Padres name Skip Schumaker first base coach

The last time I wrote about Skip Schumaker, and one of the last times I gave him much thought was when he retired during Spring Training before the 2016 season, just a month and a day after he signed a minor league deal with the Padres. At the time I was working as an office manager (glorified receptionist, if we’re keeping it real), a job that allowed me to do basically whatever I pleased for approximately seven and a half of eight hours, so I hammered out a fair bit of baseball blogging from my desk. On that particular day I saw the tweets about Schumaker deciding to retire, so I immediately started writing a post here about it. About five minutes later I was was interrupted by someone I had scheduled to come in for a job interview. Locked in and eager to publish, I barely looked away from my screen as I told her “A thing I like to do is let people interview themselves.” I imagine she thought my constant typing was note-taking, but in all actuality I couldn’t tell you one single word she said, despite my occasional upward glances punctuated by insincere nodding. I went ahead and hired her since it wasn’t her fault I had something more important to do. The post got published in a timely manner and she turned out to be a decent employee, so it was a win-win.

But yeah, I’ll be much more cognizant of Skip Schumaker’s existence in 2018 than I was this year and most of last; it’s kind of hard to not be aware of the guy who pats players on the shoulder when they single. Schumacher will be taking over first base coaching duties from Johnny Washington, who was appointed assistant to new hitting coach Matt Stairs.