Ultimate Baseball Road Trip (111 page)

If ever a city paid its dues before earning a place in the Show, that city is San Diego. The PCL Padres migrated to town from Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1936. In just their second season in Southern California, the PCL Padres captured the league championship, buoyed by the play of slugging native son Ted Williams, who was just nineteen years old at the time. Theodore Samuel Williams was born in San Diego on August 30, 1918. He would fight in two foreign theaters of war and put the finishing touches on a Hall of Fame career with the Red Sox, before groundbreaking would take place for a new stadium in San Diego on Christmas Eve, 1965. A year and a half later, the Chargers dedicated the facility on August 20, 1967, with a preseason loss to the Detroit Lions. With a stadium in place, Major League Baseball awarded San Diego a National League franchise in May of 1968. Less than a year later, the Padres fielded their first starting nine.

Big league ball was not an immediate hit in San Diego. And while some might argue that hardball still hasn’t captured the hearts of sports fans in this town to the degree that it has in other West Coast cities, the baseball culture and interest in the team have grown considerably since the team’s early days. The Padres didn’t surpass the one million mark in home attendance in any of their first five campaigns and nearly jumped town for Washington, D.C., following the 1973 season. By early 1974, team owner C. Arnholt Smith had found a prospective buyer who planned to move the franchise to the nation’s capital. New uniforms were being manufactured, and the team’s front office employees were packing for the move. But at the last minute Ray Kroc, a San Diego native who had made his fortune building McDonald’s fast-food franchises, jumped in and purchased the team. Kroc vowed to make the Padres viable in his hometown.

The team was atrocious before Kroc took the helm. In their first five seasons, the Padres never finished closer than twenty-eight and a half games out of first place in the National League’s newly formed West Division. The team averaged just 600,000 fans per season during that time, or seventy-four hundred per home game. Ouch! By comparison, the Montreal Expos, who entered the National League at the same time, attracted a million fans in each of their first six seasons. And they were playing in the barren snowbelt known as the Great White North. It is important to note, however, that California baseball in general was not flourishing when the Padres entered the league. The Oakland A’s, California Angels, and San Francisco Giants did poorly at the gate in the late 1960s and early 1970s as well, attracting less than a million fans per year themselves. Only the Dodgers thrived, routinely welcoming two million per season to Dodger Stadium.

In any case, the Padres finished last again under Kroc in 1974, forty-two games behind the first-place Dodgers, but attendance jumped from 611,000 the year before to just north of one million, thanks to the ray of hope Kroc had provided. In the years ahead, the emergence of exciting rookies like Dave Winfield and Ozzie Smith, and the acquisition of veteran stars like Rollie Fingers, Gaylord Perry, Steve Garvey, and Goose Gossage, gave the Padres a foothold in San Diego.

Josh:
Didn’t San Francisco’s Willie McCovey play his final season with the Pads?

Kevin:
“Stretch” became “Big Mac” at the McDonald’s owner’s insistence.

In 1984 a San Diego team led by Tony Gwynn, Kevin McReynolds, Graig Nettles, and the tireless Garvey won three straight games in the National League Championship Series to post a come-from-behind three-games-to-two win against the Cubs and advance to the World Series. But Detroit proved too powerful for the Friars in the Series. Jack Morris tossed two complete games, leading the Tigers to a four-games-to-one victory.

In 1998 the Padres tasted postseason champagne again after beating the Braves four games to two in the National League Championship Series. But the Yankees swept the Padres in the October Classic. Although the Padres lost both of their home games in the Series, including the clincher, the 1998 World Series would represent one of Qualcomm’s greatest baseball moments. More than sixty-five thousand fans were on hand the night the Yankees closed out the series with a 3-0 shutout behind Andy Pettitte, Jeff Nelson, and Mariano Rivera in Game 4.

Concrete and massive, Qualcomm offered few features to tug at the heartstrings of romantic baseball fans. Large parcels of foul territory in the right-field and left-field corners were not visible from the infield due to the configuration of the seating bowl. The JumboTron would get so hot that fans in the back rows would feel the heat burning through their shirts. The foul poles were actually two feet behind the outfield fences. But the stadium did play host to some memorable moments, like Willie Mays’s six hundredth career home run in 1969, and the ten innings of shutout ball pitched by the Dodgers’ Orel Hershiser in 1988, which extended his consecutive scoreless innings streak to fifty-nine frames, breaking Don Drysdale’s Major League record. Hershiser didn’t pick
up the win, though, as the Padres prevailed 2-1 in sixteen innings. In 1995 another game went into extra innings tied at 0-0, as Pedro Martinez, then of the Montreal Expos, pitched nine perfect innings against the Padres before losing his perfect game and no-no in the bottom of the tenth. Martinez still got a 1-0 victory with help from his bullpen.

Perhaps Qualcomm’s most ignominious moment came in 1990 when Padres management made the ill-fated decision to let controversial actress Roseanne Barr sing the “Star Spangled Banner” before a game. After a purposely off-key rendition of the national anthem, Roseanne theatrically grabbed her crotch and spit. Though the comedian claimed she was parodying the antics of ballplayers, her joke was lost on the crowd, which booed lustily as she was escorted from the field by then-hubby Tom Arnold.

Kevin:
Didn’t she realize that San Diego is a town surrounded by Naval, Marine, and Coast Guard military bases?

Josh:
Yeah, it’s the home port of the Navy’s Pacific Fleet.

