Oh, Doctor! April 18

FAST STARTS AND SLOW STARTS

By Jerry Coleman for the Hall of Champions

The Padres are 8-6 midway through their third week of the season and the year's second home stand begins when the Arizona Diamondbacks play the Padres Wednesday and Thursday at Petco Park.

We’ve seen the Padres start impressively with two-of-three wins in San Francisco and then in their first home stand win four-out-of-six against Colorado and San Francisco for a 6-3 record.

But since then we’ve seen them struggle with two-of-three losses at Los Angeles and split two games at Wrigley Field against the Chicago Cubs, losing 12-4 on Monday night and then winning 4-3 Tuesday afternoon in 14 innings with another save by Trevor Hoffman.

What does it mean about the rest of the 2007 season?

I wish I knew, but mid-April is way too early in baseball to know how a season will develop based on a team’s fast start, slow start or up-and-down play.

In 1949, my first Major League season with the New York Yankees, we played without Joe DiMaggio from the start of the season until June. Joe had some bone spurs and when we left Fort Worth, Texas, to head north for the start the season, he wasn’t with us again un June.

We were without two other outfielders, too. Charlie Keller didn't play that year and Tommy Henrich was injured early in the season. The Yankees had finished third in 1948 behind Cleveland and Detroit, and there were a lot of questions about the team.

Writers were saying “Who’s this guy Coleman that hit .250 in the minors last year?" and "Who’s Bobby Brown and Bill Johnson?”

Well, DiMaggio came back in late June, June 25 or 26 I think it was, and we were leading Boston by eight games at the time. Joe hadn’t played since March, but he hit four home runs in the series and we won all three games to extend our lead to 11 games.

We needed every bit of that 11-game lead to hold off the Red Sox in September to win the pennant.

In the last series of the year against the Red Sox, we were down early in one game when Joe Page came on in relief in the third inning. The first thing Joe did was walk two batters and we were down 4-0 by the end of the inning.

But Joe pitched the rest of the game, 6 1/3 innings, and shut them down the rest of the way. We came back to win the game 5-4 as well as the pennant.

We weren’t picked to win the pennant in 1949, but starting in 1949 we won it the next five years, lost the sixth and won the next four.

The Yankees had a lot of fast starts and slow starts in my time with them, but we always left spring training with confidence that we couldn’t be beaten. That confidence and stability is the reason we won so many years.

The stability that the Padres have developed in recent years is one of the things I like about this year’s team. The character on the ball club – from manager Bud Black through his players -- is excellent.

I’ve seen a lot of good ballplayers, but I look at the character of the team. That’s what usually wins out by the end of the season.

The Padres have a lot character and players that play together as a team. Did you see those one-run wins against Colorado and San Francisco at Petco Park? The players were jumping around like they won the World Series. That means they’re pulling together as a team.

It’s too early to say what a 8-6 start means over the remainder of the season, but I like the character, the enthusiasm and the teamwork that I have seen so far on this team.