Padres Management - Do your job.....

So I’m looking through the list of available free agents for a hitter to place a FAAB bid on tonight. The first thing I did was sort the players by at bats. I wanted to see what full time players were out there.

At the top of the free agent list in my league with 225 at bats was Brian Giles. At first I didn’t think anything of it, but then I looked at the stats. Brian has had no injuries to speak of this year and is clearly (from a performance standpoint) the worst everyday player in MLB this year.

From 1999 through 2002 Brain was one of the better all around player in baseball. He was definitely an All-Star. If you owned him on your rotisserie team during that time, you can’t possibly have had any complaints.

He’s no longer that All-Star player and until this year, had drifted into a nice complimentary veteran player to have on a MLB roster to help the younger players and to fit in among All-Stars of today that may be on his team.

Brian is now 38 year old. He’s had a significant chance opportunity to show that he can still play this game. He faltered at the start (it happens to the best of them) and he’s had ample opportunity to get his season back on track. He couldn’t. He can’t. He won’t.

I’m sure Brian is a nice guy, (never any reports to the contrary that I know if) but he needs to be removed from the everyday line-up. It’s not fair to his teammates, the Padre fans or even the competitive balance of the league.

Brian now has more than 250 plate appearance this year and is hitting .191 with 2 HR’s, 23 RBI, 1 SB and 18 runs scores. There is no way that you can tell me that the San Diego Padres can’t fill the right field position with someone who can perform better. It could be someone that is currently a reserve player on the Padre roster, someone in their minor league system, or someone currently belonging to another MLB team.

Memo to Kevin Towers – You are the General Manager. You need to do your job and remove Brian Giles from your 40 man roster. If you want to be polite (he probably deserves it), make him a coach, offer him a cushy executive or scouting job or let him be the ball boy (if he still wants to fraternize with the guys).

Memo to Bud Black – If Kevin Towers doesn’t do his job, you need to do yours and make Giles strictly a reserve player from here on out.

On June 1st I penned a post “Adrian does it himself.” It talks about how Adrian Gonzalez is a one man show and the lack of production around him. It was that way then, it 3 weeks later nothing’s changed. Brian Giles is probably the biggest reason for the anemic support that Adrian gets.

This is got to stop. Everyone needs to do their job. It’s time for Padre’s management to do theirs. - Josh Bolan

Josh Bolan is a retired AP baseball reporter and now works as a freelance writer in Fresno California. Josh has been contributing to baseball publications as a writer since 1996.