Dodgers: Padres’ blockbuster moves enough to guarantee second place

Congratulations, Padres! You’ve totally cemented yourselves in second place behind the Dodgers.

The San Diego Padres are having one hell of an offseason while the rest of baseball lays dormant. Almost as good an offseason as the Dodgers, who still maintain the best roster in baseball and get to spend October through March kissing their trophy before hitting the field to defend it.

There’s nothing wrong with second place, and the Padres are certainly being aggressively exciting in maintaining their position.

But adding Ha-seong Kim, replacing an injured Mike Clevinger with Blake Snell, and chasing Yu Darvish will still ultimately leave them looking up at the Dodgers in the NL West, and possibly the NLCS as well. Good job and good effort, doubtlessly, but a stronger No. 2 is still a No. 2.

Now, we’re certainly glad the Padres are flexing their second-strongest muscles. The root of sport is supposed to be high-level competitiveness, a tenet most of Major League Baseball seems content to ignore. The rest of the league wants blue ribbons for saving money or operating an endless prospect-churning near-champion like the Rays, and the Padres have decided that having an overload of talent is better than not doing so.

But at the end of the day, they’re stuck in the one division in baseball in which these moves won’t get them within a sniff of first place. In order for the Padres to leapfrog the Dodgers, they’d also have to pay for regression for Corey Seager, Walker Buehler, Cody Bellinger and Mookie Betts.

And you can’t buy that cavalcade of backward steps.

This isn’t our attempt to claim the Padres should be intimidated by us, shrug and give up before the season begins, and start preemptively selling off assets.

It’s just our celebration of the fact that the Dodgers have put together such an effective machine that it takes a title-hungry mindset that most of the league doesn’t have anymore just to get within a few games in the standings of our position.

Nice job, Padres. There’s no shame in the silver. We really mean that.

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