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).
| Figure | Published | Raw new | Clean new (Oct 2026) | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Franchise seasons counted | 57 | 57 | 58 | updated |
| Postseason appearances | 9 | 9 | 10 | updated |
| 2026 regular-season record | 55-53 in progress | 91-71 | corrected | |
| Postseason series record | 7-9 | 7-9 | 8-10 | updated |
| Sale approval | waits on 22 of 29 owners | unanimous Aug 17, 2026 | corrected | |
| FAQ deciding-game runs (2024+2025) | combined eight runs | 0 + 1 | corrected | |
| Payroll headline | about $1.5bn of payroll / cash spent | 1500.1 | $1,500.1M CBT tax payroll sum | corrected |
| Pennant chart first bar | years between pennants | debut to first pennant (15 years) | corrected | |
| Better record among untied series, 1995–2025 | 53.2% | 53.2% | 53.2% [47.2–59.3] | unchanged |
| 2025 attendance | 3,437,201 | 3,437,201 | 3,437,201 | unchanged |
| 2026 attendance | 3,347,081 | new | ||
| 70,000 DTC subscribers | stated | removed | unsourced_removed | |
| $858M owed five players | stated | removed | unsourced_removed | |
| Farm rank last of 30 | stated | removed | unsourced_removed |
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.
METHOD NOTES
Bootstrap rates in rate_bootstrap.csv: better record among untied series 0.5323 [0.4718–0.5927], n = 248; Padres postseason rate 10/58 = 0.1724 [0.0862–0.2759]; pennants per postseason (Lahman-era PS only) 0.2222 [0.0–0.5556], n = 9. See scripts/padres-data/METHODS_NOTE.md and DATA_DICTIONARY.md.
EDITOR'S NOTE
Part of our corrections series: we publish what changed, and why, whenever we fix a dataset. Human editorial direction; AI-assisted analysis per Artometrics workflow.
— Artometrics Editorial Desk