I was reading Bill Center's article in the UT.  His article is titled Not a Wiff of Improvement.  He gives us some interesting facts about the Padres hitting:

Fourteen strikeouts Thursday afternoon followed 15 the night before -- 29 strikeouts in a span of 54 outs and 20 hours.

When you read something like that your first instinct is to criticize the Padres.  "Padres [exhale hookah] suck bro!"  Maybe they do suck or we could look at through Bud Black's eyes.  Buddy is trying to tell Bill Center what his article should be about, but Bill is having none of it.

"The story today was Dempster," Padres manager Bud Black said.

But was it? What about the Padres hitters?

It's going to be a long season if we keep blaming everything on the Padres.  I'm thinking that from now on, we should just be in complete awe of the other teams.  We should employ "Shock and Awe" tactics when we feel overcome with the need to criticize the Padres.  First we are shocked that the Padres might fail, because we are so confident in their skills and their ability to try really hard.  Hell, they seem like nice guys too, who can blame a bunch of well mannered young men?  Once we realize that it couldn't be the Padres fault we are in awe of how great our opposition is.  "Wowee, this minor league pitcher they brought is mowing down our Padres, but he's probably going to win the Cy Young this year, he's got my vote!"  I'm telling you this will make it a lot easier on us as fans and the players will appreciate it as well.

How do I know it will work?  Dex, Kev, Jonny Dub and I used to play adult league baseball a few years back.  We would win probably about two games out of the eleven game season.  One Sunday morning we had a game at El Cajon Valley High School and it was raining really hard.  The other team only had 7 guys show up and we had 11.  The ump wanted to go home and told us that we could go home with a win since the other team would be forced to forfeit and we could all get out of the rain.  The other team wanted to play.  We thought this would be the perfect opportunity to improve our self confidence and beat the hell out of a lesser team.  Everytime one of the blank spots in their line up would come up they would record an automatic out.  How could we lose?

Here's the thing about our team.  We found a way.  They killed us.  We were falling in mud puddles and we were soaked.  They only had like one outfielder and we could not hit it into the gap.

Did we get down on ourselves?  Hell no! 

We first blamed a dog that peed on our bat before the game.  He jinxed us.  Then we praised our opposition.  We called them the Magnificent Seven.  We tipped our caps to them.  They were the greatest adult league baseball team we'd ever seen and probably the best that ever existed.  We felt privileged to beaten by the likes of them. To this day Dex swears that at least six of them went into the majors.