Wow. The Expos are making a run at it. Just five games out of the NL wildcard, they’ve dealt a bunch of prospects (shortstop Brandon Phillips being the centerpiece) to Cleveland for hard-throwing right-hander Bartolo Colon.

How’s this for a scenario: The two teams slated for contraction play well enough to make the playoffs, and make Bud Selig look like even more of a buffoon. Then the players go on strike, denying those teams the chance to actually play in the playoffs. Don’t laugh; look at what happened to the Expos back in 1994.

In Padre news, Dennis Tankersley has been promoted to Triple-A Portland, and Tagg Bozied has moved up to Double-A Mobile. Sean Burroughs begins rehab tonight at Portland, where among other things he’ll get a serious look at second base.

Xavier Nady had three hits last night and appears to be adjusting to the more advanced pitching. There’s an interesting discussion going on over at a Padre message board I recently discovered (in the sense that Columbus "discovered" America) about Nady’s upside. The names being thrown out for comparison are Pat Burrell, Paul Konerko, and Dean Palmer. These all seem like reasonable comps to me. Konerko is probably the one that Nady reminds me most of from an approach standpoint.

The potential downside of Nady? I was leafing through some old Sickels books the other night and discovered a disturbing similarity between Nady’s line at Elsinore at age 22 and that of former Angel and Padre third baseman George Arias in the same park at the same age 7 years earlier. Lest we be quick to dismiss this concern, recall that Arias came from a major university program and was very well regarded as a prospect–at least as well regarded as Nady is now.

I’m not trying to kill the mood, just looking at as many different angles as possible.