What I Would Do With the $4 Billion Padres

And a rough weekend for ABS System challenges for batters and fielders.

Happy Monday! It’s going to be a light week here at JoeBlogs as I plan to finish my rewrite on FIFTY SEASONS! (Yes, right now I’m leaning toward calling my next book FIFTY SEASONS rather than the plainer SEASONS, though that could change). I’m hoping to send in the first draft a week from today, which will mean locking myself in a room pretty much 24 hours a day the rest of the week.

But I love this part. I really do. I haven’t done a jigsaw puzzle in a long time, but I always thought the best part of the jigsaw puzzle was when you could see what it was supposed to look like, and were left with the last 100 or so pieces. That’s what this part feels like to me. I can see what this book will look like, and I get really excited because I think and hope you’re going to love it if I can just get the final pieces in the shape that I want.

One thing I can say for sure — for good or for bad (maybe both), there’s never been a baseball book quite like it.

One mitigating factor in all this: Margo decided she wanted to do this two-week detox (or D.Tox as the Lifetime folks so cleverly call it), and being the supportive husband that I am, I’m doing the detox too. We’re on Day 5 now, and the first four days were, um, rough. They do warn you that the first three or four days can be rough but that things should really pick up after that. We’ll see. I’ll report back.

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The ABS Challenge Scorecard

• Total challenges: 1320. Challenges have been successful 706 times (53%).

• Batter challenges have been successful 47% of the time.

• Fielder challenges (almost always catchers) have been successful 59% of the time.

Rough weekend for player challenges — in total, they were right only 49% of the time — first sub-50% weekend of the season — and batters were right just 43% of the time. Catchers had their worst challenge day of the year on Friday (43%).

I don’t know that it means anything, but it’s interesting: I’ve had this theory that ABS would make umpires better. I do believe that some of these calls are so tight, so close, that no amount of training or practice can turn them into anything more than a coin flip for umpires. But there are only a few of those calls; the rest are probably makeable calls, and I think umps will get those right more and more as the year goes on.

The Padres are close to selling for $4 billion

Anytime you hear a baseball owner cry poor — I mean ANYTIME — you should laugh and laugh like that scene in "Hudsucker Proxy.” The Padres are not in a big market. Heck, the NFL abandoned San Diego. But it looks like the team is still going to sell for the highest price in MLB history — $1.5 billion more than Steve Cohen paid for the NEW YORK METS just six years ago.

Here’s what I think people miss: There are only so many ultra-rich people in the world, and they’re always looking for exclusive clubs to join and outrageously expensive things to buy. Owning a Major League Baseball team is one of the great privileges in the world. You get to compete against other bajillionaires. You get to be around a fantastic sport. You get some of the biggest celebrities on earth desperate to become your friend. You get cities to bow down to you, give you every tax break imaginable, and hand you a palace like Petco Park to play in.

Plus, if you ever get tired of it, you can sell and double — triple — quadruple your money because there will ALWAYS be ultra-rich people eager to take your place.

We treat sports owners like deities in this country, and it’s ridiculous. We hand them championship trophies first. We give them absurd amounts of praise for simply spending some tiny portion of their riches to compete. It’s nonsensical. The Padres are about to sell for $4 billion. None of us can conceive just how much money that is. But the next team surely will sell for more. And the team after that will sell for even more. And I get it. If I were a bajillionaire, I’d buy the Padres. Then I’d hire Justin Halpern to be my special assistant to something or other, and I’d throw baseball parties with all my favorite celebrity fans (Hi, Emma Stone!), and I’d insist they wear the old classic brown Padres uniforms a lot more often. It would be fun!

Speaking of the Mets

Steve Cohen’s $370 million team has now lost 11 in a row — and I imagine that some stuff is about to happen.

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Kathleen’s Korner

• Are they really your friends if they won’t wear a hot dog costume to your baseball birthday party?

• I love it when fans are able to show off their insane talents by combining them with sport. Karla Courtney is now a Hall of Famer, thanks to her clever knitting.

• Welcome to the league, Félix Reyes! In the first at-bat of his Major League debut, he took Chris Sale deep for a homer.

• Will Klein showed off his custom Pokémon card glove, and as a millennial, I think it’s real neat.