Off Topic » In an almost annual exercise

SAN DIEGO (AP) —Larry Bowa Jersey , the San Diego Padres are searching for a new hitting coach after Matt Stairs was fired Tuesday following just one year on the job.The rebuilding Padres continued to rank at or near the bottom of the majors in key offensive stats under Stairs.His replacement will be the Padres’ 10th hitting coach since Petco Park opened in 2004.While saying that he felt Stairs did a good job with mostly younger players, general manager A.J. Preller said he and manager Andy Green decided that the team needed a different approach. The team is expected to promote someone from within the organization.“We’re wanting a different message, a different voice,” Preller said. “We have some other guys in mind who have real upside. I’m pretty realistic that it was a younger roster, with developing players. From a performance standpoint we didn’t have tons of guys who improved. It’s not like the entire team overachieved. We did have some improvement, but at the end of the day, sitting down with Andy and talking about it, we thought maybe a different voice, a different connection point will hopefully lead to better performance.”Stairs was hired last offseason to replace Alan Zinter, who was fired on Sept. 1, 2017. Green said then that the team needed “a different voice” to tutor the batters.Possible replacements include assistant hitting coach Johnny Washington and Morgan Burkhart, the hitting coach at Triple-A El Paso.The Padres also fired infield coach Josh Johnson on Tuesday.The Padres were last in the majors in on-base percentage at .297, tied for second-to-last with a .235 batting average and tied for third-to-last with a .380 slugging percentage. They had the second-most strikeouts, 1,523, or 9.4 per game.Stairs spent the 2017 season as the hitting coach for the Philadelphia Phillies, his first professional coaching position. He played parts of 19 seasons in the major leagues with 12 different franchises http://www.philliesfanproshop.com/authentic-jim-bunning-jersey , including the Padres in 2010.The Padres expected to be better this year than their 71-91 finish in 2017 but were last in the NL West at 66-96. ATLANTA (AP) — Hank Azaria attended a baseball game at Turner Field a few seasons ago.He can’t believe what it’s become.“I don’t even recognize it,” Azaria said incredulously, glancing out on the former ballpark now known as Georgia State Stadium. Even though it was converted to college football after the Atlanta Braves left for the suburbs , the stadium worked just fine as the stand-in for a fictional Florida spring training site in Azaria’s IFC show “Brockmire.” In it, he portrays a tart-tongued baseball announcer trying to recapture his former glory after a failed marriage, a very public meltdown and struggles with addiction.“You’ve gotta put a lot of fake palm trees everywhere,” quipped Maurice Marable, who came aboard as director in the second season. “If you tell the audience they’re in Florida, they’ll believe you.”The first two seasons were a no-holds-barred look at what happens to Azaria’s character, popular Kansas City announcer Jim Brockmire, when he learns of his wife’s serial infidelity. He has a profanity-laced breakdown right in the booth, which leads to a decade-long descent into pretty much every vice known to man.While Brockmire revolves largely around Azaria’s ample comedic skills, it took a very dark turn in Season 2. Brockmire dealt with the death of his horrific father and an increasingly reckless lifestyle of booze, pills and powder that culminates in a near-fatal game of Russian roulette.“This is a comedy?” Marable remembered asking when approached about the series. “But the thing about comedy for me is that I tend to gravitate toward comedy that is really based in something, that is based and grounded in something that’s real. The idea of following a character — especially Jim Brockmire, who’s in a constant journey of redemption of some sort — it just has to feel real. Funny comes from real pain. Funny comes from real awkward situations.”After being renewed for two additional eight-episode seasons, Azaria & Co. arrived in Georgia to film at various sites in the Atlanta area. Season 3 will begin airing on IFC in April.The show has already filmed at SunTrust Park Jim Thome Jersey , the new home of the Braves, as well as minor-league parks in nearby Macon and Rome. Historic Oakland Cemetery, where Bobby Jones and Margaret Mitchell are buried, was passed off as a cemetery in New Orleans — where, on the show, Brockmire earns a shot to get back to the big leagues with a gig at a Triple-A club. French Quarter revelry was depicted in suburban Conyers. It wasn’t much of a stretch to transform Georgia State Stadium into King Venom Vape Cartridge Stadium, Oakland’s fictional spring training home set in central Florida.Joel Church-Cooper, who developed the show after hooking up with Azaria to shoot a “Funny Or Die” short in 2010, was incredulous that the Braves abandoned a stadium that was only two decades old . In a fitting twist, he reveals that the third season of “Brockmire” allowed him to take a jab at spending billions of dollars in public money on sports venues.“Don’t get me started,” said Church-Cooper, wearing a vintage Boston Braves cap. “They could’ve fixed this place up and made it fantastic.”Azaria, an avid New York sports fan, based his character on former Big Apple broadcasters Bob Murphy and Phil Rizzuto.“I always thought that this was a funny way for a human being to express himself, especially if he wasn’t in the booth,” Azaria said, morphing into his Jim Brockmire voice. “Is he always talking like this? What’s happening? I tried for many years to find a comedic premise that would work.”A potential movie deal fell through http://www.philliesfanproshop.com/authentic-scott-kingery-jersey , and it was tough finding a network that would green-light a series based around baseball.“There was a lot of reticence from a lot other networks because, let’s face it, the demographics of baseball are bad,” Church-Cooper said. “The average baseball viewer is a white man who’s 58. That’s tough if you make money in the entertainment business if that’s your average viewer.”Azaria has promoted the show on MLB Network and lined up numerous figures associated with the game for guest-starring spots, including Joe Buck, Bob Costas and Hall of Famer George Brett.But Major League Baseball has been reluctant to fully embrace “Brockmire,” which is not really surprising given the strong language, rampant alcohol and drug use, and all the tawdry shenanigans that were such a big part of the first two seasons. That forced producers to tread lightly to avoid the legal wrath of MLB; for example, actual team nicknames are only hinted at but never used.Church-Cooper considers that an opportunity missed.“One of the reasons baseball is struggling with the younger demographic is because it does seem very stodgy, does seem to hold very tight to traditions and the way things used to be,” he said. “You know, everyone who works on the show loves baseball. I think that comes through even as we sort of tweak it, even though a central tenant as we go along in the show is that baseball is dying. We don’t want it to die. That’s one of the reasons we made the show.”