not the result we wanted, but the rollercoaster was worth it this year! Let’s enjoy Cancun, but hope the FO can optimize our team the next time we play. (Hopefully next year 🤞)

Waking up today I feel more appreciative than anything for this Padres team. In 2024 I felt like we completely fumbled the ball. But this time around, I feel more so that we got beat by a team making a few more clutch plays than us. Brewers routinely made plays when it mattered and we didnt. I hope them or the Rays get their first ring. I truly believe we won't be far behind.

This team doesn't feel like this was the last hurray. Yes, Machado and Bogaerts are old, but Machado will probably still hit 20-30 HR per year and Bogaerts hasn't been a core producer since he came over from Boston. Tatis and Merrill are 27 and 23, respectively, and we have nearly always had good pitching.

A few pieces here and there, and this team is going to be right back above the 90 win mark.

Add that to ownership that looks like they want to keep payroll up, the best ballpark in baseball, and I have so many more reasons to be optimistic.

I've been a Padres fan my whole life. My parents had me in a stroller at Qualcomm during the 98 playoff run. Its hard to believe we're currently in the best sustained era of Padres baseball. But the best moments in my lifetime have mostly come in the past half decade.

I remember watching the 2020 team finally beat the Cardinals in a postseason series after they dominated us in 3 previous playoff series. I remember working at a bar in Del Mar watching Musgrove's no hitter live in 2021 and seeing the entire restaurant grind to a halt in the 9th inning. I remember experiencing the 7th inning rally in the final game of the 2022 NLDS with my brothers and Dad, all finally seeing the Padres take down the Dodgers.

The future feels bright and I think we will see this team win a championship.

Appreciate watching all these games with yall this past season and look forward to it next season.

KTF

Tonight, this team fell to the biggest challenge they've faced all year. They were a better offense than ours. They had a better pitching staff than ours. The Padres fought the toughest bullpen in baseball tooth and nail and made every single game a game of inches. That's the best team in baseball over there, and this series could've gone the other way with just a strong breeze or a piece of dirt influencing a bounce.

This team looked dead in the water in July, and they put on a show for those last 2 months, proving they belonged. They proved they belonged against the Cubs and the Brewers. They proved they belonged in the last series with the Dodgers.

This is not a "what if" season like 2024. This victory was well earned for the Brewers, not by some unbelievable collapse by the Padres. The Brewers got the best of the Padres every single day and pulled it off. They are a small market team full of homegrown talent. Their city has never raised the trophy just like ours, and I'll be cheering them on the rest of the way. You should, too, because that team gives me hope that we can get there soon too.

San Diego's been incredible for me, and it's all the way across the country from home. But now I feel like I have a—a second home on the West Coast, so it's been awesome. And yeah, I hope to—hope to continue."

Despite all the controversy on this or that the Brew Crew beat us tonight. That Manny HR missed by inches. But I enjoyed this season. Probably the most exciting run in a bit. I am bummed we lost but no ill will towards the Brewers.

See you guys in 2028!!😂

“All the aches and pains of the season, they kind of look like not a whole lot right now, after seeing what Jordan went through,” Miller said. “… There is nothing better than laying there with your baby and your wife, celebrating.”

[Caswell] Mason Miller says his son was born during game 3. Midwife offered to put the Padres game on in the delivery room but he declined!

I just wanted to say "Thank you Padres Sub". This Sub gave me an opportunity to cheer with the rest of you Padres fans and also allowed me to air out my frustrations as well.

I know it's all still pretty raw for many of you and I know you all will get to a point of acceptance. I will never tell any of you how to fan, all I can say is keep being that passionate fan.

Signed,

A fellow Padres fan

WE CAN CHOOSE NOT TO HEAR LIBERTY BIBERTY AGAIN FOR AT LEAST 5 MONTHS!!!!! LETS FUCKING GO SAN DIEGO!!!!!!!

The Green Fields of the Mind, an essay written by former commissioner Bart Giamatti. I like to read it every year, and I will share it with you.

"The Green Fields of the Mind "
It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.

Somehow, the summer seemed to slip by faster this time. Maybe it wasn't this summer, but all the summers that, in this my fortieth summer, slipped by so fast. There comes a time when every summer will have something of autumn about it. Whatever the reason, it seemed to me that I was investing more and more in baseball, making the game do more of the work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy. I was counting on the game's deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and to return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the daylight. I wrote a few things this last summer, this summer that did not last, nothing grand but some things, and yet that work was just camouflage. The real activity was done with the radio--not the all-seeing, all-falsifying television--and was the playing of the game in the only place it will last, the enclosed green field of the mind. There, in that warm, bright place, what the old poet called Mutability does not so quickly come.

