; it was Alderson who introduced Beane to the work of Bill James; it was Alderson who demanded that the Athletics organization focus on on-base-percentage, power and a figurehead as a manager; therefore it was actually Alderson who was the true mind behind the man and Alderson who is the true genius.
The thing about these men who are supposedly "evil-geniuses" is that the truly great ones have a certain amount of charisma to them that attracts both scorn and grudging credit. In looking at such characters, all have that certain "something" that demonstrates their power

without necessitating an open exercising of it (see Vader, Darth; Lecter, Hannibal; Corleone, Michael; Lebowitz, Paul----aka New York, Prince Of).
Both men are "flexible" with the truth by using "insider's" terminology to disguise their true intent and swallowed by those who either take everything they say as gospel or are too desensitized to the subterfuge and disingenuousness to bother questioning them further. In reality, neither Cheney or Alderson have much of a persona that would attract people to them; it's their positions that get results rather than a force of personality and both have been the architects to historic disasters although they'll continue to insist that their blueprint was sound and the implementation the true failure. In other words: "Don't blame me; my ideas are brilliant, they screwed it up."

• Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld/Special Assistant for Baseball Operations Paul DePodesta:

Rumsfeld's life has been spent attaching himself to people like Cheney, trying to accrue power, attempting to imply a level of confidence and use innovation to reinvent his image as

that of an arrogant, pompous, condescending and despised bureaucrat. As defense secretary for the second time, Rumsfeld appeared to be trying to re-fight the Vietnam war, this time in Iraq and this time doing things his way by re-making the military by trusting his own theories rather than those of the experienced warriors who dared go against him. Surrounding himself with gutless armchair warriors like Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith and military men who wouldn't object to his interference and lack of knowledge about that which he spoke, Rumsfeld succeeded in alienating anyone who did know what they were doing with his dogged interference and abusive intrusions to delay or prevent truly supporting the troops who were little more than vague, fungible pieces on a chess board to put forth his agenda. Humans aren't "real"; what's "real" is the plan and the focus on achieving it at any cost.
DePodesta benefited more than anyone by Moneyball as Beane's right-hand man. Hired by

the Dodgers based on owner Frank McCourt's goal of building a profitable team and helped along by his young son's starstruck gaze at DePodesta after reading the book, he took twenty months to wreck the team with his adherence to out-of-context statistics rather than what the baseball people in the organization wanted. With two horrible drafts and a series of nightmarish results in his wake, along with an pomposity that alienated everyone in Los Angeles other than those that bought into whatever his laptop spit out, he was fired by the Dodgers and landed with the Padres to take a central part in another disaster.
Both Rumsfeld and DePodesta have supporters who defend them to the last. Rumsfeld has been seen to be an innovator who tried to put ideas that will eventually work into practice by streamlining the military. DePodesta is referenced by those that are attached to stat-driven

theories for their own purposes and writes a delusional blog that has provided little nuggets such as that the Padres are "a winning team". Rumsfeld was fired (three years too late) after a hellish 2006 mid-term election for the republicans; DePodesta was dumped by the Dodgers after trashing the team and preparing to hire a manager who was "on the same page" as the front office. In parlance, that means someone who'll take short money and do what the front office tells him without question. For some unfathomable reason, DePodesta is still being presented as a possible future GM. The obvious reason is that DePodesta, like Rumsfeld, is one of "them" and is therefore qualified.

• President George W. Bush/Executive Vice President and General Manager Kevin Towers:

Bush was a well-liked and popular governor of Texas when he utilized his father's connections to make himself the inevitable presidential nominee in 2000. His "Christian

credentials", populist message and promise to restore "dignity" to the White House brought him enough centrist support to counteract a perceived lack of intelligence and experience to overcome Vice President Al Gore's woodenness and attachment to the scandals of the Clinton administration to win the electoral college and gain election even as he lost the popular vote.
Once elected, Bush did nothing in his first eight months other than go on repeated vacations. After 9/11, he became even more of a zealot for the conservative ideology espoused by his base. Bush was the front man armed with the enthusiasm for spreading democracy like a present day repeat of the Crusades without the expressed attempt to convert others to Christianity. Cheney and Rumsfeld's power behind the scenes became even more pronounced as they (and Karl Rove) guided Bush into places where his father never would have gone. In an attempt to "correct" his

