Saturday, April 7, 2007

The real baseball season starts tonight

No more season openers at San Francisco. No more home openers against Colorado. Now it’s time to get on to the real baseball season, when real baseball fans are watching.
The next 158 games are when people interested in baseball pay attention. The fanfare people are gone, along with the home and road openers.
Even after four games, there are a couple of observations about the Padres:
It might not be wise to have Greg Maddux and David Wells back-to-back in the pitching rotation. Neither 40-something veteran is much more than a five- or six-inning pitcher these days. That will make for plenty of work on back-to-back days for the bullpen. The good news there is that the Padre bullpen has yet to allow a run in 13 1/3 innings.
The pop-gun offense may also be a concern. This team doesn’t appear capable of scoring runs until the eighth or ninth inning. That’s going to be too late oftentimes, such as in last night’s 4-3 loss to the Rockies in the home opener.
Speaking of, my friends in the press box tell me they had some glitches last night. For a majority of the game, there were not any paper towels in the men’s restroom. They also ran low on food, which didn’t sit well with those paying $9 a pop for dinner.
Maybe we can’t blame stadium workers for those shortcomings. After all, the real fans and media start coming tonight ... and perhaps the stadium maintenance people are under the theory the season doesn’t start until the true baseball fan starts showing up!

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