On Righteous Indignation
As a Padres fan living 10 time zones away from San Diego, I’ve gotten into the habit when I wake up of spending a bit of time in the morning catching up on what happened in #PadresTwitter the night before. Often it doesn’t take much more than a few minutes, but every now and then something significant will have occurred while I was sleeping, with the result that I’ll have quite a backlog of tweets to catch up on. It’s kind of fun, in a way, because I live through the moment in reverse order, with the reactions to whatever it was that set people off showing up on my timeline first and then the spark only making itself clear as I scroll further down.
So it was yesterday morning when I woke up to find that, at long last, a significant portion of #PadresTwitter had arrived at the point of exasperation with the franchise and its current ownership group. Here are a couple of examples of what I’m talking about:
There are much more just like these two, but you get the idea. The reaction on Twitter has been particularly interesting because, earlier in the offseason, the disagreements amongst #PadresTwitter about what moves the team should make were threatening to tear the community apart. But almost over night, it seems, everyone has agreed that enough is enough, and that rather than fighting with each other we should be directing our anger towards those who legitimately deserve it. To reaffirm the sentiment in the tweet above, it IS glorious to see, because the objective truth is the current Padres ownership group has pulled the wool over a lot of peoples’ eyes. I wrote “at long last” above because, as I’ve made clear on this site before, I have felt this way for about a year now and I was starting to get a little perplexed as to why more people didn’t share my perspective. It is a legitimate struggle to name five positive things this ownership group has done since taking control of the franchise. This is especially true if, like me and plenty of others, you are a Padres fan who is not provided the opportunity to attend games in person. The improvements ownership has made to Petco may be great but I’m watching games on MLB.tv; all that matters to me is the on-field product. Perhaps that is why I felt my exasperation more acutely than others - growing up it didn’t really matter if the Pads were good or shit because it was still fun to go to the games, but it’s a bit different when you’re watching on your computer from Cape Town. (It was, of course, much better when they were good but a day at the ball yard’s a day at the ball yard, no matter who wins.)
Perhaps the best thing the current ownership has done is hire someone with a good eye for young talent. It remains to be seen whether A.J. Preller is actually a decent GM or not, but his ability to spot talented Latin American teenage baseball players is beyond reproach. Of course he also made Wil “North Carolina Mexican food” Myers the face of the franchise, so… (Entre gustos no hay disgustos, and the comment didn’t offend my pride as a San Diegan or any of that shit, it’s just that “North Carolina Mexican food” isn’t a thing and if you think it is it’s possible you are an idiot.)
I’m not going to rehash all the reasons I think Fowler is a shitty owner, but it is worth emphasising that the thing that has seemingly broken the camel’s back in this case is the precise thing that it should have been: not uniforms, not food options at the stadium, not even Fowler’s behaviour in the media, but refusal to spend money to improve the team. This is different than merely spending money, which they have done - James Shields, Wil Myers, and Eric Hosmer can attest to that. But even in the moment those deals were considered anything from questionable (Shields) to downright foolish (Myers and Hosmer). What the fans want is for that money to be spent shrewdly, and on players who will fill the holes that exist in the team’s lineup with players who can make a significant contribution to winning. A number of articles have been written this offseason demonstrating the correlation between team payroll and playoff success, but that has been the case pretty much forever. Padres fans are not (for the most part…) stupid, we don’t expect the team to consistently run a payroll similar to the Dodgers or Yankees. But when players like Harper and Machado (or any other good free agent you want to mention) are available for only slightly more than what James Shields was given and the ownership recuses themselves from the bidding with the kind of obviously bullshit reasons they have given so far, it’s understandable that fans would be upset. In fact, it’s probably exactly what is needed, because it feels like Fowler and Seidler have not been held accountable for their failings to this point. From what I can tell, this stems from two things: the 2014-15 offseason, and the fact that Ron Fowler wasn’t Jeff Moorad. However, the shine wore off that offseason pretty damn quickly and people are finally waking up to the realisation that just because Fowler isn’t trying to buy the club via a payment plan doesn’t mean he’s a good owner. Once the blinders fall from a fanbase’s eyes it’s hard to get them back on and no amount of Kevin Acee/Union-Tribune shilling about how great an owner Fowler is will change that.
This offseason has made it clear that, for much as he talks about winning, Ron Fowler’s primary concern is making money off the Padres. I don’t think anybody would be opposed to that if the team were winning. But giving a millionaire (billionaire?) your money and then being forced to watch the slop that the Padres have become is (or at the very least should be) a step too far for even the most devoted fans. Despite our reputation, San Diego fans are good sports fans. We just rarely are given a reason to show it. Like virtually every single city in the country - here’s looking at you, Royals fans - we want to support a winner. Petco’s very existence is proof of that. But it has been almost a decade since the Padres have given us any reason to believe in them, longer if you discard the fluke that was 2010. Baseball is supposed to inspire the whole range of emotions. That’s essentially all we get as fans, if you think about it. We give our money, our time, our mental energy, and we get back different emotions. Sometimes those emotions are positive and sometimes they are negative, but the deal is supposed to be that we get the whole range, from joy to frustration to elation to despair. And by sharing those emotions with others, we are able to build a sense of identity and community and solidarity - I understand you and you understand me because we have experienced the same joy and despair. That’s what people mean when they talk about a city being energised by a successful sports team, and in the digital age it’s how something like #PadresTwitter comes to be. When a fan uses “we” when talking about a team, he or she is really talking about the community rather than the team itself. Under Ron Fowler and Peter Seidler’s ownership, the Padres have inspired nothing aside from bitterness and resentment. Hopefully January 14, 2019 is the day that we decided, as a community, to demand better.