It also didn’t help to lose the O-Dog, one of teams true veterans who’s hitting style is actually suited to the park, when they did either.

In listening to Padres commentator Randy Jones, there also seems to be a real lack of team chemistry this year. After all, the Padres turned over something like 50% of their roster from last years team and sometimes the incoming new chemistry meshes, sometimes it doesn’t.

Bud Black isn’t known for being like Ozzie Guillen and jumping down guys butts when they start feeling sorry for themselves, and i wonder if that’s been a contributing factor to the teams poor start as well. As we all know even in our own lives, different people respond differently to any given management style. Some need coddling, but others need a good swift kick in the ass at times (and I just haven’t seen that side of Black).

Personally? I just don’t like watching games at Petco; the park just feels very “sterile” to me. The first thing that needs to be done is those God-awful ugly bare concrete elevator shafts on the first and third base lines need a good coat of paint! Sounds trivial, but it helps to give the ballpark a prison like feel to it, as do the growing number of purplish-blue empty seats. JOMO.

First of all, you don’t want to rush a bunch of kids and then risk either blowing their confidence or more importantly, get their service time clock ticking to where you’ll be right back in the same leaky boat a few years down the line (with some of your emerging stars needing to be dealt in order to keep the payroll manageable).

Moorad’s plan I think is fundamentally sound. He’s completely reorganized and redirected the Padres scouting department to focus and focus hard on evaluating young talent with respect to their abilities geared towards the home park. That means focusing on speed and punch and judy contact spray hitters.

Small ball may not be what many of the fans want, but as long as the Pads have to play 81 games or more a year in a home ballpark that’s just behind Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon on the list of the largest parks in the west, that’s how they best can succeed. Pitching doesn’t so much matter because as soon as pitchers get into a Padre uniform, their ERA’s all suddenly drop because many of their mistakes turn into routine fly ball outs.

If the Padres were to call up Rizzo now and he sticks, he’d become a dreaded “super 2″ arbitration eligible player. That would cost the Padres an awful lot of money by the time his third year of arbitration eligibility rolls around.

Oh yeah, and he reportedly plays a great first base. So just throw that on the pile.

It’s a pretty bad rule.