Some Day Our Prince Will Come. In the Meantime…

Be patient, Padres fan. Someday our prince will come. That magical kiss of competitive payrolls will smack us on the lips and wake us from our nightmares. That glass slipper of front office consistency will slip gently onto our tired, overburdened feet. Hopefully this time when we kiss the frog of ownership change, it doesn’t turn out to be a poorly dressed dude with a weird beard who leaves behind his cronies in major front office positions after the other owners decide they don’t like the way he ribbits. Or something. I don’t have kids, so I haven’t seen a Disney princess movie in a long ass time (at least 3 weeks). The point is, someday our prince (or princess, you never know) will come and save us from this ownership debacle. Hopefully soon. Hopefully he has no relationship with Barry Bloom.

In the meantime, it sucks to be a Padres fan. Lowest payroll in the league. Off to a slow start with very few bright spots. We’ve got a young team with a lot of potential, but very little of it likely to be realized this season. We’ve got a new amazing TV contract, but still more than half the county can’t watch the games on TV as huge corporations bicker over relatively small fees, and the big TV money has yet to be reinvested into the product on the field.

Those things will likely work themselves out in time (except that the Padres may never be on Time Warner. Get used to that.). Most worrisome are these two facts:  1) we’ve got an Interim CEO who is more concerned with breakfast than baseball, more interested in marketing than Moneyball, and 2) we’ve got a lame duck GM who isn’t afraid to make big trades, but who almost certainly won’t be around to have to deal with the long-term consequences of them (though he’ll still be getting paid for years to come).

Padres Interim CEO (chances of dropping the Interim while keeping the CEO: not dissimilar to the chances Mark Kotsay makes the 2012 All-Star game) Tom Garfinkel seems set on moving in the fences, permanently altering the ballpark that even our detractors *cough*ColeHamels*cough* call unbelievable (in a good way). He talks of ongoing studies and no immediate plans, but he also notes that they could have plans submitted to MLB before the end of the year. Whether or not you think the fences should move, isn’t this something that should be decided by whoever buys the team in the next 12-18 months? Why should Jeff Moorad’s former car fetcher get to make these kinds of franchise-altering decisions? Shouldn’t someone (anyone!) step in and tell him to cool it on the legacy building?

Jeff Moorad’s handpicked General Manager decided that Mat Latos wasn’t worthy of a contract extension, trading him 3 years before he would become a free agent. Jeff Moorad’s handpicked General Manager Josh Byrnes then chose the first baseman he received for Latos, Yonder Alonso, over the younger, higher ceilinged Anthony Rizzo. You can debate the merits of these trades. You can’t debate this: Jeff Moorad is now (basically) gone yet his handpicked GM remains, unafraid to continue making decisions that will affect the Padres roster for the next decade. Shouldn’t someone tell him to chill out? Take away his cell phone? I know we can’t just put the team in a holding pattern while the ownership is in one, but should we really just trust a lame duck GM to build the roster in his vision?

These are my concerns. I’m not afraid of change. I can’t wait for our prince to come and shape this franchise, his new kingdom, in his vision. But what kind of kingdom will our prince inherit? Shouldn’t he get to decide where the castle walls should be? Shouldn’t he decide which generals to keep and which ones to lock in the tower? These are my concerns. I love the Padres. It’s not always easy. It’s especially hard right now. I have hope and patience. Let’s not let Jeff Moorad’s guys ruin a mediocre thing.