With the Padres sweeping the Braves to start the season 4-0 for the second time in franchise history (1984 being the other year when the Padres went to the World Series for the first time), some thoughts from this weekend:

• Luis Arraez being 0-13 to start the season was not on my Bingo card. He does have one walk so far and did start off 0-10 in his first two games last year.
• Gavin Sheets continues to have good at bats as he was in Spring Training.
• Xander and Jake had some nice hits this series (Jake’s HR to take the lead and ultimately be the difference is typical Jake coming up with big hits) but the strikeouts by both (Jake 6 strikeouts in 13 ABs and Xander 5 in 11 ABs) is reminiscent of last year.
• Day games in April are pretty cold (only one true night game this weekend on Friday) and at least for me, preferable to summer day games when the sun is beating down on you pretty much the whole game on the first base side unless your seats are far back under the overhang. I get the Padres were on the first base side at Jack Murphy/Qualcomm Stadium but wonder why they didn’t put the home dugout on the third base side considering that side is pretty much in the shade the whole time during day games.
• For the jersey geeks like myself, during this homestand the home pinstripes and the Sunday camos are back to using the larger names on the back with the smaller arch like in 2023 and earlier after the whole 2024 jersey fiasco. If you look on the Padres Instagram, you can see this year’s camo jersey vs last year’s to see the difference. But interestingly, this year’s City Connect jersey still has the same smaller lettering and larger arch like last year. Maybe Nike doesn’t want to update the City Connect since this is the last year of using them? Which seems weird since it doesn’t seem that difficult to make the letters bigger and stitch them on like the other jerseys since they have to do them at a minimum for new players on the team.