Lightly cleaned up from the auto-transcription for readability — ad breaks, music segments, and a few off-topic tangents trimmed out.

Hello and welcome into the Skraby Show for September 3rd, 2026. Today’s roundtable had some great topics we’ll get into, plus our daily gripe at the end, where I’ve been mulling over this Good Good golf situation.

Before we get into any of that: the National League MVP has been decided in my mind, and it’s Pete Crow-Armstrong. If Shohei Ohtani wins this award, that tells us the league really wants to keep pumping Ohtani up, because Crow-Armstrong hit another home run tonight. On the season he’s hitting .280 with a .947 OPS, 39 home runs, 93 RBIs, and 32 stolen bases. Last year he had 31 home runs and 95 RBIs — he’s already got 39 and 93 with a walk total up about 44 over last year’s pace, and his OPS was .768 a year ago. That’s incredible growth. If Ohtani wins this award over that season, it’s a sham. The award is a sham.

The Yankees are coming to town, and I’m genuinely curious whether it’s just because they’re the Yankees — I look at the schedule every year and think about which visiting teams I’d want to see, and the Yankees are one of those, mostly because they’ve been a huge part of my sports life. It’d be even better with Aaron Judge in the lineup, since I’ve never actually seen him play live, but Aaron Boone has said Judge is more likely to return on the Yankees’ next home stand, so don’t count on it — though he is traveling with the team. People are already reselling tickets for this series at big markups. The Yankees will be facing some strong Padres starters this weekend, and that’s part of why I titled tonight’s video “What should we worry about next?” — because there’s plenty to worry about, even if a lot of it could go away in the snap of a finger.

Right now I’m not feeling great about this offense. Since the All-Star break, the Padres have split their games in a way that’s hard to ignore. In the 25 wins, they’re hitting .311 with an .886 OPS, scoring 6.4 runs a game, with 40 home runs and 154 RBIs. In the 18 losses — before tonight’s Reds game — they’re hitting .190 with a .583 OPS, scoring right around three runs a game, and hitting more than double the home runs in wins compared to losses. That’s a 303-point OPS swing. I’m not totally sure what happens when this lineup goes cold, or why they can’t seem to figure out young pitching — the roundtable brought up that Paul Skenes comes into a series pitching terribly and then dominates the Padres, which tells me something’s off with the approach at the plate. Joseph put it well: when this offense goes cold, it goes ice cold. They’ve struck out 152 times in losses versus 171 in wins.

Nineteen games remain in the regular season, and I think it really comes down to the Padres and the Diamondbacks. Arizona is pesky, annoying, and not going away, so the last three games of the year against them at home are going to be enormous. Honestly, I don’t care if we finish 81-81 as long as we’re in the playoffs — if the Diamondbacks lose ground, I’m fine with that, even though they could always get hot. Miami is only two games back and St. Louis three, so they’re not fully buried either, but I don’t think those young teams have the experience to feel that playoff pressure the way a team fighting for its life would.

I want to talk about Adrián Morejón, because he’s been awesome — the bullpen overall has been incredible, but I think he’s starting to show signs of fatigue. He’s done a ton of heavy lifting this year. We talk about Mason Miller not getting enough work because he only comes in when the game is tied or the Padres are winning, but Morejón pitches in any situation, which makes him the real workhorse of this bullpen. Since July 21st his ERA is 0.45, his sinker is averaging close to 100 miles an hour, and lefties are hitting under .200 against him — he’s exactly what the Padres need in the eighth inning. But he’s being used a lot, and not in short stints either — some outings go two innings, and he’s throwing more multi-inning outings in the second half than the first. Against the Pirates he threw two innings in an extra-inning game, then came back the very next day and got another inning. I do think he’ll get it done in October, but I’m a little concerned about how much he’s already pitched, especially given he’s already had Tommy John surgery once. I’m not saying a couple of extra outings is going to blow out his elbow, but there’s a lot of stress accumulating on that arm, and Mason Miller gets the save while Morejón is the one getting you to the point where Miller can even enter the game.

Switching gears — the Clippers situation with Kawhi Leonard got the book thrown at them over alleged salary cap circumvention. I don’t want to accuse anyone of anything, but it feels like Kawhi is getting let off relatively easy considering his uncle was reportedly running the deal — something tells me he had to know at least something about it. The Clippers say the NBA is out to get them, the NBA says its investigation showed they cheated, and honestly I don’t know who’s telling the truth here. I lean toward believing the NBA, but there are a lot of unanswered questions.

On the Good Good golf ad situation — I’ve been thinking this over for a while and wanted to get it right before saying anything. If you missed it: Good Good, a golf apparel brand, put out a co-branded driver ad with Callaway based loosely on the movie Obsession, where a guy is so obsessed with his driver that he shoves a woman to the ground to keep her from taking it. Without the context of the movie reference, it just looks like a guy shoving a woman over golf equipment, and it’s a bad ad — genuinely strange that nobody flagged it in review. After it went viral, Callaway pulled the partnership, Dick’s and Golf Galaxy pulled the merchandise, and Golf Channel canceled an entire season of Big Break that had already been filmed in partnership with Good Good — meaning golfers who competed on that show, through no fault of their own, don’t get the platform they earned. Good Good’s CEO, Matt Kendrick, was fired and then went on social media blaming Callaway for approving the ad and then hanging him out to dry, which didn’t help his case. Here’s what’s been bugging me: why does this ad get a full death penalty when we routinely look past actual domestic violence in sports? Guys get arrested for real domestic violence and are back on the field getting cheered a year later like nothing happened — that’s not rare. One of the only players who actually got a real career-ending consequence for domestic violence was Ray Rice, and that was years ago. I don’t think what Good Good did was okay, and I don’t think the CEO handled the fallout well by fighting back publicly instead of owning it, and Callaway shouldn’t get off the hook either since they approved the ad in the first place. But it was a bad commercial, not actual violence, and I think there’s been some overreaction in how far the punishment has gone — especially for the people on that TV show who had nothing to do with any of it.