Kevin:
Talk about not knowing your audience.

The clip replayed on TV stations across the country for months, rarely alongside favorable commentary. At least Tom eventually moved on to bigger and better things with
The Best Damn Sports Show, Period,
which he has parlayed into an acting career.

Since its opening, The Pet has hosted its fair share of noteworthy baseball moments. The Pads lost the longest game in their history, a twenty-two-inning affair with the Colorado Rockies, by a score of 2-1 on April 17, 2008. A year earlier, Barry Bonds had hit his 755th home run at Petco on August 4, 2007.

Josh:
Some wouldn’t call that a shining moment.

Kevin:
True, but it’s a historical fact.

Josh:
It’s a part of baseball history that should be expunged. I mean, if they put an asterisk beside Roger Maris’ 61st, what are they going to do with this?

Kevin:
You’re going to write another letter to the commissioner, aren’t you?

Josh:
I’ve already sent several.

Petco hasn’t just served as a pitcher-friendly baseball yard since its opening in 2004. Some other funky events have played out on its lawn as well. During the Februarys of 2007–2009, it hosted the USA Sevens rugby tournament. And the stadium’s first-ever concert was a pretty sweet gig. The Rolling Stones played Petco in November 2005 as part of their “A Bigger Bang” world tour. Madonna also played The Pet on her “Sticky and Sweet” tour.

Kevin:
When are you going to remove that “music” from your iPod, by the way?

Josh:
When you acknowledge that Madonna is
the
visionary genius of our generation.

Whether hosting musical acts, rugby, or National League baseball games, Petco is a fine facility both inside and out. If there is any knock on it from the exterior, it’s that it doesn’t look much like a ballpark. It’s open, and appears obviously to be a stadium, but the sandstone walls and hanging gardens of the exterior buildings look like they could be adorning a mall in the city. There’s no dead giveaway whether Petco is a baseball park, a football stadium, or a soccer pitch. In avoiding some of the classic elements, such as red brick and green seats, the designers made the park more regionally appropriate, but left it fairly well disguised to those who may stop short of stepping inside to take in the fine field it surrounds. But this is a small knock if it is a knock at all. Who knows? Maybe Petco will set the new standard for ballpark aesthetics.

We missed the full Petco experience on the first road trip because the park wasn’t finished yet. Blame it on those silly lawsuits. We did, however, manage a game there on our second hardball odyssey, and we can tell you that in our first attempt at characterizing the park we were right about some things, and others, well, let’s just say we may have relied too heavily on the advance billing provided by the Padres’ press packet.

For instance, Petco is no “small-park.” The field dimensions are deep. And while its capacity of forty-six thousand (counting standing room) made it relatively small
compared to the several cookie-cutter parks that were still in operation in 2004, it’s not one of the smaller ballparks out there today, now that the cookie-cutters have gone the way of the spitball. In fact, it’s just about exactly in the middle of the pack as far as seating capacity goes. However, its wide open design gives most seats a clear view of the action, even if some feel a bit farther from the action than those at some parks.

As with many of the newer parks, nearly every seat in the lower bowl is a winner. Upstairs, meanwhile, an extended cantilever truss supporting the upper deck brings fans closer than usual to the playing field, and the unique design of the seating bowl offers fragmented “seating neighborhoods” that all point toward the plate at their own angle. Only a few of these sections suffer from underhang or blockage issues.

Padres management is committed to leaving a number of Field Level seats available for day-of-game purchase. We think this is a great idea and hope it catches on in other cities. So don’t rule out the possibility of nabbing decent last-minute seats. But do arrive at the box office early if you hope to score some of these tickets.

The Field Level extends thirty-nine rows on the infield and forty-four rows in the outfield. Yes, this is a deep first level. There are nearly fifteen thousand seats on the first level between the foul poles at Petco. Sections 101 and 102 are directly behind the plate, with even-numbered sections continuing down the left-field line and odd-numbered sections on the right. The first five rows of seats on the infield are reserved for members of the Padres Premier Club. The next best seats are in Rows 6–22 below the midlevel concourse in Sections 100–110, and these belong exclusively to season-ticket holders. These seats are very nice and have wait service. Farther back, the Field Reserved seats (Rows 36–44) are tucked underneath the Club Level. These should be avoided if possible because the overhang does block views of fly balls.

The best seats likely to be available to the average member of the ticket-buying public (read: you) are in Rows 26–35 of the Field Reserved sections just beyond the first- and third-base bags. Row 26 is the first row behind the walkway, which is set down low enough to not ruin the view for “front-row” seat holders. We recommend Sections 111 and 112, just beyond the corner bags. If you want to get closer to the field with a lower row number and are willing to sacrifice your proximity to the plate to do so, shoot for Field Box Sections 116 to 124 in the outfield.

The first row of seats in Section 124 near the Western Metal Building is Row 14. So if you want to sit down near the field, pass up that fifth-row seat in Section 120 or that third-row seat in Section 122, and aim for Section 114, Row 14. Just be advised that the large brick building immediately to your left may block your view of the left-field fence.

Sections 125 to 137 are located in right-field home run territory—with two levels of seating above them. The foul pole obstructs the view of the batter’s box for those in Section 127, and bisects the outfield for those in Section 125, especially seats 6–10 and on up. We recommend
avoiding 125 and 127 altogether. Section 131 also has foul-pole obstructions and should be avoided.