Padres release 2017 schedule

It looks like the Padres have released their 2017 schedule, right on schedule. The 2016 season will mercifully be coming to an end on October 2nd and we can finally look forward to our first full season of tanking in 2017. For the most part it will all be strangely familiar to us because even while the Padres weren’t tanking and were adamant that they would compete every year, they still sucked, but just not bad enough to get those high draft picks. So while the record will be practically the same, we’ll just be pretending to know and care about young talent in the system and that we can find happiness in looking at minor league box scores.

The most newsworthy topic of this new schedule is that the Padres will not be playing interleague games in Seattle for the first time since interleague play began in 1997. I have mixed feelings on this because I was seriously considering finally visiting Seattle next summer to catch a Padres game and they pulled the rug right out from under me. The good news is that I’ve grown a bit tired of the “natural rival” thing forced upon us by Bud Selig. Other than that the Padres play most of their interleague games against American League central teams. A trip to Minnesota could be fun.

The other highlight as Dennis Lin notes is that the Padres will be playing the Braves as they open their new ballpark. That will be a chance for some Padres to get their names remembered by fans in Atlanta for baseball ballpark firsts.

The Padres open the season the road in Dodger Stadium on April 3rd and finish the season on October 1st (pending an improbable playoff run) in San Francisco. In between they’ll play a bunch of other games.