Going For Broken: The San Diego Padres

Our dads love us unconditionally, no matter how messed up we are. Baseball's dads, the Padres, appear to be applying paternal love with a vengeance this Hot Stove season. The question is, will that make the team any better?

General Manager A.J. Preller took the reins of the franchise this winter and apparently has a mandate to compete in a division that includes the Brinks truck in Los Angeles and the defending champs in the Bay.

Last year, and seemingly every year prior, the Friars trailed all of baseball in plate crossings en route to another losing campaign. Preller has attempted to remedy that with a Tasmanian Devil imitation. He's made more moves than Allied Van Lines*, swapping out fringe players and farmhands for outfielders Matt Kemp, Wil Myers and Justin Upton, and catcher Derek Norris, then signing hurlers Josh Johnson and Brandon Morrow.

*This is an awesome reference to the seminal '80s parody band, Blotto, and their signature song, I Want To Be A Lifeguard. And by "reference" I mean "theft" of the line "Summer blonds revealing tan lines, I'll make more moves than Allied Van Lines." After you click on this link, listen to this and this and be schooled.

What do all these players have in common? They all live in the Land of Lost Toys. Take Johnson, a once-upon-a-time Marlins star, who's twirled fewer than 82 innings in two of his last three seasons, posting ERAs ranging from 1.64 to 6.20. Or Norris, who busted out to a .292/.402/.477 first half of 2014 and then cratered to .245/.314/.324 second half as part of the team-wide collapse in Oakland.

Or Myers, who lit the AL on fire his first season en route to the Rookie of the Year award and then stunk up the joint during his sophomore campaign last year, bleeding 180 points of OPS before fracturing his wrist, along with much of his promise.

Of the above-named group, only Morrow, a fourth-starter type, has failed to post a sine-curve career, mostly because he's never really peaked, unless you consider his 10-save performance in '08 a crowning achievement.

Well, there is Upton, a certifiable star who's just 26. He's also a one-year rental who will be flipped to a contender if the experiment lurches out of the gate.

Padre fans could be forgiven for feeling like the glass is half full. First, the glass has been merely moist the last few years. Second, Preller has bought all of these shiny trinkets on sale. After all, the best player he's relinquished in these deals, by a wide margin, has been Yasmani Grandal, a good-looking young backstop with fledgling on-base skills and pop, but not exactly Buster Posey's profile.

While the Giants get stripped by the rest of MLB and the Dodgers throw money into the wind, Preller might just be on to something. Or he might be reprising the crash-and-burn Miami Marlins of 2012. If you're a San Diegan, have faith. After all, father knows best.

April Showers Bring May Ignorance

Steroids must be back. That must be it, right? Except, Alex Rodriguez and Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro and Barry Bonds are all out of the game at the moment. Maybe pitchers have stopped taking steroids. Maybe that's it.

Or the ball is even more corked than before. No, no, it's the new Yankee Stadium, which forgot the humidor. Or good weather in the East. or was it the West? Or a lack of good pitching. That's always a handy reason.

Yes, the baseball establishment, prompted by baseball "journalism," has been doing its Tasmanian Devil routine to explain the increase in offense this April in comparison to last year. The ex post facto theorizing is an amusing spectacle when you know that people are trying to explain something that doesn't actually exist.

"There have been a lot of pitchers on the disabled list," noted Joe Torre. Curtis Granderson said the balls are juiced. Mike Sciosia postulates that pitchers aren't yet sharp.

They are trying to make sense of a 6.8% increase in runs scored this April and a 17% hike in home runs compared to last year. Batting average is up, ERAs are up, walks are up. They've all skyrocketed to their highest rate in...three years.

That's right, offense is actually down compared to 2006, which was up from '05 which was down from '04 which was up from '03 which was down from '01 and '00. Since the turn of the century, long balls are off 20%, batting average is down seven points and ERAs are more than 30 points better. Since 2001, April's offensive performance have been all over the lot.

What does all this tell us? It tells us a grand total of nada, nil, zilch, zero, bupkus, goose egg and jack. Players, teams and even whole leagues vary in their performance from year to year a few percentage points one way or the other for no particular reason -- or at least for no reason that we can discern. An uptick one year in offense doesn't even guarantee that offense will be up that year, much less suggest a trend.

Let's just say there have been a slew of grand slams this year and note that the Yankees' red zone defense was lacking against Cleveland and Boston. And leave it at that.

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