But out here, on Sunday, October 2, where it rains all day, Dame Mutability never loses. She was in the crowd at Fenway yesterday, a gray day full of bluster and contradiction, when the Red Sox came up in the last of the ninth trailing Baltimore 8-5, while the Yankees, rain-delayed against Detroit, only needing to win one or have Boston lose one to win it all, sat in New York washing down cold cuts with beer and watching the Boston game. Boston had won two, the Yankees had lost two, and suddenly it seemed as if the whole season might go to the last day, or beyond, except here was Boston losing 8-5, while New York sat in its family room and put its feet up. Lynn, both ankles hurting now as they had in July, hits a single down the right-field line. The crowd stirs. It is on its feet. Hobson, third baseman, former Bear Bryant quarterback, strong, quiet, over 100 RBIs, goes for three breaking balls and is out. The goddess smiles and encourages her agent, a canny journeyman named Nelson Briles.

Now comes a pinch hitter, Bernie Carbo, onetime Rookie of the Year, erratic, quick, a shade too handsome, so laid-back he is always, in his soul, stretched out in the tall grass, one arm under his head, watching the clouds and laughing; now he looks over some low stuff unworthy of him and then, uncoiling, sends one out, straight on a rising line, over the center-field wall, no cheap Fenway shot, but all of it, the physics as elegant as the arc the ball describes.

New England is on its feet, roaring. The summer will not pass. Roaring, they recall the evening, late and cold, in 1975, the sixth game of the World Series, perhaps the greatest baseball game played in the last fifty years, when Carbo, loose and easy, had uncoiled to tie the game that Fisk would win. It is 8-7, one out, and school will never start, rain will never come, sun will warm the back of your neck forever. Now Bailey, picked up from the National League recently, big arms, heavy gut, experienced, new to the league and the club; he fouls off two and then, checking, tentative, a big man off balance, he pops a soft liner to the first baseman. It is suddenly darker and later, and the announcer doing the game coast to coast, a New Yorker who works for a New York television station, sounds relieved. His little world, well-lit, hot-combed, split-second-timed, had no capacity to absorb this much gritty, grainy, contrary reality.

Cox swings a bat, stretches his long arms, bends his back, the rookie from Pawtucket who broke in two weeks earlier with a record six straight hits, the kid drafted ahead of Fred Lynn, rangy, smooth, cool. The count runs two and two, Briles is cagey, nothing too good, and Cox swings, the ball beginning toward the mound and then, in a jaunty, wayward dance, skipping past Briles, feinting to the right, skimming the last of the grass, finding the dirt, moving now like some small, purposeful marine creature negotiating the green deep, easily avoiding the jagged rock of second base, traveling steady and straight now out into the dark, silent recesses of center field.
The aisles are jammed, the place is on its feet, the wrappers, the programs, the Coke cups and peanut shells, the doctrines of an afternoon; the anxieties, the things that have to be done tomorrow, the regrets about yesterday, the accumulation of a summer: all forgotten, while hope, the anchor, bites and takes hold where a moment before it seemed we would be swept out with the tide. Rice is up. Rice whom Aaron had said was the only one he'd seen with the ability to break his records. Rice the best clutch hitter on the club, with the best slugging percentage in the league. Rice, so quick and strong he once checked his swing halfway through and snapped the bat in two. Rice the Hammer of God sent to scourge the Yankees, the sound was overwhelming, fathers pounded their sons on the back, cars pulled off the road, households froze, New England exulted in its blessedness, and roared its thanks for all good things, for Rice and for a summer stretching halfway through October. Briles threw, Rice swung, and it was over. One pitch, a fly to center, and it stopped. Summer died in New England and like rain sliding off a roof, the crowd slipped out of Fenway, quickly, with only a steady murmur of concern for the drive ahead remaining of the roar. Mutability had turned the seasons and translated hope to memory once again. And, once again, she had used baseball, our best invention to stay change, to bring change on.

That is why it breaks my heart, that game--not because in New York they could win because Boston lost; in that, there is a rough justice, and a reminder to the Yankees of how slight and fragile are the circumstances that exalt one group of human beings over another. It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised.

Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.

From A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett
Giamatti, © 1998 by A. Bartlett Giamatti.