What Are The Padres Trying To Tell Us, With Justin Halpern

It will not be remotely the worst thing about what has been a reasonably miserable waste of a season, however the Recent York Mets haven’t been bad in an especially interesting way. They’ve done what I assume you’d should call Some Mets Stuff—losing to the Royals on a walk-off balk driven by a PitchCom cock-up, things of that nature—but mostly they’ve just been bad because their most significant players were either (uh) badly injured during a postgame celebration within the World Baseball Classic or simply type of bad in ways in which the team categorically had no idea the best way to fix. A few of that’s Some Mets Stuff, but most of it’s just normal bad-team things. After which, in a surprisingly normal turn, they realized that they were bad and traded away everyone they may in what looks like a strikingly successful try to restock a terrible minor league system. It is not what you wish, but it surely’s not likely anything latest aside from the parts where the Mets behaved within the ways in which other baseball organizations behave.

The San Diego Padres, alternatively, are different. They’ve also been roughly as bad because the Mets, but they’re bad in ways which can be different not only from the Mets, but mainly every other team in MLB history. And so we had returning champion and San Diego Padres lifer Justin Halpern on to discuss that.

Provided that Justin can also be the chief producer of the very different but similarly beloved Harley Quinn and Abbott Elementary, and on the board of the Writers Guild Of America, West, we also talked concerning the union’s ongoing strike and the ornate and dispiriting pattern of fuckery that has come to define the studios’ approach to those negotiations. But as fraught and ominous and vital as that’s—and, my very own politics aside, I tend towards the opinion that corporate bosses attempting to empty the culture’s strategic dream reserve on pure principle is pretty vital—there have been also the Padres to discuss. And so, after about ten minutes of labor talk, we got to what matters—the query of whether Ji Man Choi is even still on the Padres. (Yes, but he’s hurt.)

We would discussed this as a kind of Pathetic Off between a Padres fan and a Mets fan, but I quickly realized that I used to be outclassed. Not simply because Justin brought some truly astonishing stats with him—I don’t desire to present an excessive amount of away, but the whole lot that seems like it’s true a few bad baseball team has quite literally been true concerning the Padres this 12 months—but since the Mets never discovered the best way to be pathetic in a really interesting way. They simply went from a team with a bunch of future Hall of Famers on it to 1 with a bunch of waiver-claim dudes coming out of the bullpen to walk the bases full, a gaggle so bereft and so obviously looking forward to next 12 months that only the presence of ovoid minor league free agent signing DJ Stewart within the lineup has come near sparking joy.

Now does that make them more pathetic than the Padres, one way or the other, in some double-bank meta sense? I do not know, perhaps it does. But I never quite made the argument on this episode, and while I did my best to put out the extent to which the Mets have been bad and proceed to be an expensive but not terribly convincing simulation of a Major League Baseball team, it was clear that I used to be outgunned. Not simply because Justin got here able to make his case to absolutely the max, which he absolutely was and absolutely did, but since the Padres really are performing some latest, different, awful stuff. They’re nine games below .500 with a +60 run differential; they’ve not won an extra-inning game all 12 months, in 12 tries. The ways by which they’re just like the Mets—low cost around the sides, wedded haplessly to an outmoded and clearly ineffective organizational philosophy—pale as compared to the ways by which they’re different from every other team in baseball, and nearly every other team in history. Their abjectness has a faint whiff of Tungsten Arm O’Doyle about it. It’s astonishing, and if I got drubbed within the Pathetic Off—one other checked out loss for the Mets, I assume—I very much enjoyed listening to Justin break it down.

I should say that while most of this podcast was about Those Amazing Padres and the less Amazin’ Mets, it was not entirely that. The conversation expanded to incorporate the relative but distinctly pathetic Angels, the broader vagaries of baseball economics, and, inevitably, the one Simpsons gag that I even have returned to probably the most often when permitted to speak concerning the Mets at length. I used to be a bit of unfair to Jake Cronenworth, and Justin was very rude to him. It was what you may call an old-fashioned cryer’s duel. There’s a whole lot of football in our future, and likewise a small but worthwhile amount of significantly better baseball than the Mets or Padres are going to play. We’ll get there after we get there. This time, this week, it was a pleasure to wallow.

We’re going to be doing a live Distraction at Littlefield, in Brooklyn, on October 4; for those who would love to get tickets for that, you may accomplish that here. And for those who would love to subscribe to The Distraction, you may do this through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you may get your podcasts. Be happy to debate this week’s episode within the comments below. Thanks as at all times to your support.