Josh Hader had been traded before. He learned the business side of baseball a long time ago -- well before he was dealt from the Brewers to the Padres last summer.
"My first year in pro ball ... I got traded, and honestly, I didn't know you could get traded that young," Hader said earlier this week. "I was like: 'I got traded? I didn't know you could do that yet.' I thought I was protected for another couple years -- I didn't know.
"To spend a long period of time in an organization getting to know people, that's hard because you're leaving those friendships. But I learned pretty quickly anything can happen in this game, and you've got to know that anything can happen."
Hader was drafted by the Orioles in 2012 and dealt to the Astros a year later. In 2015, he was traded to Milwaukee, where he made his big league breakthrough and developed into the sport's premier back-end weapon.
As such, Hader says, there are no hard feelings lingering from last summer’s trade. This week, he'll face his former club for the first time, having spent six seasons in Milwaukee -- six wildly successful seasons both individually and for the Brewers.
Sure, it was a bit jarring to have been dealt so suddenly from one playoff contender to another. But Hader looks back on it as a positive.
"It's not easy to be like: 'I'm getting traded, let's go start a new adventure,'" Hader said. "But sometimes it's good to just leave a place and start over, build new relationships. I wouldn't say there was a complacency, because there's never a complacency. If you get complacent, you lose a lot in this game. But you can get comfortable.
“You can get comfortable with your relationships, day-to-day routines, you have your coffee spots and your breakfast spots. Then you go and change it. You have to say: Well, look, you had your place there. Now you get to start over and find new places, new adventures and see a different part of the world. ... As long as you can look at it like that, it's pretty easy."
Hader quickly acknowledged that "easy" isn't the perfect word. It's easier said than done to acclimate to a new team and a new city. Hader’s wife had also just given birth to his son, and they were tasked with the process of migrating 2,000 miles southwest in the middle of a baseball season.
It didn't help that, on the field, Hader was in the midst of one of the roughest stretches of his career -- a stretch that continued into his early Padres tenure.
That story has been recited ad nauseam. By late September, Hader had returned to his old self, perhaps even better. He finished his season by setting a postseason record with eight consecutive strikeouts.
Hader is slated to become a free agent after the season. Whatever happens next, the Padres should view the deal as a success, considering the way Hader anchored their ‘pen last October and continues to do so. The Brewers, meanwhile, cratered after Hader’s departure last summer. But it might still work out for them in the long-term. They flipped Esteury Ruiz, a prospect in that deal, for William Contreras, their starting catcher.
Hader makes it clear he isn’t out to prove anything this week. He's just happy to see a few of his best friends.
"It's cool to see them," Hader said. "It'll be cool to face them. I keep in touch with them, just because I have a lot of friends over there. ... When you're in between the lines, it's cutthroat. But at the end of the day, when you're not facing somebody, you want the best for them. You want everybody to stay healthy; you want everybody to play well."
Honoring Johnny Ritchey
The Padres will look a bit different on Monday.
To commemorate the 75th anniversary of Johnny Ritchey breaking the Pacific Coast League's color barrier and the pro baseball color barrier on the West Coast, the Padres will wear their 1948 PCL uniforms.
It'll be a distinctly different look -- navy blue hats with a red "S" and navy blue lettering with red outlines on the jerseys.
What a cool way to honor Ritchey, a San Diego legend who attended San Diego High School and San Diego State University before joining the Army during World War II.
I wrote about Ritchey's journey a couple years ago. Amid his 10-year pro career, the two seasons he spent playing in San Diego held a special place in his heart. Ritchey caught for the Padres in 1948 and '49 and was a heck of a hitter -- according to baseball historian Bill Swank "a line-drive hitter, kind of like Tony Gwynn, everywhere he went, he hit .300."
Additionally, a mural of Ritchey will be unveiled on Friday at San Diego High School during a Breaking Barriers Forum, with every student in attendance receiving two tickets to Monday night’s game.