How about Allan Dykstra? Drew Cumberland? Blake Tekotte?

Alright, here you go:



Thanks to Lady Gaga, for inspiring us all.

In my last update, I mentioned that the team will be wearing throwback uniforms for every Thursday home game this season. I said that they’d be wearing the 78 whites, but it looks like I jumped the gun a little bit.

On the team’s website, you can now vote for which jersey you’d like to see the team wear. The choices are the aforementioned 78 home jersey:



The 78 road jersey:



and the 84 home jersey:



(Pictures courtesy of Padres.com)

Vote early and vote often for the 78 whites, please.

…Says Kevin Towers.

A quick look at the Padres’ Pythagorean win-loss record indicates otherwise. It measures team performance more accurately than regular win-loss by using runs scored and runs allowed. The Padres Pythagorean record puts them at 63-90. Paints a different picture than their current actual 70-83 record, huh?

Also: the pitchers as a whole have an 84 ERA+!

Shout out to Gaslamp Ball.

We’re running out of franchise players! Maybe my next wallpaper will just have  kids wearing Gwynn 18 and Gwynn 19 jerseys. This is the non-spreadsheet side of being a baseball fan.

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Boring post here, sorry. It has come to my attention that our contact us page has not been working for an unknown amount of time. Please re-send all your love letters from the past, say, 3 months. Thanks.

According to Susan Slusser of the SF Gate, as usual via mlbtraderumors.

Suffice it to say the 23 year old Gallagher has the most potential of the three pitchers in the Scott Hairston deal, though his stock has dropped due to injuries after being the centerpiece of the Rich Harden trade.

Sean tore up the minors, and put together a solid 104 tRA+ in more than 100 innings between Chicago and Oakland last year. This changes the face of the trade, and as I said before is exactly the kind of return we should want for Hairston. Gallagher could be an affordable 2nd or 3rd starter for years to come.

John Sickels has an additional scouting report. Sickels thinks Gallagher needs time to adjust to the majors, but will become an effective 3-4 starter.

PECOTA comps seem to back this up: Jeff Russell, Ryan Dempster, Jim Gott, Dave Borkowski, Moe Drabowsky, Brad Penny, Ray Culp, Tom Seaver (!), Geremi Gonzalez, Steve Dunning, Jose Rijo, and Mickey Lolich make up the top dozen, with Sidney Ponson, Dennis Martinez, and Jake Peavy also making appearances. Most of these guys were good pitchers, though their durability varied. A maximal, Seaver-like outcome seems unlikely, but there are some very good pitchers on this list, testifying to Gallagher’s potential. He’s not a PECOTA comp, but I could also see Jeff Suppan as an inning-eating model for Gallagher.

A large portion of The Sac Bunt’s search engine traffic comes from searches for Padres, and strangely non-Padres various walkup musics. If you’re here for that reason, welcome. I also write about other useless and esoteric sports subjects, like the amount of time viewers spend looking at advertising watching a game. With promotion like that, who could not check it out!?

Getting to the meat of the situation, Adrian is still riding his classic Pitbull, then mariachi music. Brian Giles is keeping it current with Eminem’s “Lose Yourself”. Chris Burke, apparently missing something in his past as much as I miss college, hums along to Kenny Chesney’s “I Go Back” on his way to the plate.

Tony Gwynn Jr. rocks “Nothin But A G Thang” by Snoop and Dr Dre, taking a page out of ex-Padre Greg Vaughn’s book. Scott Hairston keeps it hip with the cool kids using TI and all those other people’s “Swagger Like Us”.

And as a special retro walkup music feature too fantastic not to include, is Gary Templeton’s “Smooth Operator” by Sage. Marvelous.

The Padres walkup music page is updated accordingly.

Also, I think I have the poll fixed. Please vote your heart out. If it doesn’t work, tell me the error you get so I can fix it my heart out. Thanks.

The Padres are on a roll again after biting the big one, after starting being on a roll. Now I don’t know how to feel.

When the team went on their 9-3 charge, Ray asked for my opinion on the situation. I thought about it, and how I expected around 75 wins at the beginning of the year. Then I pulled up the Padres 2008 baseball-reference page.

At one point last season, starting with the last game of a series against Chicago, moving through a sweep of New York, and finishing with games against LA and at Cleveland, our team from our town took 8 wins to only 2 defeats.

Of course we all know I’m cherry picking dates, but the point is that even a bad team can have stretches that make you think twice about what you thought you knew. And just because that stretch happens at one particular point in the year, say the beginning of the season; does not make that run any more meaningful in terms of projections.

The “it’s a long season” cliche gets beat up a lot, mostly because it’s seen as an excuse losers make to justify their perceived wussyness to do anything gratifying and irrational. Yes, poor performances need to be held accountable. But baseball is a game with more random noise than people like to believe, so make to pull back when you find yourself caught up in ups and downs.

Greene was a good player for four seasons, a league-average hitter and a decent enough shortstop. And then, suddenly and shockingly, he was not. Suddenly, he went from being worth $10 million per season to being worth nothing as a ballplayer.

I know that’s harsh, but it’s the truth. Still, one might have assumed that Greene’s 2008 season was a fluke, the product of some terrible convergence of randomness or (more likely) an injury that wasn’t enough to impress his manager but was enough to limit his abilities on the field.

We’ve already bragged enough about calling for Khalil’s trade when his value peaked, even though he was pretty much always over valued offensively and defensively. So, I’ll just brag about it one more time and leave it at that.

Rob Neyer

Updates on casting and locations for the upcoming Moneyball movie, directed by Steven Soderbergh:

“Anybody who is not actively playing who was on the 2002 team has been approached,” he said. “We’ve got about 60 percent of them. We have [manager] Art Howe, we’ve got Rick Peterson, the pitching coach. We’ve got three-quarters of the scouts who were there. … The guys on the team we can’t get — we’re casting real people who can play and perform. We’ll have the real footage and then we’ll go to the close-up with our guy in it, and it should be seamless,” the director explained.

They’re also re-creating the Oakland Coliseum interior on a soundstage. Shooting begins in six weeks.

H/t Rob Neyer.

Also, there’s a new poll to go along with the Moorad discussion from Wednesday.

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