The Padres At The All-Star Break

By: Steve Atkinson

The Padres are finishing a series with the Mets this weekend then it’s the All-Star break. Nobody thought in April they would be 43-47 and fourth place in the NL West. Nobody predicted the Padres would be 5.5 games back in the final wild-card spot. It’s been a disappointing first half of the season to say the least for this team after all the money they spent. You would think after making the NLCS last season they would be off to a great start. But nope it’s almost like those four guys that made that dumb song during last year’s NLCS cursed them.

It doesn’t fall on A.J Preller it falls on the borefest of a manager Bob Melvin and I’ve been saying it for months. The guy has zero vibe with his players and can’t get them going on a consistent basis. At one point they were winning and losing every other game. They had their first sweep of the season just the other day against the Angels. It took to almost the All-Star break to sweep a series. That is unacceptable with this type of team. The Padres needed some life with a big series against the Mets this weekend which they won the series. Now they must rest up to turn the page into the second half starting with the Phillies next weekend.

Padres Have A Big Month Coming Up

Padres have Darvish pitching on Friday, Blake Snell who has been on fire recently pitching game one on Saturday of the doubleheader, It’s not known who’s pitching for the Padres yet in the second game of the doubleheader. Seth Lugo pitches on Sunday.

The Padres really need to kick off the second half of the season with a bang. Like get above .500 please. By the trade deadline they really should be games over .500 not under. After the Phillies they travel to Toronto and Detroit before coming back home to play Pittsburgh and the Rangers which leads them to a series with the Rockies on July 31st.

No doubt the Padres should be a lot better than what they are. It falls on the manager for not having them prepared. That stupid pinata after the win over the Giants in the Mexico series didn’t last long. The Giants are better than the Padres at the moment. The next two and half months the Padres need to be balls to the wall if they want a chance at a sniff of a postseason berth. They really can’t afford any more losing streaks.

Preller appeared on the Ben and Woods show and talked about how better days are ahead for this team.

“I believe in this group, I believe in this team … We have the ability to play good baseball, I think we’re all frustrated when we don’t do that … Expect things to change going forward, expect us to get in a position here where we get into the race and eventually play in October, that’s the goal here,” Preller said. “I’m responsible for the product, the team and what we see. And I think we all feel it,” Preller said. “We’re frustrated because we think we have a team that was one step away from the World Series last year and, from our standpoint, we expected to build on that this year and it hasn’t happened for us so far in the first half.”

He also spoke on the trade deadline and how the month of July will tell us alot of the direction moving forward.

Obviously the next month will tell us a lot,” Preller said. “From our standpoint the attention right now is to continue to look at this team playing in October, continue looking at ways to improve the roster.”

So far it isn’t bad starting with a series sweep and then taking two out of three against the Mets. The real test begins next weekend.

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