‘Slide Now, Play Later’ Should Be the Padres’ Pennant Motto

In a moment of springtime profundity, when all of San Diego and Yuma were bonkers over the prospects for Ted Leitner’s Padres, I shrewdly injected a note of caution.

Beware, I said, this club could well finish first but it could also finish fifth . . . or anywhere in between.

Alas, ‘twas I who was maybe overly optimistic. Fifth might be too high. Let it now be correctly said that this club can finish anywhere from first to sixth, which just about covers the National League West.

Such is the state of affairs for both the Padres and their NL West brethren. No team in this division is without flaws. Some will show up sooner and others later.

Right now, the Padres’ flaws are so multiple that no one is really paying much attention to the ones everyone originally expected.

When, for example, was the last time you heard anyone say that the Padres need to resolve their third base situation? It has been awhile, hasn’t it?

For the Padres to say that third base is the problem would be akin to Custer saying he would have been all right if his rifle hadn’t jammed.

And so the week dawned with the local heroes ignominiously in last place, for one day at least the most flawed of the flawed.

The temptation is to suggest that this is truly an awful team. Such a temptation would ignore the fact that this is baseball, and the baseball season is long and winding, filled with periods of exhilaration and frustration.

As tightly packed as the NL West has been, the team playing the worst lately will be the last-place team. Conversely, the team playing the best lately will be the first-place team.

And the Padres underachieved for most of the first month of the season and then took a pratfall on this trip. They fell into the cellar after a series of misfortunes in frustrating one-run games.

This team seemingly had forgotten how to (a) get on base and (b) stay on base. The only thing worse than the hitting had been the baserunning. If someone told me the Padres had three men on base, which in itself would be hard to believe, I would probably wonder which base.

The way the Padres were running the bases, enemy relief pitchers should have been apologizing for getting saves. Padre baserunners, not Padre batters, seemed to be ending the most rallies. The worst circumstance possible for the Padres in a one-run game was having a runner on second in the ninth inning. Kids playing T-ball seemed to have a better sense of direction and purpose.

Of course, shoddy baserunning is magnified when a team has so much trouble getting runners on base in the first place. You don’t notice losing a couple of runners a game when you get 12 hits a game, but you sure do when you get only five.

As I looked at the standings and contemplated a growing discontent by the populace, I found something very encouraging in the hitting statistics.

Right about now you must be wondering if I lace my morning coffee with brandy . . . or just skip the coffee part of it altogether.

Bear with me.

At this discouraging point of a discouraging trip, which was to say at the beginning of the Montreal series, I noted that Tony Gwynn was hitting less than .300, Benito Santiago was near .200 and Jack Clark, Carmelo Martinez and John Kruk were below .200. These gentlemen represent a substantial portion of what was expected to be this team’s offensive output this year.

What these numbers tell me is that good times are ahead. None is going to hit at his current level. They may not reach their career norms, but they will move toward those norms, and the ball club will benefit with upward movement.

Of course, this theory is predicated on the pitching remaining solid. That is all it has to do. Remain solid. That’s fine, because that is all it has been. It has not been spectacular by any measure, but it has been good enough to keep the Padres within a hop and a skip of first place.

Mark Davis has been a big part of it, obviously, and the biggest threat to the Padres’ aspirations remains his left arm. If anything happens to Mark Davis, the Padres might as well dig a little hole and disappear. Indeed, to keep him healthy, a victory might even have to be sacrificed here or there . . . or at least a lead imperiled in the hands of a lesser relief pitcher.

This is going to be a long and interesting season, and the race so tight that just about everyone in the division is likely to get tastes of both the top and the bottom. In fact, in this division, it might be said that just about anyone can finish anywhere from first to sixth.

In this climate, baseball’s version of both parity and parody, the key to survival is to understand that neither good times nor bad times are going to last forever. And that they who are best last will be called champions.