When Padres GM Jed Hoyer made his pre-trade deadline moves in July, I was glad that he had the guts to go out and improve the lineup, accomplishing the task while giving up little from the farm system.
Chris Ello, the mid-morning talk show host at 1360AM -- and moving to an early-afternoon slot -- had the opposite reaction. His opinion was that the additions of SS Miguel Tejada and RF Ryan Ludwick would alter the character of the team, from a scrappy athletic group to a bunch of station-to-station players of the sort regularly spit out by Petco Park over the years. Tejada in particular would be a poor fit here, according to Ello.
I shrugged when I heard him. Ello can be a curmudgeon and has a tendency to predict the worst for San Diego sports efforts, and this seemed no different. If nothing else, Tejada was going to be an upgrade over Everth Cabrera.
Fast forward to more than a month later, and it is looking like Ello was right. While the Padres have had some notable pitching failures over the past two weeks, the bottom line reason for the now-10-game losing streak is an inability to push runs across the plate. The Friars have, by my mediocre math, scored a paltry 23 runs over the 10 games, getting as many as five runs in a contest only once. They haven't been patient at the plate, working counts to get on base, and when opportunities have arisen, they've converted minimally. They are, like the beginning of last year and in prior years, a station-to-station team that, even with the additions of Tejada and Ludwick, still aren't powerful enough to make it work.
The moves appeared to work well at first. The Padres began August with a 16-7 record. That's now 16-17. In some ways, that's not too terrible, but they're not going to win any divisions performing at that rate, and it is a sign that Ello might have been right on this one.
No comments:
Post a Comment