The most interesting game unfolding on San Diego’s sports scene is one off the field.

Padres ownership has won over local media and fans, by and large, if not through baseball know-how, through sincerity.

Peter Seidler and Ron Fowler have engaged locals in a way that Dean Spanos, the overly enabled Chargers owner, never did over a lengthy San Diego tenure that soon will end.

So far on the field, the Padres are frequent losers under Seidler and Fowler, but San Diegans seem to buy the full-on youth movement they are selling, the race to the bottom, likes of which have gained favor in Major League Baseball’s warped system.


Fans seem not to hold against Seidler and Fowler the team’s four losing seasons in their four-and-a-half years in charge, or that the Padres are serving up another non-contender, starting Monday afternoon, at a time when the Chargers’ exit created a timely chance to give the city a lift.

They’ve bought themselves time by reaching out.

Unassuming millionaires, Seidler and Fowler give off an “every man” vibe — genuinely, I think -- in talks with fans and media.

Fowler is a big-time San Diego philanthropist whose $25-million donation to San Diego State academics this year was nearly double the Chargers’ impressive $13 million in charitable contributions dating to their foundation’s 1995 inception.


“The Beer Man,” as Fowler is known, for having made his fortune as a local distributor and a Labatt Brewing fixer-upper, shoots straight when talking Padres.

When questions are barbed, he doesn’t duck and run. Amid continual Padres flat-lining, he has met with scores of ticket-holders, answering their questions.

Seidler is no less open. A cancer survivor, private-equity ace and philanthropist, he is also bent on solving San Diego’s escalating homeless problem.

Do they have a clue about running a big-league club?


They may have started out over their head, which happens often with newbie owners. It appears they’ve learned from their missteps.

Both Seidler and Fowler behave as if it’s important to get San Diegans to trust them.

They believe that selling themselves to the public is a big part of their role as franchise stewards.

Chargers Chairman Dean Spanos (John R. McCutchen / San Deigo Union-Tribune)


Public relations seems far more important to them than it was Spanos, a scion who succeeded his father, Alex, a construction magnate, as top Chargers executive in 1994.

Spanos maintained a private profile, despite pleas that engaging his public could build political capital toward getting a new stadium.

Several years ago, when a public relations and political expert worked for the Chargers, the newcomer tried to persuade Spanos to step to the fore.

All that got him was fired.


Chargers staffer Jeff Marston, invoking the heightened profiles that Padres owner John Moores and CEO Larry Lucchino had maintained in pushing a ballpark initiative, which voters approved in 1998, made a failed pitch for Spanos to do likewise.

“I told (Spanos and other Bolts execs), the Chargers do so much good around the community, good deeds worth millions of dollars, but don’t let anybody know about the good that they do,” Marston told the Union-Tribune’s Chris Jenkins last year. “His response was something along the lines of, ‘Well, I appreciate that. But that’s just not what our family is all about. It’s not what we do. We do not seek attention.’

“I leaned forward and said something like, ‘Well, Dean, you’re just going to have to get over that.’ I looked at the foreheads of the other two people at that meeting and they read like the news ticker in Times Square: ‘Gee, Jeff, it’s been nice working with you.’ ’’

Soon enough, Marston said, their expressions were confirmed.


“Dean sat there and smiled, almost laughed, then he fired me,” he said. “But he fired me in a way that I greatly respect. He didn’t get mad at me. He didn’t let any emotion enter into it. He just fired me. And that was that.”

My sense is Spanos never won over the majority of Chargers fans, even as Bolts teams were piling up victories.

Years before he made himself dead to many of them by deciding to move the team north, a good number of San Diegans still perceived him as an entitled interloper from Stockton although he’d spent decades here.

Worse yet, putting a dent in the notion that a team’s win-loss record doubles as its identity, I found many Chargers fans ambivalent, or worse, toward Spanos even amid prolonged playoff contention unlike the Padres have ever known.


There just wasn’t a simpatico.

A shame, because an NFL owner who has an ounce of “every man” can get the public on his side if his team is only decent, a bar the Spanos Bolts cleared in many years.

Consider that under Spanos, the Chargers achieved more consistent winning and playoff contention than either the Padres or non-Spanos Chargers have.

Spanos presided over a 10-year period, starting in 2004, in which the Chargers won 60 percent of their games and claimed six playoff berths, four as an AFC West champion.


By San Diego standards, the 10 years weren’t a Golden Era. They were a Platinum Era.

And yet, at a time when he could’ve had San Diego eating out of his hand, our Dean was barely more popular than Dean Wormer was to the Animal House gang.

He was viewed as aloof, harmfully passive — and overly devoted to hiring family members.

Of course, he made mistakes during those 10 years, but I daresay his public image during that stretch of .600 winning, rather astonishingly, lagged the current image of Seidler and Fowler, whose tenure has yielded a .455 win percentage and constant non-contention.


Frankly, the Padres haven’t played a meaningful game under Seidler and Fowler — or for that matter, at all, since 2010 ended -- and may not again before 2019.

As Padres CEO, Sandy Alderson said he enjoyed a book titled “Perception is Reality.”

It comes to mind here.

The 33-year Spanos Era is winding down, as the Chargers on Monday morning will commence spring workouts in anticipation of leaving Chargers Park for Orange County in July.


For all of the frustrations of the Spanos Era — and the failure to get to a Super Bowl in the platinum stretch is a defining one — the .472 win rate edged the .464 pace of the franchise’s 14 NFL seasons under owner Gene Klein.

John Moores, April 2012

Seidler and Fowler bought the Padres in August 2012.

How does their .455 win rate and absence of winning seasons stack up with the initial four full years of the Padres’ other four ownership groups?


We’ll work backward.

Under Moores from 1995-98, the Padres had a win rate of .532, two winners and two playoff berths, one a portal to the World Series.

Under the Tom Werner group, from 1991-94, the rate was .454 with two winners.

Joan Kroc assumed ownership early in the 1984 season after the death of her husband, Ray Kroc. The ’84 team reached the World Series.


Over a four-year span that dates to 1985, the results were .471 and two winners.

Starting out with an expansion team, Ray Kroc endured four bad seasons that yielded a .367 pace.

I’m not inclined to draw big conclusions from these snapshots.

I’d suggest that persona building is important for team owners.


In the NFL, the money train rolls on regardless. But good PR helps in the Stadium Game, and in building out the business.

Though he did many charitable deeds, many of which were chronicled in the team’s game programs, Spanos came up short in the “connecting” role.

Give him an F+ there.

Assign a C-/D+ for his sports stewardship.


The grades for Seidler and Fowler are A+ and D/I (incomplete), respectively.

The A+ is serving them well.