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Dodgers: Padres’ blockbuster moves enough to guarantee second place

Adam Weinrib
Adam Weinrib

Dodgers Way

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS - OCTOBER 02: Starting pitcher Yu Darvish #11 of the Chicago Cubs delivers the ball against the Miami Marlinsduring Game Two of the National League Wild Card Series at Wrigley Field on October 02, 2020 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)

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.

Adam Weinrib

Adam Weinrib

Adam Weinrib is a Content Director on the FanSided network, and has been the co-editor at Yanks Go Yard and Dodgers Way for 4 years. He also co-hosts The Baseball Insiders Podcast twice weekly, alongside FanSided MLB insider Robert Murray, as well as the Yanks Go Yard Podcast. Previously, he was a Senior Editor at 12up.com, and has been covering MLB and NFL for eight years. Previously, he was a headline and features contributor at ClickHole and Onion Sports, as well as the Associate Producer of the ESPN 30 for 30 film "Believeland". An avowed fan of the New York sports teams -- specifically the Yankees -- as well as the North Carolina Tar Heels, you can find Adam complaining mid-game on Twitter, as well as on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn if the game goes really poorly.