Finding things to celebrate can’t be easy for the Padres, who this fall wrapped up a ninth straight losing season and whose dismal play down the stretch may have prompted the late Ray Kroc, one of the franchise’s former owners, to amend his infamous tirade of 1974 to something like, “I’ve never seen such awful ballplaying in my life.”

Peter Seidler, however, is gamely trying to apply an inspiring spin to Pads ball.

The team’s general partner, Seidler has seized upon not just the familiar selling point — a youth movement headed by Fernando Tatis Jr., Chris Paddack and Baseball America’s second-ranked farm system — but also a development that’s not so well known.

The Padres franchise, despite the on-field futility, is enjoying robust economics.


Attendance at Petco Park rose last season, even as Major League Baseball’s overall attendance dropped. Expect home crowds to climb again in 2020, Seidler said, but his favorable spin concerned the next decade of Padres player payrolls, which he correlated to the team’s healthy financial outlook.

“We should be in the middle tier of MLB for the decade of the 2020s,” he said, while also noting that amount would be a higher level of spending on big-league talent, relative to the other MLB clubs, than the franchise has ever sustained.

“And the reason we can commit to that,” Seidler said in a recent chat, “is the great support that we have from our fans in San Diego, our sponsors and the really solid people in our organization who do great work so that people want to support us. ... We can afford to be in the middle. We’re going to run the operation cash on cash.”

Rather than “pounding our fists on the table saying looking at us,” Seidler said the team is, in effect, saying “thank you” to its supporters by putting more money into the payroll.


It wouldn’t be overly snarky, in light of chronic struggles on the field, if Padres fans were to reply: “Sounds good, Peter, but it’s time to win more games.”

The run of losing seasons matches the longest in franchise history, and back then, from 1969-1977, the Pads were an expansion outfit serving as a piñata in the six-team powerhouse that was the National League West.

While it stands to reason that rising in the payroll rankings will coincide with, and even contribute to racking up more victories on the field, Seidler and Executive Chairman Ron Fowler have seen many of their baseball men’s big investments come a cropper, starting with the $27-million extension to fragile veteran outfielder Carlos Quentin that the incoming owners approved in July 2012.

The on-field results could hardly have spanned a broader spectrum on the rare occasions that the payroll dwelled in MLB’s mid-tier under the previous Padres owner, John Moores, who operated in economic circumstances that were far less favorable to the franchise.


The payoff was nothing short of enormous in 1998, when a Padres team that stood 14th in payroll set a franchise record for victories (98) and reached the World Series.

That’s when voters approved a ballpark funding measure that in today’s dollars was worth more than $400 million in public money.

The outcome was altogether different a decade later when Moores signed off on CEO Sandy Alderson’s decision to ratchet up the payroll.

The Padres were coming off the franchise’s longest stretch of winning seasons, from 2004 through 2007, coinciding with the first four seasons at Petco Park.


Alderson said he normally would’ve leaned toward ramping down, not up. But he decided to try to leverage a core of stars (Adrian Gonzalez, Jake Peavy and Chris Young) into a World Series bid.

The 2008 payroll, at $73.4 million, was 18th in the big leagues, per the USA Today database that I used for this research. That was an increase of more than 25 percent from $58.1 million the previous season.

Bad from the start, the ’08 Pads ended up in last place with 99 defeats. Moores, who’d chafed a few times publicly about the hyper-growth of players salaries — growth the coincided with the industry’s exploding revenues — deemed it “insane” to have jacked up the payroll.

By then Moores was facing a divorce from his longtime wife, Becky, that ultimately led him to sell the team.


Seidler, the longtime head of a private equity firm in Los Angeles, is accustomed to his investments paying off.

And for both Seidler and Fowler, who did well in the beer distributorship game, their investment in the Padres seems to have paid off spectacularly, in no small part because MLB’s revenue growth has soared in that time, while revenue sharing has increased within the industry.

Forbes estimates the Padres franchise’s value has gone up $800 million, to $1.4 billion, since Seidler-Fowler took over in 2012. The purchase price was $800 million, including $200 million for the team’s 21 percent stake in Fox Sports San Diego, its TV broadcast partner. Forbes valued the franchise at $600 million upon the sale. The $200 million, it should be noted, per Fowler, was divvied among Padres shareholders who cashed out, including the groups headed by Moores (and by extension, his former wife) and Jeff Moorad.

In the first six seasons (2013-18) of the Fowler-Seidler era, Forbes.com reported the Padres averaged about $33 million in operating income (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization). Most years the club ranked in or near the upper third of MLB.


While MLB officials have disputed Forbes numbers over the years and Padres ownership has noted its own outsized efforts to pay down its chunk of ballpark debt, it’s a bright financial picture for a franchise in the industry’s fourth-smallest TV market.

Doing their part off the field, the Padres keep Petco Park immaculate. Ballpark ushers and vendors are Disneyland friendly. Fans’ food-and-drink options have expanded under Fowler-Seidler, who’ve consistently made themselves available to ticket holders and media.

Yet the thrill of playoff races and October baseball, not just soaring franchise valuation and stellar operating income, would seem part of the anticipated reward to buying an MLB club. While the home attendance could regularly rival the 3 million of Petco’s first season if the Padres were to live up to Seidler’s 2017 forcecast of five playoff berths in the 2020s, there’d be an emotional payoff, too.

“Sometimes there’s not a great correlation between spending money and winning,” Seidler said, “but we’re going to do our best to spend it carefully and with precision in a way that helps us achieve our goals, to bring the trophy to San Diego.”


There are no trophies for farm-system rankings, or franchise value seemingly tracking toward $1 billion in appreciation.