I work downtown again. Got a new job at Digitaria Interactive so I'm right in the thick of downtown. For lunch today, I went over to Bread on Market. I find myself looking very closely at people around me to determine if they affiliated with the Padres so that I can harrass them.

Part of me feels really guilty about being so titillated when it comes to the Moores divorce, but at the same time, if Drama and Winfield's Ghost went through a bitter breakup, I'm sure the FanPost/FanShot fans would be all a titter as well.

Is Peavy gone next year? Maybe. Maybe. He'd be another in a pretty decent list of amazingly good pitchers that have played for the Padres for a pretty minimal amount of time.

I don't have a whole lot else... I know JBox is working on a Gaslamp Ball t-shirt shop. That should be up sometime. I came across Baseball Hacks while at Borders yesterday. If somebody wants to send me a copy for Halloween, that'd be cool.

This is crrrraaaazzzzy!!! The Padres are for sale!!!

According to sources, Padres owner John Moores is going to sell 49 percent of the team as part of a divorce settlement with his wife Becky.

I think we all figured it was going to happen, but it still comes as a shock. I'm superduper psyched for when Becky owns half and somebody like Mark Cuban owns half. It'll be like some kind of crazy romantic comedy with Becky wanting to hire sexy ballplayers and Cuban wanting to do ridiculous stunts for the media.

Quick! How much you guys got on you? If we pool our resources, we'll be able to own a Brian Giles butt cheek!

Dang, yo.

So many questions... Is Moores being forced to split the asset? Why wasn't the whole thing sold and then split? Is this a way of making it harder on Becky? Who will the new Padres owners be? What if Alex Rodriguez buys the team? Does that mean A-Rod will play short or third? How many Gaslamp Ball t-shirts would we have to sell to get a share? Will they go public? Wouldn't it be cool to have a share of the Padres hanging on your office wall?

[Note by Dex, 10/09/08 3:53 PM EDT ] Drama digs up the following:

John Moores bought 80 percent of the Padres in 1994 for a reported $80 million. His net worth has been estimated in recent years by Forbes magazine at about $750 million. The magazine projected the value of the Padres at more than $360 million.

The Forbes valuations have always been suspect in my mind. It will be interesting to see how the valuation stacks up to what somebody's willing to pay for 49% of the asset. I'm not sure how Moores' 80% splits down to 49%. By the math I just did in my head, that'll leave Moores with 31% of the team and additional cash in the neighborhood of $180 million.

[Note by Dex, 10/09/08 4:14 PM EDT ] So what happened to this?

For those who may be wondering, John Moores intends to maintain his principal ownership of the Padres into "the foreseeable future" and have a significant impact on any sweeping changes that may be made to the club in the offseason.

Does 31% count as "principal ownership"? Is "the foreseeable future" about 3 weeks?

Right? Doesn't that seem logical? The more athletic competitors are the ones who kill it at ballroom dance. Therefore it must be a sport.

[Note by Dex, 10/07/08 12:44 PM EDT ] I admit it. I added this post because I wanted to see what the widget would do. It doesn't do a whole lot except link back to the DWTS page. Oh well. I thought maybe somebody would show up and dance on my desktop.

Arizona Fall League is starting up and the Padres own Chad Huffman is blogging his experiences:

I remember walking up to [Fall League pitching coach, Wally Whitehurst] on the bus and saying, "Hey, I'm Chad Huffman."  He replied, "That's great, now go sit down."  No hi, my name is Wally or anything - that was it!  So I just sat down in my seat on the bus - which had no A/C, by the way - and thought to myself, "so this is what pro ball is all about."

But once you get to the Big Leagues, I hear the women all got long legs and brains.

I was up in San Francisco for a wedding late last week. I kept wandering the streets yelling, "Bochy! Bochy! Come back to San Diego!" Maybe he could bench coach. Imagine the crazy lineups and pitching changes that would happen then.

Evan at MVN Outsider gives his opinion on what Kevin Towers could do during the off season. Evan readily admits that all of this is very unlikely to happen, but I was looking for stuff to write about and his email happened to appear and so...

The other thing that I happened to come across was this ad for a Padres scrunchie. Do women still wear scrunchies? I seem to remember an episode of Sex In The City about that.

Dodgers and Cubs. Angels and Red Socks. Everybody in Southern California plays baseball today, but the Padres.

How do I root? How do I root? I guess I want the Angels over the Socks and the Cubs over the Dodgers. Sure. I'll go with that.

Ah Korean warmups. Soft piano music blasting away. A militaristic man barking orders at you while you stretch. Foreign countries are so foreign.

Mangold Hurling is where you take mangold roots and throw them as far as you can. And like any sport worth its salt, there's an association and a web page devoted to it.

"Away, mangold! Fly away as far as ye can!"

It's a common sport in various cultures, as evidenced by the black pudding throwing we learned about recently, to take something and throw it as far as you can and be judged by the distance and form you achieve.

Why is that? What prompts people to pick things up and see how far the thing can be thrown? It's like man is in a constant war against gravity.