Well, the San Diego Padres are off to a disappointing 15-25 start, and the city of San Diego is hurting.  Attendance is down, message boards are calling for changes, and radio talk show hosts are lambasting the club with poorly reasoned analysis and sensationalist negativity.  Well, we should be used to that last one by now, nothing new there.

Fear not!  Keep your cool.  Don’t call in to radio shows.  Melvin Nieves is here to melt away the disappointment with 9 reasons to still be excited about the San Diego Padres:

1. The Padres have never worn a vest jersey. Good God, who would believe somehow more teams are switching to these mockeries of style.
2. Tony Clark: black guy
3. Led by Matt Antonelli and Chase Headley, the farm system improved from 29th in the majors to 12th according to Baseball Prospectus. The new training facility in the Dominican offers additional promise for the farm system.
4. Jody Gerut is here to provide the unconquerable, unbeatable weapon that is team speed. Bonus black guy.
5. Fewer TV viewers mean broadcaster Matt Vasgersian has a longer leash for offending as many people as he sees fit, to our amusement.
6. Since the team balked at hosting the official Padre blogger meetup day, we’re free to be as angry as we please without risking good standing with the club.
7. We don’t live in Minnesota.
8. Paul DePodesta’s blog.  The Sacrifice Bunt finally has something in common with someone smart.
9. To show those nerds at Baseball Prospectus their 1.6% Padres playoff odds are for sissies.

The Padres’ Zips Projections for 2008 are available. For some reason they’re all jumbly in my browser, so I copied the data to a monospace text editor (gedit) for easy viewing.

The first thing that jumps out at me is the team OBP, that would be awesome: .351, .345, .370, .375, .366, .350. Those are the numbers projected for Adrian, Kevin, Morgan Ensberg, Brian Giles, Josh Bard, Chase Headley. If that happens next year (it won’t) I’ll buy Tony LaRussa’s book.

Never mind Khalil Green looking at a .300 OBP. We’ll save that discussion for another post.

This gets me thinking: Kouz in left, Headley / Ensberg at third leaves money for a centerfielder and starting pitcher right? Git er done KT.