Social Hour Extra: O, America?
By Friar Wire
By Mike Janela
Thanks to their only trip of the year to Canada now sitting in the rearview mirror, the Padres’ excursion north of the border offered us plenty of fodder for an off-day edition of Social Hour on Thursday.
From co-host Bill Center wanting to trade our national anthem and the state of North Dakota for the rights to “O, Canada,” to he and Mike Grace disagreeing on what San Diego should do with Christian Bethancourt, we had no shortage of topics with no game to preview. And, oh yeah, there’s a 25-consecutive-game home run streak still going on. Here’s a deeper dive into some info we didn’t have time for during Thursday’s show.
JOINING SOME INTERESTING COMPANY
We talked about how the Padres and their 25 straight games with a long ball have joined some rare — and quirky — company. Basically, you can’t deduce anything in common between the five teams in MLB history who have homered this many games in a row. Here are those previous four teams, their records, and the season-ending HR totals for their players who ended up with 20 or more:
- 2002 Texas Rangers (72–90): Alex Rodriguez (57), Rafael Palmeiro (43), Herbert Perry (22)
- 1998 Atlanta Braves (101–56): Andres Galarraga (44), Javier Lopez and Chipper Jones (34), Andruw Jones (31)
- 1994 Detroit Tigers (53–62): Cecil Fielder (28), Kirk Gibson (23)
- 1941 New York Yankees (101–53): Charlie Keller (33), Tommy Henrich (31), Joe DiMaggio (30), Joe Gordon (24)
Two 100-win teams, two losing seasons, and everyone from The Yankee Clipper to Herbert Perry. Yeah, good luck drawing any comparisons.
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CAN YOU COUNT ON CHRISTIAN?
With all the talk of starting catcher Derek Norris potentially being on the move before the trade deadline, Bill thinks you give top catching prospect Austin Hedges the keys right away if Norris does go.
Mike thinks current backup catcher Christian Bethancourt could still have some use. The issue for Bethancourt as we noted on the show, though, is that Padres pitchers haven’t produced the same numbers throwing to him as they have to Norris. Well here are those numbers:
- Pitching to Norris: 673 IP, 4.44 ERA, .326 OBP, 1.36 WHIP, 8.3 K/9
- Pitching to Bethancourt: 220.2 IP, 4.81 ERA, .345 OBP, 1.47 WHIP, 7.3 K/9
Not an otherworldly difference, but enough over a large enough sample size to question where the Padres go from here.
PROSPECT POWER
The MLB Pipeline midseason re-ranking of their top prospects is available here, for those who wanted to know what we were talking about on the show today when Anderson Espinoza, Manuel Margot, Hunter Renfroe, et al., came up in discussion. Some numbers to keep in mind we didn’t share on the show: Renfroe jumped 40 spots from his preseason Top 100 ranking thanks to a strong season at El Paso, while shortstop Javier Guerra wasn’t as fortunate with his season-long struggle at Lake Elsinore.
ON THE NEXT SOCIAL HOUR
The Padres return to Petco Park for its longest homestand since April 15–24, when they kick off a 9-game, 10-day slate against the Cincinnati Reds for Game 1 of 3 Friday night. Before that, join co-hosts Bob Scanlan, Brady Phelps, and me at 6:00 PT to discuss what reality shows Padres players should appear on, what rules changes the guys would approve, and how many wins to expect out of the homestand. Check it out at Padres.com/SocialHour, FOX Sports San Diego, or ESPN 1700!