father's mistakes and listen to a voice (Rumsfeld) who the senior Bush is said to despise, the younger Bush has demolished his father's legacy and become perhaps the most polarizing (and worst) president in history.
Towers was a respected GM for years before Alderson arrived and exerted his theories on the GM. For Towers it was either go along or move along and, before they hired Josh Byrnes, it appeared that Towers would escape to Arizona and the Diamondbacks. After that fell through, Towers seems to have resigned himself to working under the Alderson parameters.
Towers worked with his solid field manager in Bruce Bochy and rebuilding his team using principles of both statistics and on-field results, the Padres had a reasonable budget and willingness to bring in stars to try and win. Towers rebuilt the team after a sell-off following the

1998 World Series and again restored them to respectability and contention. After Alderson's arrival, Towers has scoured the bargain bins and tried to find whatever he could based on the budget. Their farm system is devoid of prospects and he's likely to get the blame for going along, just as Bush has. Unlike Bush, Towers will probably receive an opportunity to redeem himself as a solid baseball man in his own right after his inevitable departure, leaving the Padres to do as they wish without Towers on the firing line as the man in "charge" of an ill-thought-out train wreck.

• Former Secretary of State Colin Powell/Manager Bud Black:

Powell could have done anything with his life after leaving the military. He could have run for president himself; he could've been vice president; he could've simply chosen to go and

make himself a ton of money in private business or simply giving speeches. Instead, he decided to use his experience, likability, connections and pragmatism to be Bush's secretary of state. Powell's speech in front of the United Nations, which later was said to have contained claims that Powell himself didn't even believe, demolished all of the good will that Powell had accumulated in an exemplary life of public service.
Bud Black was respected as a player for his guts and honesty with the media, management and teammates. He was the well-liked and competent pitching coach for the world champion Angels of 2002 and was seen as such a smart baseball man that he was considered a second bench coach for Angels manager Mike Scioscia. Mentioned as a possible manager for many jobs, Black was reluctant to pull his daughters from school in Southern California and turned down opportunities to stay with the Angles. It was when the Padres job opened up that Black would

have the opportunity to show his skills as the field boss; but in the system used by the Padres, the manager is never really in control of what happens----he does as he's told, takes an entry-level contract and is easily dispatched when things go wrong.
Black's lack of managerial experience and preparedness for all the criticism that comes down on the manager mirrors the excoriation that Powell has received for being the good soldier. Black has made some egregious mistakes that have been similar to those of Powell in following orders (in a less important sense of the baseball world compared to actual war) that have haunted him and sullied his reputation. Like Powell, it's likely that if Black is removed from his duties in San Diego, he'll have to do some penance as a coach or lower level subordinate, but is likely to get another chance to be the man in charge.

In the end, both are disasters of different levels of import. The Bush administration has wrecked the economy, the reputation of the United States around the world and ravaged the military to its breaking point with its adherence to that narrow conservative agenda held by a

hard core, ruthless and disciplined few who care about what suits

their grasp at power and money. In a baseball sense, the Padres are on a level with the Bush administration. There was great hope for a team that would build a financially restrained and successful team that utilizes principles, proven by numbers, and eventually result in a new age of monetary sanity and on-field success. Sadly both have failed in a massive way and it's going to take years to clean up each mess only if competent people are put into position to do it right. In both cases, we'll know soon enough which direction the management of each intends to head. I have more faith in the American public than I would in the front office of the San Diego Padres.

A Disaster On Paper And In Practice

Since Moneyball enthusiasts are so fond of pointing to stats in their beliefs of constructing a team, here are some stats for the San Diego Padres: Team Record: 32-51; Record according to the Pygmalion Win

