2010 Padres will eventually be remembered for unexpected success

Trust me, there isn’t a single player, coach or high-ranking executive of the San Diego Padres feeling good today about the surprising 90-win season in 2010.

The day after the season ended with the Padres looking up at the San Francisco Giants in the National League West and at the Atlanta Braves in the NL wild-card race will be a day filled with sadness and frustration. That is how it works with elite athletes and competitive professionals – as well it should.

Players will think about a clutch situation in which they failed to come through (like Miguel Tejada in the seventh inning on Sunday) or recall poor location on a pitch (how could Jonathan Sanchez ever triple against Mat Latos?) or getting swept by a bad team (Arizona’s three-game sweep during the Padres’ late-season 10-game losing skid was a killer).

They’ll think about 100 other things. Some big, some small. Some that occurred in the ninth inning, others that transpired in the early innings.

All-Star first baseman Adrian Gonzalez hit 31 homers and 101 RBIs but will be thinking about some of the times he didn’t come through in the clutch. All-Star closer Heath Bell converted his last 34 save opportunities but he’ll think about his only loss of the season – coming against the Chicago Cubs on Sept. 30.

In fact, every member of the Padres will think about the Cubs – a lot – as San Diego scored just five runs while losing three of four to Chicago in the final week of the season.

Manager Bud Black will think about some moves that didn’t work – temporarily forgetting that he pushed the right buttons with an offensively challenged team more often than not. I’m thinking Dusty Baker of the Cincinnati Reds will probably win NL Manager of the Year honors but Black surely did just as good a job as Baker.

Gritty second baseman David Eckstein will think about the error … um, check that, the pesky Eckstein didn’t commit a single error all season. Not one bobbled grounder or bad throw for the converted shortstop. That’s amazing.

Same goes for everybody on the roster and coaching staff. They’ll beat themselves up a lot this week and will struggle to turn on the television in October with the baseball postseason being a constant reminder about how they came up short.

Everyone in the organization will reminisce about having a 6 1/2-game lead with five weeks to play and coming up empty in terms of the postseason.

But when the calendar turns to November and spring training emerges on the horizon, the Padres will eventually be able to take pride in what they accomplished. They were supposed to be like the Pittsburgh Pirates and Kansas City Royals – teams just playing a schedule with no chance of being competitive. They were supposed to unload Gonzalez and Bell for young, cheap players even though they already had one of the lowest payrolls in baseball.

What they weren’t supposed to do was being in position to compete for a playoff spot on the final game of the season.

General manager Jed Hoyer needs to spruce up the offense this offseason if the Padres want to be back in contention in 2011. There was a lot to like about the effort and competitiveness of the 2010 Padres but it will be hard for this team to be part of next year’s postseason without some upgrades. Gonzalez needs some help and the Padres need to keep the hometown star in town despite him being eligible for free agency after the 2011 season.

But here is what will eventually sink in: This collection of players picked to be among the worst teams in the majors just produced the fourth-best record (90-72) in the franchise’s 42-year history.

Yeah, it doesn’t feel good on October 4 – nor should it – but it will someday be recalled as one of the more remarkable seasons in San Diego Padres history.

Padres leave San Francisco facing a Giant predicament

So we know now that Jonathan Sanchez won’t be an oddsmaker after his mediocre pitching career ends. That weekend sweep the San Francisco Giants pitcher predicted for his team didn’t come close to happening.

We also know the San Diego Padres took a major step toward winning the National League West title by winning two of three games against the Giants – a fact that leaves San Francisco in a Giant predicament.

Falling another game behind the Padres – San Diego leads the West by 3 1/2 games – immediately before a tough nine-game stretch in which you are playing three of the NL’s top teams isn’t the preferred method to winning a division title.

Particularly when San Diego is starting a 10-game sequence against three also-rans – the Chicago Cubs, Milwaukee Brewers and Arizona Diamondbacks.

San Francisco has three games each against the Philadelphia Phillies (.564 winning percentage), St. Louis Cardinals (.560) and Cincinnati Reds (.568) at the time when the Padres should be beating up on three below .500 squads.

By the time the stretch concludes, San Francisco might be five or six games behind the Padres as September approaches. It will be quite an accomplishment if the Giants don’t lose further ground to San Diego, the upstart squad with the NL’s best record.

The Padres annihilated two-time Cy Young Award winner Tim Lincecum in Sunday’s finale, with the 8-2 drubbing serving notice that even the San Francisco ace who has dominated them in the past can’t halt their season-long dominance of the Giants.

That was Lincecum’s first start against the Padres this season and San Diego easily improved to 9-2 against San Francisco.

Of course, the tone for the series was set Friday night when Mr. Big Mouth (that’s Sanchez) didn’t come through in the opening game, won 3-2 by the Padres.

San Diego could have won the Saturday afternoon matinee if its clutch hitting hadn’t been horrid. The Padres lost 3-2 in 11 innings and stranded nine runners over the final four innings. Buster Posey’s base-running hustle in the 11th helped give the Giants the much-deserved 3-2 victory.

