All these years later, the Chargers finally decide to leave town and in their wake, what does San Diego get from the Padres as pitchers and catchers launch spring training this week?

Another overmatched Padres team. Another MLB franchise racing to the bottom.

Padres ownership headed by Peter Seidler and Ron Fowler is entering its fifth full season and has yet to field a squad that could spot the pennant race through the Hubble Telescope, let alone finish with a winning record.

If the Padres catch fire this year, all would be forgiven. A hot baseball club would rev up San Diego and muffle the sounds of Chargers boss Dean Spanos as he croons “L.A. Woman.”


Not happening, barring a miracle that would make the ’69 Mets blush.

Vegas’ betting-line on the Pads is 64.5 victories, which means around 100 defeats.

Even if they’re really lucky, a ninth losing season in 10 years probably awaits San Diego’s baseball team.

For the 25-plus years prior to that span, far more often, the Padres, though never a sustained juggernaut, found success less elusive.


Now and again they were big league in product, not just ticket prices.

Heck, you could watch Padres games on “free TV” for several of those years, and back then, you’d see future Hall of Famers, or mere-stellar others, such as regulars Ozzie Smith, Dave Winfield, Tony Gwynn, Roberto Alomar, Fred McGriff, Garry Templeton, Steve Garvey, Gary Sheffield and Benito Santiago.

In effect, the Padres season ahead shapes up as another glorified audition. Selling what they can, hucksters will tout Padres “hustle” and “grit,” as if it’s a virtue for big leaguers to run out groundballs.

Best-case reasonable scenario, it won’t be until 2019 that the Seidler-Fowler group gives San Diego a winning team.


Seven-plus years after they bought the franchise.

Seidler and Fowler come off as such decent people, the positive image they project may temper the view of the franchise’s on-field rut.

Seidler is a pleasant man, a cancer survivor.

As a boss, he is long in patience and loyalty.


Amid another losing season last year he said of A.J. Preller, the team’s general manager since Aug. 2014, that he can keep the job as long as he wants.

If Preller produces one winner, presumably Seidler will lobby Cooperstown to send a bronze sculptor to Petco Park.

Fowler, a San Diego philanthropist deluxe, gives money away like he can’t hold onto it.

His foundation has bettered the lives of scores of at-risk teens. His checkbook has aided several local schools.


The $25 million he and wife Alexis donated to San Diego State last month was the largest gift to the school in its 119-year history.

Not to slight the good deeds of the Spanos family, but $25 million is nearly double the $13 million the Chargers Community Foundation, created in 1995, has provided in services and resources to youth-oriented programs in San Diego County.

Seidler is aces at running a private equity firm. Fowler is a whiz-bang in the beer distributorship game.

But a reasonable conclusion is that when they bought the Padres, neither man was ready for the uniquely rough task of building up a big-league baseball franchise.


Dexterity is especially needed in a bottom-five media market. Due to MLB economics, it’s a tougher test than the Spanoses faced in San Diego.

“In major league baseball there’s still quite a significant correlation between spending and success,” University of Michigan sports economist Stefan Szymanski said last year, via the radio show Freakonomics.

“But if you look at something like the NFL, of course, where the difference in wage-spending budget between the top team and the bottom team is negligible, there’s almost no scope statistically for the money to make a difference.”

Yet, the valuations of even smaller-market MLB clubs like the Padres continue to soar. Regional sports networks, advantaged by advertisers’ thirst for live sports content, pump money into the industry.


Seidler and Fowler were awarded the team in August 2012 because they could meet the rising price.

Unwilling or unable to keep pace, movie producer Thomas Tull bowed out that June.

Aspects of the Padres auction were atypical. Not only did Fowler broker the negotiations, Seidler partnered with him afterward and named him Padres Executive Chairman and control owner.

As it turned out, $200 million in Padres TV money was front-loaded into the deal and — whoosh — forwarded on a proportional basis to majority owner John Moores, minority owner/Vice Chairman Jeff Moorad and other shareholders who chose to cash out.


The pie-slicing passed muster with then-MLB Commissioner Bud Selig, which didn’t make it any less concerning to a sector of Padres fans.

Eyes wide open, Seidler and Fowler said they regarded the $200 million as the cost of doing business.

Even so, the loss of close to 20 percent of a 20-year TV deal’s fixed income was a blow to a baseball operation that already faced a steep climb in the well-heeled National League West.

Financing aside, Tull presented as an intriguing candidate. He had the good sense to align with Padres Hall of Fame outfielder Gwynn.


Not that he opposed the other bidders, but Gwynn, who played for the franchise from 1982-2001 and continued to live in San Diego afterward, said Tull held great promise as a potential Padres steward. “It makes too much sense,” Gwynn said, “so it’ll never happen.”

Despite the soaring cost, Seidler-Fowler got the Padres for a bargain at $800 million (including a hefty chunk of debt) in light of recent reports that Miami Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria has a $1.6-billion handshake agreement to sell his team.