Theorem: 32-51; ranked 15th in the National League in runs; 2nd in strikeouts; 15th in OBP (they're a Moneyball team!); 9th in ERA; 10th in runs and hits allowed.
They were picked by numerous people----credible and not----to go as far as winning the World Series this year and while teams like the Mariners and Mets have been the object of relentless ridicule this year, no one seems to be unloading on the Padres to the degree that their performance warrants. In fact, there are still those----again, credible and not----who are trumpeting the candidacy of Padres assistant Paul DePodesta for a future GM job. It's getting difficult to come up with analogies to exemplify the silliness of even suggesting DePodesta for a top job considering the anecdotal evidence that he has neither the competence nor the right to be up for any job in baseball, let alone one in

which he's again put in charge of a team.
Manager Bud Black was almost directly responsible for the team blowing their lead in the NL West last season by allowing Jake Peavy to pitch on short rest against the Diamondbacks and hasn't shown the strategic acumen to coax more than what he's gotten from this flawed roster. As well-spoken and respected as Black is in the media, the question has to be asked: given how the team blew a playoff spot last season (similar to the Mets), and that they look like an expansion team this year, how has Black not been fired? The Moneyball ideal of having a manager do the bidding of upper management and take short money for the job also entails the front office's ability to randomly fire the manager when the team isn't performing. In this system, with this

roster, there's no way to tell whether Black would be an effective manager if he were legitimately put in charge of a team, but the evidence of his work so far indicates that he is more deserving of the ax than Willie Randolph or John Gibbons were in their respective jobs.
GM Kevin Towers isn't absolved of blame here either. It's a convenient excuse for every employee in the Moneyball system to shield blame from themselves when things go horribly wrong by hiding behind the numbers. Towers is functioning under some heavy-handed interference from team president Sandy

Alderson and payroll constraints, but he's the GM and receives credit for being "smart"; but is this the roster of a "smart" GM or organization? Are the results? The Padres can only hide behind the injury card for so long. The Angels lost their two top starting pitchers and didn't miss a beat; the Red Sox have been without a chunk of their starting rotation and the best clutch hitter since Reggie Jackson in David Ortiz and you don't hear them whining; the Yankees are hanging in there with a bunch of journeymen starting pitchers; the injury excuse can explain away some poor play, but

32-51 is what it is on paper and on the field.
As for DePodesta, what is it about him that people still insist that he's qualified to be a GM in the big leagues? Is it his Harvard degree? Is he such a charming and nice guy that people want to help him? Is it that they don't want to let go of the Moneyball ideal that the system is "better" than the way other teams go about running their teams when it's being disproved by the day by the repeated failures it's spawned? It reminds me of the democratic political consultant Bob Shrum. He's touted as an "expert" and introduced as a democratic consultant as if the mere designation is supposed to justify his position and imply expertise; but the man has never won one presidential campaign in which he was involved----not one. The list of losers Shrum has been involved with is a vast

wasteland of democratic hopefuls who were dispatched----Dick Gephardt, Michael Dukakis, Bob Kerrey, Al Gore and John Kerry. One-by-one they lost, all of them. Yet Shrum's writing books about his work and given some form of credibility. Is it because people like him or because he's somehow convinced others with charts, graphs and numbers as to why he's been right all along but was unable to convince the people who matter----voters----of his brilliance?
Karl Rove is sleazy, Machiavellian and repulsive; he looks like the guy in the khaki raincoat who just left the adult bookstore and is skulking away to try and avoid detection, but he has one important attribute to validate his political standing----he wins; and I can guarantee you that he would be just as effective working for the

democrats as he's been working for the republicans. It's fine to stand on beliefs and principles as people like DePodesta seem to with the Moneyball system, but in the end someone has to be responsible for getting results. Adaptability and getting things done are more important than being liked. After DePodesta's nightmarish tenure with the Dodgers and this train wreck in San Diego, how is he still being promoted for a GM job? It's an honest question for which I'm still waiting for an answer. I don't expect one anytime soon.
The one thing that the Padres are fortunate about is that the fans in San Diego are perfectly willing to move along with such a disastrous team because the weather and laid back atmosphere of the town itself precludes such angry calls for someone's head as would be heard in New York, Philadelphia or Boston. They can go along their merry way with a team that, right now, looks like it could lose 100 games and

continue to try and convince the public that it's just a matter of a tweak here and there and things will resume as they were in the past few years, but the truth is right there in the numbers and on the field regardless of what they use as rationale for this nightmare. That the fans can easily say, "The Padres are terrible? Well, Chargers training camp is coming soon and until then, we can just go to the beach" is saving them from the rightful indignation that they deserve and that's part of the problem.

Nicholson's Words Fit Better Than Mine

• I don't want money, and I don't want medals:

Quoting Jack Nicholson when he's bullying Tom Cruise's character from A Few Good Men

is appropriate in this instance:

I don't want money, and I don't want medals. What I do want is for you to stand there in that faggoty white uniform and with your Harvard mouth extend me some fucking courtesy.

