On July 23rd, Major League Baseball is planning to start its season with a doubleheader. The first game features the New York Yankees traveling to our capital to face the defending champion Washington Nationals, followed up by a new chapter in classic rivalry with the San Francisco Giants facing the Los Angeles Dodgers.
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While I have no qualms with the meeting between the Yankees and the Nationals, there’s a missed opportunity by having the Giants play on Opening Day. There’s no doubt that Giants-Dodgers is a historically rich rivalry, having existed for more than 100 years in two different states. From Willie Mays vs. Duke Snider to Madison Bumgarner vs. Clayton Kershaw, there’s never been a shortage of supremely talented players amongst these franchises. However, this current version of the Giants roster simply isn’t worth promoting for a national television audience that’s been waiting for months for baseball.
The key members of San Francisco’s three World Series titles from 2010 from 2014 have now either left the team or are in decline. Madison Bumgarner, the 2014 postseason hero, signed with the Arizona Diamondbacks in free agency. Buster Posey, the 2012 MVP, has seen his OPS decline in three straight years from .861 in 2017 to .688 last year. Brandon Crawford, the defensively reliable shortstop, had the worst full season of his career in 2019 based on WAR from both Baseball-Reference and FanGraphs.
Even the new players of note the Giants have acquired since 2014 find themselves with their career trending in the wrong direction. Evan Longoria arrived in San Francisco in 2018 and has since been a below-average hitter based on OPS+. Former Reds ace Johnny Cueto had a successful 2016 in his new scenery, but from 2017 to 2019 his ERA was 4.24, almost exactly league average based on ERA+.
Since 2016, when the Giants won the Wild Card Game before losing to the Cubs in the NLDS, the team has had three straight losing seasons. Baseball Prospectus and FanGraphs both project San Francisco to finish with the worst record in the NL West with the new 60-game schedule. While they’re a recently successful franchise with several well-known players, it’s still a mistake to promote this team in the second game of the delayed start to the season.
Instead of the Giants, the Opening Day opponent for the Dodgers should have been the San Diego Padres.
Normally, a team that finished last in its division wouldn’t be an ideal team to feature on national television the first day of the season, but the Padres roster is hardly that of a normal team that won 70 games last year. The biggest reason is perhaps the most exciting young player in the league: Fernando Tatis Jr. The son of a major leaguer, the 21-year-old Tatis was electrifying over 84 games in his rookie season. He only trailed Yordan Alvarez among rookies in OPS and while he didn’t play a full season, he still ranked second in OPS at shortstop of those who came to plate at least 350 times last season.
Tatis Jr. is also the kind of player where stats don’t fully capture his excitement. His base running last year was also wonderfully aggressive, including two instances where he scored on sac flies to the second baseman.
If Major League Baseball is serious about promoting its new stars, then it’s a failure by the league to not get Tatis Jr. in front of a nationally televised audience as soon as possible. After all, I’m not aware of any other players who scored on a sac fly hit to the second baseman twice in one year.
While Tatis Jr. emerged as the one of the most exciting youngsters in the league, the Padres have another excellent player worth watching: Manny Machado. For the many Orioles fans reading this, Machado’s talents hardly need explaining. There’s few, if any, players in the league who can consistently provide the kind of defensive highlights Machado has in his career, and it’s a shame he won’t have the chance to be seen for the first day of the season alongside Tatis Jr.
In addition to the talented duo of Machado and Tatis Jr., there’s one other thing the Padres could bring to Opening Day that the Giants can’t: brand new uniforms. After several years using navy blue as the primary color, the Padres returned to their roots with brown and yellow uniforms. Announced in November, the Padres will be rocking the color scheme used in the early years of the franchise that included a trip to the 1984 World Series with Tony Gwynn.
Your city. Your colors. #BrownIsBack and it’s better than ever! pic.twitter.com/ykPW6aW4R7
— San Diego Padres (@Padres) November 10, 2019
Regardless of if you think the new Padres uniforms are a fantastic way to return to the franchise’s roots or one of the ugliest color schemes in sports, the new uniforms would generate discussion on social media and the internet as a whole that San Francisco’s uniforms wouldn’t.
The Dodgers combine a huge market with multiple superstars where fans would tune in regardless of their opponent, especially for the first game of the season. So, instead of the Giants, why not pick a team with two star players and a fresh set of uniforms?
BSL Analyst
Rose Katz is a recent graduate of the University of Maryland’s journalism school, where she worked for The Diamondback as the online managing editor and a sports blogger. As a student, she spent almost all of her time on campus in The Diamondback’s newsroom or at Xfinity Center, Ludwig Field and Maryland Stadium. Rose gained intern experience with the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN).