FanPost

Why the San Diego Padres?


I'm following a Sportsmanagement course in school this year and we have english classes. For this course we have to write about any topic we like. Obviously I went with the Padres. In this fanpost I'd like to share the introduction of my paper with you. In this introduction I try to explain why I chose the Padres. The paper is still a work in progress so the grammar and language might be off. Anyways I'm not sure if you'll like this or if this is even the right place for this kinda stuff but I thought I'd try to give something back to the community that has given me so many good laughs that I've lost count. If there is some interest I could probably post more once more is written. Here goes...

note: as I'm not a native English speaker I will probably be making a lot of people's days...


Why?

To answer the question why I chose the San Diego Padres, a baseball team, as the topic of this paper we have to go back to 17th of august in 2004. It was the last day of an unbelievable holiday in Carlsbad near San Diego. As I walked out of the amazing San Diego Zoo together with my cousins we got a call from my aunt saying that we would be going to a Padres game. At that moment I knew nothing about baseball, all I remember is that I was super excited to be going to a sports game in the United States. And as it turned out my excitement was quite justified…

When we arrived at Petco Park in downtown San Diego I didn’t know where to look first. It was all very overwhelming and everywhere I looked there was something cool that was definitely worth looking at. After we got the mandatory hot dog that goes with a baseball game we sat down in our seats. From the moment I sat down in my seat I just had goose bumps throughout the whole game. That night was simply a series of awesome things happening like the national anthem, the 9 strikeouts by Jake Peavy(the pitcher), the back to back homeruns by Brian Giles and Phil Nevin in the 2nd inning, the 15 other Padres hits leading to 11 runs, the 7th inning stretch and eventually the win for the San Diego Padres.

Obviously I might be exaggerating my memory a bit and I may or may not have checked Baseball Reference for the more precise details. That however is not the point, the point is that this one game of baseball basically changed my life as I’ve been loving baseball and the Padres more specifically ever since. At first I started reading game recaps and watching the occasional highlights. But as I was roaming the internet the amazing stories about baseball just kept coming. Then I bumped in to great blogs like Gaslamp Ball and Ducksnorts where I found baseball stories combined with a great sense of humor. After that the next step for me was buying a MLB.TV subscription so I could watch the games online. I did this for the first time in the 2008 season. From that season on my passion for the Padres only intensified even though it was a horrible season where the Padres won only 69 games and lost the other 99. 2012 marks the fifth birthday of me watching Padres games online and I have to say that I’m still giddy and I nervous when I start watching one. I still jump up and down when a Padres player does something good and I’m still bummed out when they lose.

I guess what I am trying to say is that the San Diego Padres are one of the big loves in my life. So the first time I heard we had to write a paper about any topic it was a first class no-brainer for me. I think about the Padres every day, I read about the Padres every day, I try to watch Padres games every day (during the season). It seems only fitting that I should now write about these Padres…

This FanPost was written by a member of the Gaslamp Ball community and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Gaslamp Ball staff or SB Nation.