A Quick Introduction

Hi, I’m Nathaniel Stoltz, and I’m excited to come aboard FanSided as the lead blogger for the San Diego Padres. I hope to provide readers with the most comprehensive and thorough coverage of the team that I can.

I’m probably unique among the bloggers on this network in that the team I’m blogging about isn’t my favorite team. I’m actually an Oakland A’s fan, and was asked to come aboard the FanSided team as the A’s lead blogger, but rather than move my A’s work here, I decided it would be a better fit for me to cover my favorite NL team, the Padres.

I’m a baseball fan first, before being a fan of any team, and I know plenty about all 30 major league teams. I could probably name at least 60-70 players in each organization and give at least a strengths-and-weaknesses breakdown of each, so rest assured that although the Padres aren’t my favorite team, I have plenty of knowledge and analysis to offer.

In fact, I see my A’s fanhood as something of an advantage here; I’ll be more objective about the team than most Padres fans, so I’ll have less of a bias. And don’t worry about me not watching the team: I actually live in Virginia, so I use MLB.tv to get my A’s games. I’ll be able to see every minute of Padres action there. I also have MiLB.tv, which often broadcasts the games of the Padres’ AAA affiliate, the Portland Beavers.

I’m a fairly sabermetrically-oriented writer, and you’ll probably see me pulling lots of stats off of Fangraphs. I’m also a big minor league expert, so I do a lot of pieces on the minors. San Diego has a fairly new-school front office, and given their budget constraints, they’re a very young team, so I feel that the Padres organization dovetails nicely with my own areas of expertise.

A quick “About Me:” I’m a 20-year-old junior at James Madison University (where Padres outfield prospect and former 1st-round supplemental pick Kellen Kulbacki went). I’m majoring in technical and scientific communication, which essentially means “taking jargon and putting it into plain language,” which I hope to use in making advanced statistics easily comprehensible to people.

I still run my A’s blog over at Bleacher Report, and I do occasional minor league features on OaklandClubhouse.com, which is the A’s site on Scout.com. I also chime in about the A’s with other AL West bloggers at HotStove.com. I’m hoping I’ll get the chance to be a Padres contributor for them as well, but that’s undecided right now.

That’s about all I have in the way of introduction. If you need to contact me for any reason, just shoot me an email at no.more.quad.a@gmail.com.

I hope that you enjoy my writing and that I can start building this site up.