SAN DIEGO — I don’t know which baseball truth is more absurd:

That at age 21, Detroit Tigers rookie Kevin McGonigle has resembled an All-Star hitter;

Or that because the San Diego Padres have been so good at making Major League Baseball more popular, they have less chance to draft someone as promising as McGonigle.

Let’s start with McGonigle.

Based solely off his first two games, I’ll make a point of watching the Tigers this year. The 5-foot-9 rookie infielder looks like a special hitter with sharp instincts on the basepaths.

“To be that good at 21 would be awfully nice,” Padres manager Craig Stammen said.

It took guts for general manager Scott Harris and manager A.J. Hinch to promote someone so young — McGonigle won’t be 22 until August — to a Tigers club in win-now mode.

“He has a slow heartbeat and a clear head,” said Hinch, a former big-league catcher. “His swing is very sound.”

Give an A-plus grade to Tigers scouting director Mark Conner and Detroit’s area scout who went to bat for McGonigle.

“He is one of the best pure high school hitters in the class,” Conner said in July 2023, after drafting the lefty 37th out of Bonner High School in Drexel Hill, Pa.

Conner, a former Padres scouting director who was overseeing his first Tigers draft, smartly agreed to pay $550,000 above the $2.3 million slot value to convince McGonigle to forgo a scholarship and NIL money with Auburn.

So what’s this about the Padres being penalized for making baseball more popular?

Consider the pick the Tigers used to get McGonigle: it was one of the 15 “competitive balance” picks MLB hands out every year.

The Padres don’t get these plums anymore.

Teams eligible for the picks sit in one of the 10 smallest markets or fall among the bottom 10 in revenue, per MLB.

The Padres land among the 10 smallest media markets. They’re behind every club but Kansas City, Cincinnati, Milwaukee and the Sacramento-based Athletics, per Nielsen’s 2024-25 ratings.

But for a while now, the Padres haven’t been getting any competitive balance picks — come the next draft in July, it’ll be four years in a row they didn’t get one.

That’s four picks that would’ve fallen between either the first and the second round, or the third round and the fourth round.

The Padres haven’t qualified as a bottom-10 revenue team since they transformed themselves into steady contenders. And that seems to be why they’re not getting these picks.

Read that again. The Padres are a small-market team. But because they’ve grown the revenue pie much larger, MLB is making it harder for them to seed their farm system.

Does it make sense to punish a small-market team that’s finished fifth, second, fourth and second out of 30 teams in attendance?

Seems absurd.

It’s believed that the list of teams that get competitive balance picks is collectively bargained.

The no-picks stretch for the Padres, indeed, has come in every full year since the current CBA was adopted.

Maybe other owners didn’t like how Peter Seidler, the team’s late chairman, went about turning the Padres into a hot ticket, running up as much debt as he did.

Do you think the same 29 owners will like it when the Padres are soon sold, and the price sets an MLB record or comes close to it?

“It should be a performance-driven sport for everybody — players and owners,” player agent Scott Boras said Saturday.

The labor pact is set to expire in December.

Attention, next Padres owner:

On this issue, among others, you need to go to bat for your team.

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