Padres manager Bud Black might have given ace Mat Latos too quick a hook on Saturday. Latos tied a career-high with nine strikeouts in six innings but was pulled after allowing Pablo Sandoval’s leadoff homer in the seventh.

You can just imagine the relief the Giants felt to see Latos exit since this was the fourth time this season the 22-year-old dominated San Francisco hitters.

The Padres bounced back well from the defeat with its crushing knockout of Lincecum. San Diego tallied four times in the second with recent acquisition Miguel Tejada driving in two of the runs and the light-hitting duo of Tony Gwynn Jr. and Everth Cabrera driving in the other two.

The two teams still meet seven more times this season and that can’t feel too good for the Giants based on their struggles with the Padres this season.

Perhaps Jonathan Sanchez can fill us in again on the odds of the Giants overtaking San Diego.

On second thought, probably not.

Giants’ Sanchez looks silly by disrespecting Padres

Mid-August has arrived with the San Diego Padres possessing the best record in the National League and having led the NL West for nearly the entire season.

That season-long success, though, hasn’t led to the type of respect that normally is attached to first-place teams at this juncture of the baseball season.

The Padres (67-46) begin a key series against the second-place San Francisco Giants on Friday night at fabulous AT&T Park in San Francisco. San Diego has a 2 1/2-game lead over the Giants but that didn’t stop San Francisco starting pitcher Jonathan Sanchez from disrespecting the Padres in the days leading up to the series.

Sanchez predicted that the Giants (66-50) will sweep the three-game series and won’t look back once they pass the Padres and move into first place.

That’s a pretty silly thing to do right before a big series. Even dumber to diss a team that has already beaten your squad seven of eight times this season.

Sanchez apparently has forgotten that he has won just once in his last six starts to go with a mediocre 29-37 career mark. Nice way to put extra pressure on yourself when you are the starting pitcher in the opening game of a key series.

The left-hander has pitched well against the Padres this season despite having a 0-2 mark in three starts. Twice, he was outdueled by San Diego ace Mat Latos, one of the top pitchers in baseball.

The Padres won both those games by 1-0 scores. In the second matchup in San Francisco, the only thing that prevented Latos from throwing a perfect game was an infield single by Eli Whiteside.

So perhaps Sanchez, who no-hit the Padres last season, just got overly giddy when he realized Latos was pitching Saturday afternoon and not Friday night.

Then again, lefty Clayton Richard starts for the Padres on Friday and he is 2-0 with a 1.77 earned-run average in three starts against the Giants this season.

Regardless, San Francisco manager Bruce Bochy and some of the team’s veterans were upset over the comments and the immaturity shown by Sanchez.

One thing to note about the Padres’ dominance of the Giants this season is that the two teams haven’t met since May. That was before San Francisco promoted catcher Buster Posey and signed outfielder Pat Burrell off the scrap heap.

The Giants’ offense was pathetic early in the season and is much improved now with Posey (.331) and Burrell (10 homers in 53 games) in the lineup. And Aubrey Huff is quietly having a solid season with a .300 average, 20 homers and 67 RBIs.

San Francisco acquired Jose Guillen on Friday but that move could go either way. The hot-headed outfielder just given up on by the Kansas City Royals is always about five minutes away from becoming a distraction. The Giants are his 10th major-league team in 14 big league seasons.

San Diego recently acquired infielder Miguel Tejada and outfielder Ryan Ludwick to improve its shaky offense. It was good work by Padres general manager Jed Hoyer to acquire two bona fide hitters without giving up a major-league player or a prized prospect.

The acquisition of Ludwick really looks good. He has three homers in his first 11 games with the Padres, showing signs of regaining the form that saw him roll up a combined 59 homers and 210 RBIs the past two seasons with the St. Louis Cardinals.

Getting some support for NL MVP candidate Adrian Gonzalez was a must prior to the stretch drive. Gonzalez is hitting .299 with 22 homers and 73 RBIs.

So it should be an interesting three-game weekend series in San Francisco. The Padres could build a nice cushion with a sweep and further their season-long dominance of the Giants.

And as we know from Sanchez’s vow, the Giants would move into first place if they were to sweep.

Near-perfect Latos gives Padres ace they need

If only the San Diego Padres had both Jake Peavy and Mat Latos in their 2010 rotation. Then you could really truly consider them one of the best teams in the National League.

For now, the Padres have the best record in the NL despite possessing just one of those two dominant starting pitchers. San Diego is sitting at 22-12 after sweeping the San Francisco Giants in a three-game series for the second time this season.

The 22-year-old Latos produced the finest outing of his young career on Thursday by throwing a one-hit shutout in a 1-0 victory over the Giants. He also drove in the game’s only run off fierce lefty Jonathan Sanchez, the pitcher who no-hit the Padres last summer.

The stellar performance prompted reminders of Peavy, the former Padres staff ace traded to the Chicago White Sox last summer. If Latos can keep delivering like this and become the ace San Diego needs, then the Padres are really going to be competing for a playoff spot this season.

