Ups and Downs of Baseball, SDSU Stadium

Baseball, the good: Stephen Strasburg of San Diego State and West Hills HS in Santee wins the Golden Spikes Award as the Player of the Year in college baseball. No surprise there and congratulations. Strasburg, with all the stories about how he came to college soft and turned himself into the monster pitcher that he is, makes for a great life story for parents to use with their children.

Baseball, the good: Adam Jones of Morse HS and now the Orioles drives home the winning run in the All-Star game with a sacrifice fly off the Padres' Heath Bell.

Baseball, the bad: The Padres Heath Bell is the losing pitcher in the mid-summer classic.

Baseball, the worse: The Padres really suck. I accept to a certain degree that their poor play of the past month is, in part, due to injuries. They were within hailing distance of .500 when starting pitchers Jake Peavy and Chris Young went down with injuries. Add to that the loss of 2B David Eckstein and C Nick Hundley, and that hurts a bit, no question.

What really strikes me about the team's futility is that the Friars have the second worse team ERA and have given up the second-most runs in the National League despite playing half their games at pitching-friendly Petco Park. If these guys hurled in Cincinnati, the team ERA would be over 6.00.

I have to admit to not being impressed by the recent statements made by Padres president Tom Garfinkel, who is busying himself with improving the "fan experience" at a relatively new baseball park. As one letter writer to the Union-Tribune mentioned, get a better team and the fan experience will be great. Garfinkel's reaction to the current predicament is to baffle us with BS. I know it will take a couple of years probably to turn things around, but we'd rather see progress on the field than a new video board.

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A barely noticed tidbit from Chargers special counsel Mark Fabiani on XTRA 1360 Tuesday: SDSU AD Jeff Schemmel has mentioned a couple times something about building the school's own stadium. Interesting. He also said with the state's budgetary difficulties that any talk was unrealistic, and his NFL team fully considered SDSU to be the main tenant of their new facility.

As reported here recently, Fabiani says the Bolts have talked to the city of San Diego more the past few months than in the four years that Michael Aguirre was the city attorney, and they were looking at sites downtown, though nothing has jelled.

Fabiani also said the state of the nation's monetary system means financing will take a while for a new Chargers stadium, so my thinking is by the time they come up with money, the state of California also might come up with money. I can see a lag time of a couple of years between private and public capital markets returning to normal, but the Aztecs might be able to get their own place sometime in the next few years.