San Diego Padres

I have not had good experiences with fantasy baseball in the past.

First and foremost, I was terrible at it. I would say that I could identify a comfortable 95 percent of current players by name, but that doesn’t mean I know how to fashion them into a successful fantasy franchise.

For three years running, San Diego closer Heath Bell has been the subject of trade discussions and rumors and the trade deadline.

Yet, Bell still remains a Padre despite this season being the time when everyone was positively sure he was on the move, most notably to either Texas or St. Louis.

31 years after the Summer of Love, Major League Baseball decided to stage a little summer smoochfest of their own in 1998.

This would find full grown adults in colorful clothes who would consume illegal drugs to their hearts' desire, all under the approving eye of both the owners and the commissioner. McGwire in Cardinal red would amicably bump chests with Sosa in Cub blue, and all was right with the world.

Embarrassing, pathetic, futile. These are words that come to mind so far this season while watching my Padres become the WORST hitting team of all time. EVER.

San Diego leads all of baseball in several pitching categories, as well as being dead last in almost every offensive statistic. It might be the ballpark, it might be the players, it might be the coaching, and it might be all three of these things, brought together in the perfect storm of hopelessness.

Lets take a quick look at some Padre starters and the numbers they have compiled so far in 2011...

The San Diego Padres may have the worst offense my eyes have ever seen. They are really, really bad offensively.

As a team, the Padres have a .212/.295/.311 slash line with 12 HRs. Those numbers in each category are dead last in all of baseball by a wide margin. For the love of everything holy in this world, their cleanup hitters are hitting .126 this season!

There’s no way around it or no easier way to put it: A lack of offense has resulted in a lack of wins for the San Diego Padres.

With over 20 games of the season now in the books, the second Skill and Skunk awards add a little more color to the overall picture. The Skill awards suddenly have a little more flash, spit and polish, while the Skunk awards smell a little more like the loaf of Limburger left in the sun.

Rating a team ten games into the season often seems like a lost cause. 

Imagine, for instance, critics panning a movie after watching ten minutes. 

What if a teacher wrote you off two weeks into the new semester? 

How about rating the Chargers after one game?

Yet ten games of the baseball season still represent more than five percent of the season, and Padres fans can explain firsthand about the difference a few games can make, let alone ten. For further references, I suggest googling the 2010 season.

After three straight six-win seasons, Aaron Harang and the Cincinnati Reds parted ways this offseason. The 6'7", 250-pound hurler signed with his hometown San Diego Padres.

After ending last season with a bad taste in their mouth, the San Diego Padres opened the 2011 campaign against the team that ended their last two playoff runs.

Despite having only one win in their last 13 meetings in St. Louis, the Padres got off on the right foot against a familiar foe.