The San Diego Padres are a very bad baseball team. Nobody needs to be reminded that they are bad, and honestly nobody really cares. They are the Padres! Bad is their natural state. This has not been explained to executive chairman Ron Fowler, who went on the radio to rant about the team’s 20-33 record and act like a dickhead.
Fowler called into 1090 AM to air his grievances, and although it’s perfectly fine for an owner to be upset about his team’s poor performance, it’s pretty uncool for him to lay all of the blame on his players and to call out one specifically (transcription via Fox Sports):
“To have a starter like (James) Shields perform as poorly as he did yesterday is an embarrassment to the team, an embarrassment to him,” Fowler said.
“It’s about as frustrating as it can get. In a normal environment, if you had performed as well as we have over the last three years, you’d probably be unemployed. But it’s baseball, with guaranteed contracts. We’ve got to get through it.”
To make Fowler’s pining for the days before guaranteed contracts even more annoying, he went on to praise the coaching staff and front office later in the interview. The message from Fowler is clear: All of us guys in suits are doing our jobs perfectly, it’s those no-good, shitty players who aren’t earning their money.
That might even be true, but what was Fowler honestly expecting from these guys? James Shields is a 34-year-old former almost-ace who is pitching pretty much exactly how you’d expect a 34-year-old almost-ace to pitch. He’s not the one who decided to trade for Matt Kemp, Melvin Upton, and Wil Myers, and it’s definitely not his fault that those risky trades didn’t work out. It’s not the players’ fault that the Padres currently boast a starting rotation that features Colin Rea and Cesar Vargas. You know what else isn’t their fault? The fact that the Padres have the 10th-lowest payroll in the league.
Photo via AP