Padres Gonna Padre: Tatis Suspended

 


Just when they thought there was a chance.

If this isn’t the biggest PED suspension, it’s at least in the top 3.

The San Diego Padres fan is the most tortured in baseball. There’s no contest. It’s the hands-down leader. I’ll go as far as saying San Diego sports fans are on top of the sports misery index for all sports.

Suffering doesn’t describe it. They’re flat-out cursed. Their sports teams can’t even sniff a title. Oh, I’m sorry. They no longer have teams. San Diego’s NFL and NBA teams left town for Los Angeles. The L.A. Clippers used to be headquartered in San Diego. The Houston Rockets also began life in San Diego.

This is getting exhausting.

The Padres have been around since 1969. They have been to two World Series. They have won a grand total of one game in the fall classic. One in 1984.

The past few seasons, they seemed to build a winner. The Padres spent millions constructing a club that could compete with the best. They’ve signed star free agents. They’ve made trades for young players that have developed into stars.

The Padres made the biggest trade at the trade deadline, getting young slugging phenom Juan Soto from the Washington Nationals. The Padres were primed for a postseason run for the ages.

Just when fans thought they were going to have some fun, their best player, Fernando Tatis Jr., gets suspended for performance-enhancing drugs. He’ll miss the rest of the season.

It doesn’t mean the season is over, but baseball is a game of momentum.

Yogi Berra said that ‘Baseball is 90 percent mental, the other half is physical.’ They play most of the game between the ears. The Padres were getting charged up because the team was going to finally be at full strength.

Now, all that has changed. The letdown may be too much.


Marshall Dunlap on Flickr, via Wikimedia Commons

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