Padres take on the Marlins in just about an hour.
I tweeted earlier that being in the lead in the NL West feels like you're fighting off a pack of wild dogs. You beat one back with a stick and another one attacks while the rest recover. Around the All Star break I was paranoid about the Rockies, then the Dodgers and now the Giants. It seems that the Padres really thrive under this constant pressure. It keeps them sharp, like some sorta guy that fights packs of wild dogs.
I'm bummed that Aaron Cunningham is being sent to Portland. It seems like just today I was blogging about how he was my favorite.
In other news... sometime last week Gaslamp Ball's odometer rolled over and we passed 2 million visits. If you're into web analytics you know visits aren't the best metric for measuring traffic, but it's something. It took us like 4 years to get to one million visits and only a year and a half to get to two million. Hooray?
Sometime this year SB Nation installed some new features that let us track activity on the site. We're averaging 2.37 stories a day. That's down -5.33% since last month. We've been tweeting an average of 5.7 times a day and that's down from 7.17 last month. We've been dropping the ball apparently but that hasn't stopped you from joining up. We're averaging 3.73 new registered Gaslamp Ballers a day which is up 86% from last month. It probably helps that the Padres are killin' it.
In other news... we also found out we just won another award for our Trophy Case (left hand tool bar). Everybody take a minute to go over and kiss it and pose for pictures. Online Schools named us the Top MLB Blog for the Padres. I didn't read all the criteria that went into them choosing us, but we thank them for the award.
Anyway enough about the site. Time to get this Game Thread under way.