Padres sweep Giants, special season continues

It's been a few days since we've talked about how magical the 2022 Padres season feels. Let's do it again.

The San Diego Padres are something special this year. It could be from dumb luck, or a result of the new culture established by the new manager and coaching staff, or it could simply be that the team was right when they invested all that money into Manny Machado years ago, or maybe they were right to make all those trades for starting pitchers before last season.

It seems like every move they are making is the right one, and some of the things that are happening are making some old mistakes look like wins now.

The Padres have enough offense, on the back of an absolutely unbelievable start to the season for Manny Machado, and enough defense and pitching. They also have plenty of heart and, most importantly, they believe in it.

Somehow, while the whole world was saying that the Padres needed to stay afloat until Tatis could return (still a month or more away), this team believed that they could be challenging the Dodgers for 1st in the division with nobody else around.

The Padres are now 17-7 on the road, which seems impossible, and 27-14 overall. One quarter of the way through the regular season, there are exactly two teams with a better overall winning percentage (the Yankees and Dodgers). They have a candidates for MVP, CY Young and Rookie of the Year awards on their roster, not to mention the potential candidacy for Manager of the Year and Executive of the Year awards.

To put it in the same terms that I’ve been using, the Padres have the magic that we always saw other teams have and wondered “Why can’t that be us?” The answer, which is the one that previous Padres ownership and front offices were afraid of, is that you can only find that magic when you spend a lot of money to hire experienced baseball guys and then let them be in charge.

It’s easy to get excited when the team signs a superstar like Manny Machado, or finds one in Fernando Tatis Jr., or drafts one in MacKenzie Gore, but maybe the best move the Padres have made in decades was giving Bob Melvin the keys to the castle and trusting him to get the most of out of his team.