Padres Trying to Fight Tradition of the Slow Start

For two years, it has been the same.

The Padres make their big winter trade. And then the talk begins. First place. Playoffs. World Series, maybe?

Then the season starts. And the talk stops.

Actually, that isn’t true. The talk continues, the subject changes. Optimism fades and the questions begin. People ask each other what happened to the wonderful team that was supposed to plow through the National League and rekindle memories of 1984.

A tradition of slow starts has been built and even many of the Padres aren’t sure exactly why.

“I don’t know,” outfielder Tony Gwynn said. “I really don’t know. I don’t have the answer.”

Who would have thought last year would have been such a bust? Joe Carter arrived from Cleveland to add muscle to the batting order. The Padres sailed through spring training and looked fit to improve on the previous season’s second-place finish.

And then . . .

“We open up in L.A.,” Gwynn recalled. “We lose opening day. We come home. We lose the home opener. The first thing you find out, you’re 0-2. And you’re picked to win the division. And people are saying: ‘This team is picked to win the division. What’s the deal?’ And our standard line was: ‘We’ve got 160 more. We’ve got plenty of time.’ But then it just seems to snowball and you find yourself 10 games out.”

OK, so let us get that question out of the way this season before the first loss is recorded.

What’s the deal?

“Very simple,” Manager Greg Riddoch said. “Look at the schedule. Who do you open against? Atlanta? Houston? Just look at the schedule. We play the best teams in the division. The Reds, Dodgers, San Francisco Giants. You’re playing all the top teams. And that determines how good your team is.”

That’s fine, except that it doesn’t explain why the Reds, Dodgers and Giants are so much tougher in April and May than they are in midsummer and early fall.

“You get those hot teams out of the way in the beginning and play the weaker teams and get back on a roll,” Riddoch said. “Then you’ve got that momentum. You go back to playing the hot teams after you’ve been away from them and you’re much better prepared to play them.”

Which begs the question. Why aren’t the other teams better prepared to play the Padres by then?

There are other theories.

The Padres make their way through spring training like a crosstown bus, stopping frequently and then moving on.

This year they played four games in Yuma, then went to Scottsdale, Mesa, Tucson, Chandler, Tempe, Phoenix, back to Mesa, back to Scottsdale, back to Mesa again and back to Chandler. Then they played nine more games in Yuma. And then three in Palm Springs and three more in Las Vegas.

Garry Templeton, for one, would like to see fewer stops on the spring tour. He says that might help the team get off to a quicker start.

“My opinion is that we just don’t get enough work in spring training because we travel too much,” he said. “And if you travel as much as we travel, you just don’t have the time to spend on the things that you need to spend them on. It’s just not enough working time.”

It can become as tiresome as the regular season.

“You look at the rest of the teams around baseball,” Templeton said. “Nobody travels as much as we do. Teams come over here to Yuma but they come, like, one or two days and then they might go to Palm Springs one or two days but then they head right back to Phoenix. . . . I’ve always felt that we should be closer to the other teams.”

When Joan Kroc sold the Padres last April, players began to wonder about their futures. It’s easy to see why the team many thought would take the National League West was four games under .500 on July 4.

“When Mrs. Kroc sold the club, it seemed like everybody just went really tight,” pitcher Ed Whitson said. “Nobody was really certain where they were going to be tomorrow or the next day. Even the coaches were kind of uptight because they didn’t know exactly what was going to happen either. They didn’t know whether they were going to have a job the rest of the year or what, because new ownership was coming in. Everybody played with a lot of pressure.”

Perhaps that is as good an indication as any why the Padres were once again strangely inconsistent during first half of the season.

On April 23, they beat the Giants. 13-3. The next day, they beat the Cubs by the same score. And then they lost five of the next six, scoring a total of 13 runs.

At times, the pitching was very good. Others, it wasn’t. Hitting followed a similar course.

“On paper we probably had the best ballclub in the National League,” Whitson said. “But we just didn’t put it all together--pitching and hitting--at the same time. I thought we had a great ball club. I thought we were going to contend right to the last game. It’s a shame we got off slow like that.”

A new season brings another chance. Maybe this will be the year the Padres break their April slumber and get a head start on the rest of the division.

“I’m optimistic, just in the sense that we’ve got a young club,” Gwynn said. “We’ve got a lot of guys fighting for positions. So once they get out there they’re going to want to do well. . . . I don’t expect us to come out of the gates slow.”

Of course, that’s typical spring training rhetoric, and nobody is more aware of that than Gwynn.

“When you get to spring training, everybody talks about: ‘Yeah, we have a chance to win it. We’re just like anybody else.’ But unless you go out on the field and get it done, it’s all talk. Just like last year. It was all talk. And the year before, it was all talk. And the year before, it was all talk. You’ve got to get it done.

“The Reds went out and got it done. They didn’t start talking until after they already started getting it done. But they got it done.”