Escaping your own gravity
The Astros did it, and now everyone hates them. Be careful what you wish for!
Public perception of the Giants used to be different, you know.
Sure, today people think of the three recent World Series wins, but it used to be that the Giants were a franchise, for lack of a better term, aging with dignity. No, they never actually won anything anymore, but they used to, and oh boy, the stars they’ve had! Christy Mathewson! Mel Ott! Willie Mays! Willie McCovey! Juan Marichal! Will Clark! Barry Bonds!
(This period of time encompasses when I was young, so for this exercise, please think of Barry Bonds as current)
And besides, the thinking used to be, they could still sometimes put up a good showing, make the playoffs, maybe even win a series or two. Sure, they always fell short, but there’s no harm in that. Not everyone can be the Yankees or Cardinals. Some teams just aren’t meant to win. They’re the respectable opponent who loses the game, but wins a moral victory or some crap that people pretend to care about.
They’re not necessarily winners, but they were at one point, and there’s still some cachet there. They’re an old team, past their prime, not doing so hot at the moment but still possibly able to put together one last run. They recently had some sparkling moments in the regular season, but fell short in the postseason. They’re run by someone who made some brilliant moves early in his tenure but, as time has gone on, has made more missteps than he did when he brought the team back to relevance. They’re generally respected, but at the same time, they’re not what they were.
Hey, wait a minute! That’s now! I’m talking about now! I thought I was writing about the past but it turns out I wasn’t! Totally unfair!
After a bit of a lull where they broke through the stratosphere, reached orbit, and got to the moon (this is somehow a metaphor for winning 3 World Series and if you ask me to elaborate I will politely decline), the Giants are back where they were 15 years ago. They are living off the aging stars of the past, signing veterans to extend a window of contention that probably closed last year, and generally selling nostalgia to their fans more than they’re selling good baseball.
There’s a level at which this is just who they are. Their ownership group wants marketable, popular stars, and so the Brandons stuck around. It was a defensible move after the seasons they had last year, just like it was in the mid-2000s (Do you remember JT Snow’s 2004? Of course you bring him back in 2005), but it hasn’t worked out the way the team had hoped.
It’s uncanny, though. The franchise is making the same gambles it did 15 years ago and ending up in a very similar spot. It’s like no matter what they do, what kind of brilliant baseball minds they bring it, they just can’t escape being themselves.
Which brings us to the San Diego Padres.
The Padres have spent most of their existence being afterthoughts. They have been the team that got hype, but everyone knew wasn’t quite as good as the Dodgers. They have been the team that was perpetually 2-3 years away from being a powerhouse. They have been the team that had boatloads of great prospects, and then a few years later none of them would have really panned out but they had another boatload of great prospects, and THESE were sure to be the ones that propelled the team into perpetual relevance.
They never were. Some of them — Jake Peavy or Adrian Gonzalez, for example — did turn into great players for several years. But the team never had enough around them, never made it click long term, never got fully over that hump. The Padres have won exactly four playoff series in their history. Only one has come this century, and that was a 3-game series in 2020 that only kind of counts.
The Padres never arrived then, never took the next step. They’re the kind of franchise that doesn’t do that sort of thing. It’s not in their character. Never has been.
So it was time to take a dramatic step to change that character.
There was an episode of Lost, when that show was into its yes-this-is-pure-science-fiction years, where a character was explaining his theory of time travel. He said that generally, when you try to change the past, it’s like dropping a pebble in a stream. It doens’t do anything, and is totally irrelevant to the water’s flow. But if you really make a big dent, like drop an enormous boulder in, then the past will have to change because there’s no avoiding the fact that that was never supposed to happen.
Juan Soto is the Padres’ enormous boulder.
Soto is as close as a 23-year-old can be to being a Hall of Famer. That’s still not that close — he’s got years and years of Juan Soto-like production to maintain to get there — but he’s done everything he possibly can to be on that path. Acquiring a player like that changes things. It has to change things. The water will have to divert if Juan Soto is sitting in the middle of it, taking walks and hitting dingers.
Unless another boulder, perhaps a Fernando Tatis Jr-shaped one, suddenly vanishes.
Tatis’s PED suspension maintained balance in the universe. He is a living example of the universe declaring, “No, the Padres are this, not that.” Just at the moment when his team’s window was open to change their perception and their trajectory, Tatis slammed it closed. The timing was impeccable. Just before he came off the IL to make his season debut, Tatis was suddenly out for 80 games. Just like that, the stream resumes its normal course. All is in equilibrium.
In the show, that character was wrong, by the way. His time travel theory didn’t work. Sorry, Padres!
It is remarkable how teams find a way to be themselves so thoroughly and utterly that it appears there was never a way anything else would happen. The Giants did it by choice. The Padres did it despite their best efforts. Either way, neither team could escape its own orbit.
It would almost be comforting, if it didn’t mean that the Dodgers, on Planet Fuck You Money And Everyone Wants To Play Here, didn’t get a new superstar every year. I can’t say I care for that part.