A Little Bit of Patience Never Hurt

It's been a week since Major League Baseball's regular season ended. That means it's been a week since my San Diego Padres ended their nightmare of a season.

And it seems to me that the fans are about to revolt, and that just comes from reading all the user comments on the stories published on the San Diego Union-Tribune's website.

They're about to revolt because this team, to them, was supposed to contend. This team, to the fans and possibly to the Padres upper management, wasn't supposed to lose 99 games.

But the writing was on the wall before the season started. The Padres, contenders or champions of the National League west the three years prior to 2008, saw a lot of subtraction in the offseason and not a lot of addition. So to think this team was going to contend was a stretch. I didn't expect it and was surprised everyone else though they would.

What's more surprising is that the fans are ready to jump off the Sandy Alderson ship.

I guess with the success of the other professional sport team in the city (the underperforming San Diego Chargers), Padres fans expect more. They expect to win now.

C'mon kids, this isn't New York, Chicago or Boston. The Padres aren't going to buy themselves some wins, or should I say enough wins to get the club where we want it to be.

Alderson was brought here by John Moores to do one thing, improve the organization as a whole. Alderson has been in San Diego for just under three or four years. To me, that's not enough time to cultivate prospects and build a crumbling minor league system that needed saving.

The Padres minor league system was consistently one of the worse in baseball before Alderson came into town. And it's the reason why the club isn't as successful as it is today.

If there was one thing we've learned from the Yankees, the Red Sox, the A's and any other semi successful team in the Majors since the turn of the 21st century is this: a major league club's core has to come from the farm system; the base of the team has to come from there. Then, you fill in what you need through trades and free agency. As the Yankees have shown, you can't build a winning team through just dropping loads of cash. And as the Sox, A's, Angels and the Rays have shown, you build winning clubs with the talent you have in the minors.

And so, the Padres aren't there yet. The farm system is almost there. The big league club has its stars, now it just needs everything else to fill in around them.

And to dump Alderson now would be a mistake, that would set the organization back years.

Alderson did lead the A's to four division titles, three American League pennants and a World Series victory while he was in Oakland. I'd give him a little more time.

I'd let him do what needs to be done, without all the bitching, because, he knows what he's doing.

And sure, some fans are ready to dump Alderson and his use of statistics, which was a precursor to Moneyball.

But, how many World Series Champions flags fly above Petco Park?

If you don't remember, why don't my fellow Padres fans walk over to 19 Tony Gwynn Drive and take a look. They won't see a single one.

So I'd have some patience.