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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Before the world met the whirlwind of wit and intellect that is now known as The Sacrifice Bunt, one Ray Lankford and I designed a Padres jersey concept.

I like the way these build on previous design traditions, bringing together uniquely Padres elements of sand, brown, and the currently used word marks. The look is also both unique and clean, a tough combination to achieve yet is essential to all classic designs. We might even be willing to go without outlines on the text to further streamline the look, a process the Dodgers used to improve their road jerseys.

Check em:

I’m tired of the blue. It’s boring. Everyone uses it. It isn’t “Padres”. Bring back the brown.

4/29 Update: Sac Bunters William, PadreHomer, and others suggested incorporating orange or mustard into this scheme, and Steve C came though big time incorporating it. Check out their work here and here.

In February, we reported on the upcoming movie adaptation of Moneyball, directed by Steven Soderbergh, written by Steve Zaillian, and starring Brad Pitt as Billy Beane. At the time, I said:

I hope DePodesta … mentions something about this on his blog. Hopefully he can give us a casting scoop on who’s going to play him.

Now we have our answer: Demetri Martin, of Important Things with Demetri Martin and Ang Lee’s upcoming Taking Woodstock, will be playing our favorite special assistant for baseball operations.

David Justice and Scott Hatteberg will also be in the movie, playing David Justice and Scott Hatteberg, respectively.

It’s a real film, Jack.

Literally every second, Ray and I get hundreds of emails from loyal SacBuntians clamoring for ways to advertise The Sacrifice Bunt for us, free of charge.

“I’m tired of wearing shirts with boring little green alligators, or apparel without hilarious sayings that show the world how witty and hip I am,” they say. And as is our usual policy when strangers on the Internet tell us to do things: we have wholeheartedly obliged.

The Sacrifice Bunt Shop is here, hipper and with more Padres related double entendres than previously thought possible.

Honest to goodness, we don’t make any money off this stuff, besides the good feeling in our hearts we get when people cover their bodies with the logo of our worthy to be on a t-shirt website.

Most shirts feature a design on the front with a Sac Bunt logo on the back. AA means it’s American Apparel. So they’re a little further up the pricing scale, but the shirts are soft and well fitted. You can choose any t-shirt color your heart desires, but if you want a different color ink, or a different style of shirt (long sleeve or moar women’s styles, for instance) let me know.

It’s been a while.

So recently The Sac Bunt has seen a sizeable increase in first time visitors. Normally we would take this with a grain of salt as the cost of being awesome and move on.  Instead, I would prefer to do the exact opposite and ask if you kind new readers could let us know where you came from?

Not that we need anything more to brag about, but Ray thinks Peter Gammons mentioned us as one of his favorite blogs . Also I really like bragging, so just holla at us in the comments, or send a message through the contact form.

Thanks.

-Mel