The rub is that Padres valuations have continued to soar almost irrespective of how many losing seasons the team strings together, or how far its TV and radio ratings plummet.

A boon to Padres investors is the Petco Park experience that attracts a large number of fans who either root for the Padres opponent or deem a Padres victory trimmings to a pleasant outing.


Baseball ambiance sells, especially in coastal San Diego at a gorgeous ballpark.

Going large on rebuilding the team, as the Padres are doing, is nothing new in today’s MLB. Role models for it under the recent labor pact were the Royals, Rays, Astros and Cubs.

Many franchises, in response to the economic system, act as if they have to be really bad before they can be really good.

I’d prefer MLB operate as does English soccer, so as to increase the relevance of games of downtrodden teams.


Prodding chronic losers to actually win games, relegation to a lesser league awaits clubs that continuously finish near the Premier League’s bottom. Relegation isn’t too rough on the fans, because in a lesser league, their team stands to compete for the title.

At any rate, smaller-market teams like the Padres have to figure out if they are either contending or rebuilding.

Odds are ultra-steep against them doing both.

The best approach, said Cubs architect Theo Epstein, is to stay out of the middle.


Learning on the job, Padres leaders probably set the franchise back a number of years when they authorized Preller to trade away prospects (some of whom appear to be pretty darn good) and load up on pricey veterans. Also as part of a win-now strategy that brought in veteran pitcher James Shields, the Padres forfeited a top-15 draft pick valued by several clubs at well over $15 million. And, in trade talks for veteran Justin Upton, they passed on a Mets pitching prospect who became a Tigers standout.

As refreshing as it was to see a gung-ho approach, the results fell far short of ownership’s forecast of a playoff berth.

Baseball can be a metal-spikes jab to the shins, not only for the players but a team’s top bosses.

As for Padres ownership’s top hire, Mike Dee as president and CEO in July 2013, the move looks like a miss, although Preller stands to vindicate Dee if he builds the Padres into a sustainable winner.


Dee’s tenure was uneven, even stormy. Amid growing discontent with Dee among Padres fans, Seidler-Fowler stood by the CEO.

Then in October, the team announced Dee’s departure without providing a specific reason for it. Four months earlier, Seidler had told the Union-Tribune that he expected Dee “to be our CEO for a long, long time.”

Know this: Tull never would’ve hired Dee so long as Gwynn had a say.

Suffice that Gwynn wasn’t a Dee fan when the two worked for the Padres in the late 1990s.


What excites the Padres faithful now is the youth movement Preller is engineering.

More so than past administrations, the Padres are saying, to heck with trying to win 80 to 90 games. We’ll pull out all the stops to build a killer farm system.

Preller, to that ongoing end, operates less as a big-league GM than a super-scout. He spends consecutive weeks, even months on the road prospecting for young talent.

Conceivably, the new labor pact’s leveling of the international amateur market will play further into a reputed Preller strength.


The team’s comprehensive push to build a talent pipeline is encouraging, as were some of Preller’s buy-low plays for big league pitchers such as Drew Pomeranz.

A cautionary tale: seven years ago, the Padres’ farm system ranked first overall in several listings and No. 3 in Baseball America. In the six full baseball years that followed, the Padres never got close to the playoffs.

Oddsmakers’ pessimism aside, the Padres may spring a few pleasant developments this season to go with what should be an exciting year at several of their minor-league affiliates (including Lake Elsinore, an hour’s drive north of Petco Park; and rookie-ball Peoria, an hour’s flight to greater Phoenix).

The Padres almost always manage to develop an efficient closer and set-up relievers who provide big returns on the salary dollar.


And, it should be fun to watch rookies like Manuel Margot, a center fielder and Preller acquisition who excites scouts of other teams.

Catcher Austin Hedges, 24, is an entertaining defender. Can he hit? This is the year to find out.

A sticky question still arises: When will Padres games matter again?

Thirteen baseball seasons have passed since San Diego built the team a ballpark, with help from Moores. The Padres have yet to win a playoff game inside the downtown venue (losing all four games to St. Louis in 2005-06).


Not since November 1998, when San Diego voters approved the bulk of the ballpark’s funding, have the Padres won a postseason series.

When Mission Valley was home, the Padres reached the World Series in their 15th big-league season. Fourteen years later, in 1998, they returned.

Replacing even bad recent Chargers teams in the hearts of local fans won’t be easy. The Bolts still drew solid TV ratings in San Diego, even while losing 23 of 32 games the past two seasons against the backdrop of potential franchise relocation.

Their games mattered.


(Update: Roberto Alomar was misidentified as Roberto Alomar Jr. in an earlier version of this story.)

(Elsewhere: What is L.A./O.C. getting in the Spanoses?)



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Tom.Krasovic@SDUnionTribune.com; Twitter: SDUTKrasovic