Yesterday while reading Buster Olney's blog, I saw that Olney had made a mistake in saying that when Kyle Lohse wins his next game for the Cardinals, he will win 10 games in a season for the first time in his career; I wrote a comment that corrected the

mistake saying that Lohse won 13 games in 2002 and 14 games in 2003. When I checked later to see if the mistake was corrected, it was----by erasing it altogether. So basically, my comment looks like some random statement uttered into the wind for no reason at all like something Joe Morgan would say.
There's nothing wrong with saying the words, "I made a mistake", but apparently those that make a living writing and talking about baseball haven't yet made that discovery and if that's one of the prerequisites, I'm relegated to my devoted readers who can see through the crud of the "mainstream" media and are aware that it takes more competence to admit that one is wrong than it does to simply try and erase a mistake hoping no one noticed.

• Shaun Chacon's job prospects:

I seem to be in the minority thinking that someone is going to take a chance on Shaun Chacon, but I still believe that he'll get picked up after he apologizes and displays a facade of contrition (real or fake). He has three things going for him: everyone's desperate for pitching and Chacon has experience as a starter and reliever; he's breathing; and he has a functioning

right arm. Add them up and he'll get a job once everything settles down; it'll probably be a minor league contract at first and a quick promotion after the smoke clears.
What I don't understand is how guys like Darryl Strawberry and John Rocker got chance after chance after careers full of controversy and missteps and Chacon's career is said to be over for one incident in an eight-year career that has (as far as we know) been clear of off-field problems. If Chacon apologizes to Wade and Wade accepts the apology, why shouldn't he get another chance with another organization. My one piece of advice for Chacon would be not to ask Wade for a recommendation. (A satirical resolution to this story would be if the Phillies sign Chacon; the not-fully-evolved Phillies fans would probably worship Chacon regardless of how he pitched because the majority of them probably wanted to choke Ed Wade numerous times while he was the Phillies GM and they'd have a player who'd actually done it.)

• Athletics 5-Phillies 0:

Athletics GM Billy Beane is probably doing pirouettes in his office with every dominating

start that Rich Harden provides because he's going to trade him. Mark my words. Other GMs would be teetering back and forth on whether or not the deal the oft-injured righty, but not Beane. The risk/reward factor doesn't enter into his mind. He's got a guy in Harden who is dominant when he's healthy, but is rarely healthy. Other GMs are going to be hypnotized by

Harden's brilliance and Beane's going to use their lovestruck gaze and dearth of available pitching to get some desperate team to empty their vault to get Harden; with every healthy and excellent start, the price is only going to go up with Beane's getting exactly what he wants and the team that gets Harden eventually rueing the day they made the deal with the devil.

• Twins 4-Padres 3; call in the National Guard for the Padres train wreck:

The San Diego Padres are an utter disaster and an organization in shambles. Why is it that no one seems to be taking the Padres to task with the same enthusiasm as they are with other teams like the Mariners or even the Mets. The Padres are one of the teams in the

staggering NL West that is saying they're reluctant to start clearing the decks because their division is so bad and they'd like to give it more time. They shouldn't. The other teams in the NL West have something called hope.
The Giants have that young starting rotation to fall back on; the Dodgers are bursting with talent and have a manager whose teams are known for second half surges; the Diamondbacks are playing badly, but they too are packed with prospects and have too much talent to continue playing like this; the Rockies are fresh off a World Series appearance and many of the young players who carried them there are experiencing a sophomore slump and should level off with some experience; but the Padres?
Other than Jake Peavy (if his arm stays attached to his shoulder) and Adrian Gonzalez, what do they have that bodes well for the future? Chase Headley and Kevin Kouzmanoff could

become All Stars, serviceable big leaguers or underachievers; there's no way to know. As for the rest of the roster, they're a bunch of veterans nearing retirement; journeyman who should be bench players and waiver wire pickups; their farm system is said to be barren. Bud Black and Kevin Towers might get the blame for what's happened, but they're not really at fault. If a baseball wanted poster for incompetence is going to be distributed, it should have one face and one name on it: Sandy Alderson. I expected the Padres fall under .500 this year, but no one could have expected them to descend into this, and what this is is an utter train wreck.