San Diego Padres Trade Tree

We know that Kevin Towers has been a very active general manager over the years, making quite a few more trades than average for a major league baseball team. Here's a little diagram I put together, a so-called "trade tree". It is not exhaustive, but rather tracks as far back as possible, via trades only, from three current members of the Padres (Chris Young, Terrmel Sledge, and Adrian Hernandez) who were acquired in early 2006.

It's quite amazing that starting from just that one trade, the players involved go all the way back to 1976 - that's thirty years of continuity through just trading!

Finally, a few interesting things of note:

• All the trades involving this particular tree are present. Some of the players (such as Doug Brocail and Phil Plantier) were acquired again by the Padres, but not as part of this specific trade tree.
• One player, Craig Lefferts, actually appears twice in this trade tree! After the Pads traded him away in 1987, they re-signed him as a free agent in 1989 (and proceeded to trade him away again in 1991!)
• Both MLB players named Greg Harris appear in this trade tree. The ambidextrous one was acquired for Al Newman in 1984, while the other one was drafted in 1985 and then traded in 1993 as part of the deal for Andy Ashby.
• There are a heck of a lot of good players on this list, including some MVPs (Ken Caminiti, & Kevin Mitchell, e.g.), some Cy Young winners (Rollie Fingers & Mark Davis, e.g.) and some Hall of Famers (Fingers, and Ozzie Smith).
• There are also some guys who went on to manage, including Jerry Manuel and Bob Geren, who was traded shortly after being drafted in 1979 and will manage Oakland this coming year.

Without further delay, here is the San Diego Padres Trade Tree:

Where's Washington?

I heard a story recently that reminded me something about how the Pacific Northwest differs from the rest of the US.

A friend of mine was moving from suburban New Jersey out to rural Washington state, out in the unincorporated part of Bremerton on the Olympic Peninsula. He bought a new cell phone in NJ a few weeks before moving, but was sure to ask the salesperson if the phone would get the same quality signal in Washington. The salesperson assured him that he would, in fact, get the same quality signal.

After the move, low and behold, he gets no signal at all out in Washington state. He takes the phone to his local branch for that cell provider, and they get the same salesperson on the phone from the first store, who corroborates my friend's story about assuring him it would work "in Washington."

Very quickly, they discover the source of the miscommunication. When people say "Washington" in the eastern part of the country (and most other parts as well), almost everyone assumes they are referring to Washington D.C. (i.e. the District of Columbia) whereas out in the Pacific Northwest, "Washington" refers to the state of that name. As someone who lived in Washington state for years, I can tell you that when the folks out there refer to the country's capital, they call it "D.C."

Really Awesome Halo

Here's a camera-phone shot of a full rainbow halo taken off the right side of an airplane.

Righteous!

Cinder Block Art at Tufts

This qualifies as a really awesome thing.

Behind one of the buildings on the Tufts campus (and visible from Boston Ave in Medford MA), somebody arranged a pile of cinder blocks to spell out the school's name.