Down with the ship

The San Diego Padres 2021 season has spun out of control and is unofficially lost. The manager needs to go, and the guy that hired him needs to look in the mirror.

Hi. I haven’t written anything here in a while, and I should probably explain why before I get started writing again as if nothing happened.

First, life has gotten a bit busier. Bandwagon Beach started as an unemployment project and I’m not longer unemployed. Second, and this one is probably playing a large role, I have grown tired of this Padres team.

After months of thinking this team was a sleeping giant, it became painfully obvious that they are actually a paper tiger. It was obvious when I last wrote, about a month ago, and the signs get brighter and more neon with each passing game.

We’ll have plenty of time over the offseason to talk about the who/what/why/how of it all, not to mention the ideas of what to do next to fix it all, but I wanted to start things more simple than that for my first post back.

Jayce rightfully takes (most of) the blame

Here’s the thing about capitalism…

You want to believe that the high-paying jobs out there pay significantly more than your own job because they can only be done by a very small subset of very-skilled, almost preordained, people.

Sure, you can tell your friends that you would do a better job of coaching the team than whoever actually is, but doesn’t it make you feel better to know that’s not true? That you can’t just take Joe Schmoe off the street, put him in the job, and expect that he’ll figure it out before the wheels fall off? I know it makes me feel better.

That’s about as far as I can get with silver linings.

Jayce Tingler is not qualified to be the manager of an MLB team. He never was. It’s not his fault. If my good friend Jed Hoyer (a joke!) called me up and asked if I wanted to manage the Chicago Cubs next year, telling me that it’s not that hard like Brad Pitt pretending he’s Billy Beane and trying to get Scott Hatteberg to sign with the A’s, I would 100% accept that job. And by the end of my first full season, it would be a disaster.

It would be a disaster but not because of my lineups and bullpen management. Those would be pristine. It would be a disaster because the players wouldn’t respect me. I wouldn’t be able to lead the team and the clubhouse. I wouldn’t be able to solve for tense situations, because most of those situations will have arisen as a result of me not being able to lead the team and the clubhouse.

It would be a fun experiment, and a profitable one for my family, but the chances of it working are zero. I’m not positive I knew that before, but I know that now. And, as a result, I don’t blame Jayce Tingler for being the anchor that unwittingly dropped itself to the bottom of the ocean and slammed the brakes on a speedboat.

“I’m not even supposed to be here today.”

Jayce Tingler is going to be fired. The fact that I can say that, and it hasn’t happened yet, is borderline criminal. The San Diego Padres need to stop messing around and just move on already. But…

To insist that the Padres do the same thing as a smart, professional baseball operation is to know understand the landscape. Let me make this as succinct as possible:

There are three levels to “baseball operations”, unofficially.

• The front office (management), which consists of the GM and Assistant GM and head of player development and people of that ilk. A.J. Preller is the head of baseball operations, so he’s the boss here.

• The coaching staff, who are all responsible for smaller portions of the bigger picture and who all answer to the manager, a position currently held by Jayce Tingler.

• The players, who have a daily (middle) manager in Tingler but are hired and fired by the GM.

As you can probably make out, getting the GM and manager and players right is the ultimate key to success. Other members of the front office or the coaching staff don’t have nearly as much influence.

And the Padres let their GM hire his unqualified friend to be the manager of their team. The one that all of the coaches and players have to answer to. This is not a thing that normal, decent sports organizations do. This is a thing that laughing stock franchises do, and it’s part of the reason they can never catch up to the teams they are chasing.

Instead of paying market rate, a strategy that the team had recently decided was the only way to get actual good players onto the roster after decades of throwing other shit against the wall, the Padres once again thought they could outsmart the system. They thought they were better than capitalism. They thought that letting Preller hire his friend instead of an actual manager was the thing that was going to make all of the finances less painful.

And now the players don’t have a daily manager they trust or respect, and the coaches probably don’t either. Maybe next time they shouldn’t cheap out on one of the two most important positions within baseball ops?

Oh, and fire the guy who has his head in the guillotine. Be a real organization. For once.

The nuclear option

If it’s not obvious, I point the blame for the soured 2021 Padres season squarely on the shoulders of A.J. Preller.

The symptom was Jayce Tingler but Jayce didn’t force himself into a role where he was guaranteed to fail. He just accepted the job and any one of us would’ve done the same in his position.

So, the question has to be asked….should A.J. Preller be fired as well? Will he be? The answer to both is ‘maybe’, and teetering towards ‘probably’ at an alarming rate.

The Padres now have something that they haven’t had in decades: Multiple superstar players in the prime of their careers. That’s not the type of thing you want to play around or hit reboot on. The next Padres move needs to be one that gets them back on track to immediate contention. The options available to the team to do that will need to be factored in before they make a decision on whether or not to give Preller some more time/rope.

At the end of the day, A.J. Preller is the captain of this ship. Right now it’s taking on water. If it goes down, he goes down with it. But we’re not there yet. There is still plenty to build on in San Diego and plenty to reason to think that the team is a strong manager away from being the team we thought they could be this year.