Tuesday (19 Feb) - The 2013 Season Play Along

Tuesday (19 Feb) - The 2013 Season Play Along

The 2013 Major League Baseball Season is almost upon us. The San Diego Padres did not have a particularly good season in 2012 (76-86), but we fans will  ignore that. Everything always looks so much better during Spring Training. The team played very well in the last month of the season, so all hopes are based on that one month of success.

There are some positives. Chase Headley had a career year in 2012, finishing fourth in the MVP awards and winning both the Gold Glove and Silver Batter awards for third basemen.  Being arbitration eligible, he signed a one year deal for something over $8M. We'll love him while he's here, which may not be beyond the end of this coming season.

The Padres moved the fences in for this season, hoping that the shorter porch in rightfield and bringing in distant fences in left and right center will favor guys like Headley, Cameron Maybin, and Carlos Quentin.

We also have a monster hitting AAA minor league third baseman, Jedd Gyorko,  trying to learn secondbase so we can take advantage of his bat. They want him to make the Bigs right now. His stats for 2012 AAA: 92 games, 24 HRs, .325 BA, .377 OBP.

Then there is Yasmani Grandal, who hit .297 with 8 HRs in 192 ABs at the tail end of the 2012 season as well as impressing the team with his fielding behind the plate. He was all but anointed as the starting catcher for 2013 - until he popped positive on a drug test and is serving a 50 game suspension.

I don't want to talk about pitching, which until last season had been the one major positive. The pitching crashed and burned in 2012. In 2013 the Padres brought 57 pitchers to Spring Training. Our two best pitchers are still recovering from injuries and won't start the season. What's left looks absolutely delicious - to opposing hitters. All winter we were told that the team must find a front line starting pitcher. The closest they got was 36 year old has been Freddie Garcia, who is a non-roster invitee. He hasn't had a season with an ERA under 4.00 since 2005. He gave up 18 HRs in barely a 100 IPs in 2012. I bet he wishes we hadn't moved those fences in.

I dream of a productive lineup with Headley, Quentin, and Maybin filling the 3-4-5 spots. If I suspend reality a little further, I can imagine the "never lived up to his potential" Evereth Cabrera as our sterling shortstop and base stealer based on a few weeks when he actually looked pretty good. He did lead the National League in steals with 44, so I'll cut him a break.

The rest of the lineup looks very suspiciously like last season's lineup. That's because it is. The team was sold last year to a group headed by the O'Mally's, of former Dodger ownership fame. They were quiet as mouses over the winter, and declared they liked the last month of the season so much they were happy to bring back the same crew.

Randy Hundley will start at catcher, because of Grandal's suspension, and because Hundley was given a big contract last season. He promptly forgot how to hit, spending most of the season in the minors or the disabled list.

Maybin will try again to live up to his impressive talents despite five years of mostly mediocrity with the Padres. He has a nice contract, too. The guy has the physical talent to be a 40-40 man, but so far his only real value is that he plays centerfield pretty well.

Chris Denorfia and Will Venable will once again platoon in the outfield. They are okay, but the early promise they showed back in 2005 has settled into journeyman status.

A youngster who played well in 2012 was Yonder Alonso. Alonso won the firstbase job in his second year with the Padres and played 155 games. His hit .273 with just 9 HRs, but he also ripped 39 doubles. He bats left-handed, and could show more power in 2013.

Another youngster with "hope" tatooed on him is Jesus Guzman. He hit .312 in 2011 (76 games) but unraveled in 2012 (120 games, .247). He hits the ball hard, but the question is whether he can get the bat on the ball.

I'm going to try something new this year. In addition to following the real season of the Padres, I'm going to be playing along with Strat-o-Matic as well. SOM is a baseball simulation game that I have played for a very long time. My intent is to use the actual lineups and starting pitching of the Padres and their opponent's for each game of the season, and play the two teams the day after each real game is played. I will be using the player stats for 2012, obviously. I will also make some exceptions to that rule if circumstances warrant. For example, I might have to go to an earlier year to find an appropriate player card for a pitcher who was injured most of the 2012 season but who is back and in the rotation for 2013. I will, of course, be reporting the results of each real game and it's SOM twin.

I think it will be fun! Oh, and we will be in Peoria, AZ, on 16 March for a spring training game against the Diamondbacks.