Latos faced just 28 batters in his gem on Thursday and the hit barely traveled 80 feet. Eli Whiteside led off the San Francisco sixth with a hard shot back to the mound. The ball caromed off Latos and between short and third and Whiteside narrowly beat Padres third baseman Chase Headley’s throw to first.

Latos (3-3) hasn’t allowed a run in any of his three victories this season. Thursday’s effort was his second standout performance in a row – he tossed eight shutout innings against Houston in his previous start.

He hasn’t walked a batter in 17 innings over his last two starts – that’s amazing for someone who hasn’t even pitched 100 major-league innings yet.

It also was the second time Latos beat Sanchez by a 1-0 score this season, the other coming on April 20 at Petco Park.

Good thing Latos can swing the bat a bit. The rest of the Padres have just three hits against Sanchez in 15 innings this season.

Latos has been billed as a phenom and he looks more than capable of living up to the billing. But get too good too fast and all San Diego fans know what that will mean – he’ll price himself out of town.

Kind of like Peavy, who had no interest in departing the only organization he’d ever known.

But if you can’t have both, it’s nice to have one. Latos is the type of ace that can soon be competing for Cy Young Awards. He’s that good.

Now if the Padres only had some hitters – they have yet to act on my free advice from April 15 to sign Jermaine Dye – to go with the stellar pitching they have received thus far this season.

Then you could make a solid argument that the Padres are the class of the NL West instead of renting the top floor until either the Giants, Colorado Rockies or Los Angeles Dodgers put everything together. (The only noise the Arizona Diamondbacks are going to make will be over the new immigration laws of the state.)

For now, only the American League’s Tampa Bay Rays have a better record than the Padres. Nobody foresaw such a thing occurring prior to the start of the season.

And they now have the stopper they need to make a legitimate run – a guy named Mat Latos.

Revisiting that Padres’ win total prediction

The baseball season has reached the All-Star break and it appears my prediction of how many games the San Diego Padres will win this season is going to be off the mark.

I predicted 72 victories prior to the season and the Padres (sitting at 36-52) are on pace to win just 66 games, six fewer than my oh-so-lofty prediction. (http://www.sdnn.com/sandiego/2009-04-06/sports/mike-sullivan-padres-prognostications)

Oh wow, the written word has a way of coming back to haunt someone. Just cruised through the article and I see I predicted the Padres would finish in fourth place — ahead of the Colorado Rockies.

Yikes! Not good. The Padres trail the Rockies by 11 games and there’s more of a chance that San Diego Chargers coach Norv Turner will develop a personality before he turns 60 than the Padres have of catching the Rockies.

At the All-Star break, the only National League team with a worse record than the Padres is the Washington Nationals, and I’m pretty sure the Chicago Cubs’ short-season Class A team in Boise (struggling at 7-15, the worst record in the Northwest League) would have a shot at splitting a four-game series with the putrid Nationals (26-61).

With ace pitcher Jake Peavy sidelined for another six weeks or so, it’s hard to see any hope for the Padres. Geez, they just were no-hit by San Francisco’s Jonathan Sanchez, who brought a 2-8 record into the game and was only starting because Randy Johnson was injured.

That’s the most-embarrassing moment in Padres’ history since Bud Smith of St. Louis no-hit the Padres in 2001. Smith would win just seven games in his major-league career.

A big part of the Padres’ poor season can be attributed to the team’s poor minor-league development record. The Padres refuse to sign bona fide major-league players as free agents and can’t seem to develop every-day players — a big-time double-whammy that can’t be overcome.

The Padres had the No. 3 overall pick in the recent baseball draft and chose Donavan Tate, an athlete good enough to also receive a football scholarship from North Carolina.

The choice — which could bomb in a big way if Tate opts to go to college — sounded OK to me but I almost fell off the sofa when I read some comments from Padres scouting director Grady Fuson, who was quoted as saying that the worst-case scenario was that Tate would turn out to be like Mike Cameron.

That’s the worst-case scenario? I guess someone needs to read off the list of all the Padres’ first-round busts over the past two decades to Fuson. The last time the Padres took an outfielder in the first round (the easily forgettable Vince Faison in 1999), the player never played above Double-A for the Padres.

If Tate can have a major-league career like Mike Cameron, the Padres should thank all the stars in the galaxy because their drafting track record resembles Donald Sterling’s success as owner of the Los Angeles Clippers.

Cameron is on pace for the eighth 20-homer season of his career this year and ranks 34th among active players with 255 career home runs. He has stolen 20 or more bases eight times and has three Gold Gloves for his stellar defense as a center fielder.

The Padres ought to be wishing that Tate develops into half the player Mike Cameron has been over the past 15 years. Based on their track record of poor scouting and development, there’s more of a chance that Tate will hit like Cameron Crowe, run like Cam Cameron and throw like Cameron Diaz than have a career like Mike Cameron.