Idiots Write About Sports

By most measures, 2005 has so far been a Bizarro season for the San Diego Padres.

Standard operating procedure dictates that the Padres shall regularly defeat the Dodgers, just as the Giants shall regularly hand the Pads their collective ass; and yet, the opposite situation now holds true. (That I consider our current 3-2 series lead against the Giants to be cause for celebration should be some indication of how mercilessly they traditionally thrash us.)

The strangeness doesn’t end at division boundaries. It’s definitely out of the ordinary for San Diego to eke out even a couple of meager wins against St. Louis, let alone take three out of four from the Cards at Busch. And in a normal year, the Padres most definitely do not sweep league-leading Florida, then back up the sentiment with a sweep of the always fearsome Atlanta.

Even the way that we’re winning games is weird. For the last decade or so, the Pads have applied one of two strategies to each of their outings. Plan A involves backing up a stellar San Diego pitching performance with a near total lack of offense, an approach that usually results in severe boredom and a 2-1 loss. Plan B, by contrast, involves jumping out to a huge early lead, which the pitching staff then gradually pisses away over the course of the game’s remainder. More memorable and infinitely more frustrating than the Plan A variety, Plan B games are responsible for spawning the well-known Lutz household phrase, “No lead is safe from the San Diego Padres.”

But this “come from behind win” thing, that’s a completely new and different beast. As a long time Padres fan, it’s a difficult concept to wrap my head around. It’s not that I don’t enjoy seeing victory snatched from the jaws of defeat by way of a scrappy ninth-inning rally; it’s just that such a thing is so totally out of character for the Pads that I feel I can’t trust it. And this business of three or more starters being productive at the plate in the same game? That’s simply too mind-boggling to even contemplate.

The Padres faithful – defined as those for whom the lure of beer and hot dogs on a sunny summer day still trumps the shame of rooting for a team that would likely place third or lower in a corporate softball league – know better than to interpret such anomalous trends as signs of future success. We are not convinced when the Boo-Ya Gang pronounces the Padres “the hottest team in the NL” as a lead-in to the obligatory 15 seconds of SportsCenter coverage. We understand that, sooner or later, the Padres will likely revert to their old ways and limp lamely into September wedged firmly in the middle of the NL West standings.

Which is why, over the last two weeks, whenever somebody has asked me, “What’s gotten into your Padres?” my immediate response has been, “Whatever it is, it won’t last.” And I’ve quickly followed that up with, “I just hope they stay at least half a game back for a few weeks, because as soon as they have sole possession of first place, they’ll plummet and splatter like a seagull turd on a freshly washed BMW.”

For that is another of the proud traditions of the non-Bizarro Padres: playing well enough to climb into first place in the NL West, then falling off the cliff to be dashed on the Rockies below.

In 2001, for example, the tail end of May saw the Padres tied for first with Arizona going into a four game home series versus those selfsame Diamondbacks. San Diego took game one, giving them sole possession of the division lead. They then chased their victory with three ignominious losses, including the game that featured the infamous Ben Davis “chicken shit” bunt to break up Curt Schilling’s perfect game. After one lucky win against Houston, the Pads hurled themselves into the abyss in earnest with a season-high eight-game losing streak from which they never recovered. They ended the season firmly ensconced in fourth place, 13 games back. The Diamondbacks… did something else.

Last year provides another ready example, with the Padres again leading the West early, then gradually settling into the more familiar climes of third place. And if their decline into mediocrity was perhaps less dramatic, the fact that the hated Dodgers ended their season in first made it sting that much more.

For the Pads know, in their heart of hearts, that they are a losing team. Even when they’re at the top of their game, the awareness of their true place in the baseball hierarchy is there, seething, just below the surface. It rankles in their guts like a brick of smoky gouda in a lactose intolerant lower bowel. And when the team, through whatever outlandish twist of fickle fate, finds itself in first place, the subconscious understanding that they simply do not belong there overtakes them.

Unwittingly, they find new and creative ways to lose ballgames and restore the balance of the universe. Perhaps one of their starting pitchers will commit inadvertent hari-kari with a box cutter while attempting to open a DVD; another will nearly slice his hand off at the wrist drunkenly stumbling over a barstool. Perhaps their normally level-headed second baseman – also, coincidentally, the single consistent performer on the roster – will snap his thumb clean off while executing an ill-advised head-first slide into first. Perhaps the entire infield will spontaneously burst into flames midway through an easy double play attempt. The particulars don’t matter; suffice it to say, the descent will be pronounced, embarrassing, and unavoidable.

And, indeed, the descent has already begun. Immediately after sweeping the Marlins and the Braves, the Padres were presented with that worst of all possible situations: a day off. Apparently they used this day as I’d feared they would – to begin to panic about their place in the division – because they then proceeded to lose two out of three to the lowly Mariners, the last a complete-game shutout by Aaron “Six-Innings-And-Out” Sele.

So forgive me if I’m less than excited at the prospect of heading into Phoenix to take on the division-leading Diamondbacks today (after another day off, God help us.) But you see, I’ve heard this joke before, and the punch line isn’t worth the lead-up.

Then again, when the choice is between a division title and a jagged rip in the fabric of the space-time continuum, it’s hard to be too disappointed.

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