Jared W. Smith

I wonder how lonely Trevor Hoffman feels in the 500 Save Club. :) It’s so fitting that he reached the milestone against the Dodgers, too.

Is Hoffman a Hall-of-Famer? For his consistent approach and durability in an age where closers last maybe two to three years, tops, abso-freaking-lutely. Sure, some will say — correctly — that Mariano Rivera is a better big-game closer who has won it all. He, too, is headed to the Hall. But there has to be something said for Hoffman’s consistently high level of performance for 14-some-odd years in San Diego. 500 saves is not easy, especially considering he had lost a whole year to shoulder surgery and then continued to be devastatingly effective despite a significant loss of velocity on his fastball. Hoffman’s legacy is his palmball changeup, absolutely the best in the business.

My congratulations to him and his Padres, currently in first in the NL West, which is shaping up to be quite a horse race. The best pitching will win that division, guaranteed.

Jake Peavy helped get the Padres off to a fine start, shutting down Barry Bonds and out-pitching Barry Zito enroute to a 7-0 shutout of the San Francisco Giants. I don’t think the Padres could have asked for a better start to the season with solid pitching and generating a great deal of offense against a dangerous Barry Zito. History shows, though, that Zito is not at his best on Opening Day, so I’m willing to chalk his performance today up to an aberration. Keeping Barry Bonds in the park is always a beautiful thing, too, especially after the spring he had.

One down, 161 to go…

So I had a giant blog post written on my PC at work…and I kinda forgot about it. My bad. It wasn’t that great, anyway.

I’m drowning in a sea of work, but I’ll use this moment to come up for air to comment on a couple things, real fast:

• Windows Vista is close to RTM, but I have to say, Fedora Core 6‘s desktop composition and display (courtesy of AIGLX and the Compiz window manager) is far more attractive — and much friendlier to older machines — than anything Microsoft could ever offer with Aero. Think Linux is stagnating on the desktop? Think again. I’m not a big fan of Fedora, but I may have to give Core 6 a whirl on my PC soon (in place of Vista RC2 probably) to see how well things are coming along on that side of the fence. It’s been a couple years since I ran a Linux desktop on a regular basis, and it’s high time I gave it a whirl again.
• Bruce Bochy is leaving the Padres, heading up I-5 to the Bay Area to manage the San Francisco Giants. And so the Sandy Alderson era begins in force — I don’t think Kevin Towers is going to be too far behind at this rate. Bochy’s tenure with the team, dating back 24 years including when he was the team’s catcher, is pretty unheard of in this day and age. (I have the San Diego Padres’ 1984 World Series pennant, with his name on it.) He’ll be missed, and at a time when the Padres are starting to win consistently, I have to wonder if a new manager is going to help or hinder progress. Time will tell on that one. The early short list I hear is Bud Black, among others. I personally want Joe Girardi, but he’s going to be a YES broadcaster next year it looks like.
• Props to Brian — the new Lowcountry Blogroll coming out this weekend (currently in beta) is quite, quite sweet.

That’s it for now. I had a thousand other items at my other desk that I won’t see again until about 1pm tomorrow, so those will get posted whenever I get a free second. Gonna probably hop in the shower now, hit the sack for an hour or two, and then head on to my 8am for the presentation we’re doing. What a marathon life I’ve been leading.

Yep, it’s Monday — that day of the week everyone seems a little groggy. It seems like as the semester wears on people are more and more groggy on Monday morning. This definitely holds true in my case — I was up until 2:30 am working on meteorology and random websites. read more »

The Padres put together a three-run fourth to put them in the lead and ahead for good to stay alive for at least one more game in the National League Division Series by beating the Cardinals 3-1 at Busch Stadium.

Quick observations: Chris Young is a stud pitcher, unbelievable on the road, and was every much the stopper San Diego needed. The Padres got to Hoffman to get the game closed out, which is their formula for success. By the way, Dave Roberts is still the most consistent player on the team on offense. He has been pretty much unstoppable, though the rest of the Padres’ bats needed to rise to the occasion more. In the fourth, they did, but there were two other wasted opportunities in the first and the fifth. In the fifth they stranded the bases loaded, and didn’t even get a run…they got away with that bigtime today.

We’ll see how it goes tomorrow…it’s pretty likely it’ll be Peavy vs. Carpenter again, as the break in the series permitted them to get their normal four days of rest.

Gotta run — later folks!

J

…because had Mike Piazza been able to catch up to Albert Pujols’s foul ball (which took a weird hop off the net and got lost in the sun to boot — I’m not going to put too much on him for it), he would never have had a shot at hitting a home run off Jake Peavy to put the Cardinals up for good.

I like Jake Peavy’s intensity on the mound, but he gets into this mode where he feels he has to strike everybody out, and that really came back to haunt him today. After giving up the Pujols home run, he was clearly upset, and started forcing pitches over the plate. With the Pujols spark, the rest of the Cardinals lineup started hitting, and that really was that for San Diego, as they fell 5-1 in the first game of the National League Division Series.

The bullpen — including Chan Ho Park — did a good job of holding down the damage, and Dave Roberts was nearly unstoppable. The lack of consistent hitting has been San Diego’s weakness all season (and for the last several years), and that really doomed them today, especially as they left the bases loaded in the 7th. The Cardinals pitched well, played great defense, and took advantage of Peavy’s mistakes. They deserved to win it.

Game 2 is scheduled for Thursday at 1PM Pacific. Jeff Suppan takes the mound for the Cardinals to face David Wells — let’s hope Boomer, known for his postseason prowess, can get the Padres back into the series. We don’t need another sweep like last year against these same Cardinals.

The San Diego Padres just defeated the Arizona Diamondbacks 7-6 in what ended up being a nailbiter for their second straight NL West crown. The Dodgers won, too, but the Padres won the division based on the season series overwhelmingly being in San Diego’s favor.

Trevor Hoffman had a rough outing, giving up consecutive homers, but got it together to finish the D-Backs off. Fantastic!

More later — I’m printing things in the library right now and am on a bit of a time crunch.

UPDATE: Now that I can actually see the recap, I corrected a factual error. Sorry for pinning those home runs on you, Linebrink. ;)

Well, it’s official: The San Diego Padres will be in the playoffs in consecutive seasons for the first time in franchise history!

ESPN tells the story:

Whether the Padres advance as NL West champions or as the wild card team won’t be decided until Sunday’s regular-season finales. But that was no reason to squelch the celebration.

“We’re going to celebrate this, but not go overboard,” Bochy said as champagne flew all around him. “It’s a great day.”

The San Diego victory eliminated Philadelphia from postseason contention, while the Padres and Los Angeles remained tied for the NL West lead after the Dodgers won at San Francisco 4-2.

If the two still are even after Sunday’s games, the Padres get the division title because they won the season series against Los Angeles.

Pretty cool, I must say — let’s hope the Padres can scratch out the win against the D-Backs’ ace Webb tomorrow so we can be assured of the NL West title.