San Diego Padres news: Draft update, disappointment rankings, second-half reset

SEATTLE — Good morning from the Pacific Northwest where the San Diego Padres will not be taking part of tonight's Home Run Derby, but will have more draft picks as Day 2 of the MLB Draft gets underway.

In case you missed it, the Padres had just one pick on the draft's first day, selecting Dillon Head, an outfielder from Homewood-Flossmoor High School in Illinois, with the 25th overall pick.

“I think there’s sneaky juice in there offensively,” Padres scouting director Chris Kemp told reporters, including MLB.com's AJ Cassavell. “He’s a guy that goes line to line and works good ABs. Real excited about his skill set.”

here. Head will be the only pick for the Padres until the team selects again at number 96 later in today's third round.

Are the Padres really the most disappointing team in MLB from the first half of the season? According to Scott Roche, who writes for Friars on Base and also our sister site at CallToThePen.com, the answer is yes.

In this article, Roche ranks the Padres at number one, followed closely by the New York Mets, the team that San Diego just took two of three games from at Petco Park before the All-Star break began.

So are the Padres really more disappointing than the Mets or St. Louis Cardinals in the NL? It's a question that is worthy of some arguments, but San Diego seems to have found its stride a bit before the break. Will that continue for the rest of July and beyond? If so, whatever ranking from the first half of the season will certainly disappear.

While here in Seattle for the All-Star Game, we had the chance to chat exclusively with Padres top prospect Jackson Merrill before he played in the Futures Game. You can read that here.

here.

Also, we had a little fun with one of our followers on Twitter who decided to pair Padres players with the various Taylor Swift Eras. With Swift's tour in full swing, we liked the idea and riffed on it ourselves with Fernando Tatis Jr., Manny Machado, Ha-Seong Kim and more here.