OCT 13, 2026 · Padres

Padres

What Changed When We Fixed the Data

We audited the Padres dataset behind our record-sale report, rebuilt it from Lahman 1969–2025 plus a verified 2026 season, and reconciled every number the July 2026 live page had published—including a corrupted HTML sync, stale sale copy, and an FAQ that claimed eight runs in two deciding games.

By Kyle McAuliffe · 2026-10-13 · 3 min

Executive summary. Research is only as good as its ledger, so we treat corrections as findings. We re-audited the data behind PADRES: Record Sale, Zero Championships, fixed a broken sync to the live HTML body, and recomputed every number we had published. The thesis survives: demand and tax payroll are solved; conversion is not; franchise values still track the market. What changed is the calendar. The sale is approved. Milwaukee ended 2026. The FAQ no longer claims eight runs in two winner-take-all games.

WHAT WE CHECKED

The July 2026 live page in src/content/blog/padres.md had lost four sections (Fifty-seven seasons, Preller doctrine, tax-bill section, expansion peers), spliced the expansion “alibi” paragraph onto the Wrigley opener, and left charts 1, 3, and 4 without working embeds. audioSrc pointed at /audios/padres.mp3 (SPA fallback) instead of /audios/padres-the-artometrics-of-paying-for-october.mp3. The Quarto source at articles/padres/ was intact; the publish merge was not.

We rebuilt the numeric ledger from Lahman’s 2025 database (Padres 1969–2025, CC BY-SA 3.0), added the completed 2026 season from Baseball-Reference, and fact-checked 91–71 against the MLB Stats API NL standings (see data/padres/verify/mlb_api_check.json). Competitive-balance-tax payrolls remain the Spotrac compilation in the July 2026 draft—labeled as tax payroll, not cash. One script reproduces the clean tables: python3 scripts/padres-data/clean_audit.py (rules in CLEANING_LOG.md, intervals in METHODS_NOTE.md).

OLD VS NEW

Published is what the July 2026 live page or sports-canon generator stated. Raw new recomputes from Lahman without changing the file. Clean new is the October 2026 audit, including 2026 and copy fixes. Brackets on rates are 95% bootstrap ranges (5,000 draws, seed 20261013).

The full machine-readable ledger is data/padres/clean/old_vs_new.csv (mirrored under public/data/articles/padres/data/).

WHY THE BIG NUMBERS MOVED

Calendar, not math. Lahman through 2025 was already correct on wins, attendance, and the 132/116/11 coin-flip split. The step change is 2026: a third straight postseason, a wild-card sweep of the Cubs, and an NLDS loss to the Brewers—the club the July draft had used as a low-payroll alibi.

Copy and sync, not sources. The eight-run FAQ line had no box-score support (Games 4–5 of the 2024 NLDS were shutouts; the 2025 wild-card deciding game was 1–3). The sale paragraph was stale after the unanimous August vote. The pennant-gap chart mislabeled the first bar; the axis now distinguishes debut-to-first-pennant from gaps between flags.

Wording on payroll. Summing six Spotrac competitive-balance-tax payrolls is not the same as cash spent. The report now says $1,500.1 million of tax payroll, with 2026 still a July snapshot.