The start of the baseball season tomorrow got me in the mood to update my blog. I have obviously changed the url and title of this blog (It will stay sports exclusive) and I now have a separate blog for my other thoughts which will have its first post coming up. When it is up I will post the url for that blog.
San Diego has the reputation of being a bad sports city, and this definitely has a lot of truth to it. Now I'm not saying that San Diego has no hardcore fans, because they do, I'm saying that the overall support for their local professional and college teams is wishy washy at best.
Why is this? The two rationalizations that I commonly hear is that there is always something to do in San Diego, and that San Diego is filled with transplants from all over the country that already have teams that they support. Again there are elements of truth to both of these observations, but everything is not that black and white. I am not going to try and solve this issue because I am not sure if it can be fixed.
The truth is that San Diego is an event city. The casual fan will not shell out their money to support a bad or mediocre team. In some cases such as the 2010 Padres, the team can be competitive and the fans will not come and support their team. But when their is a sports event going on in town, people will flock out to come and watch. One example of this event atmosphere is the '98 Padres that won 98 games, where there was amazing support from the community. Yeah of course there was a bump in support because of the team winning but there was a sense of pride in being a fan that year, it was fun to watch, and San Diegans enjoyed being part of that amazing run. More evidence of this is the correlation of how the Chargers perform from year to year and how many tv blackouts their are, and the sudden upswing of support for the SDSU basketball team because they were good for the first time ever. San Diego will never be a great sports town if these trends continue (There is no reason to believe they won't), but at least with baseball I can see some hope.
I believe under the current leadership a team can be built that fans will want to come out and watch. In '98 the team was all about power with Greg Vaughn and Ken Caminiti, and power is always a huge draw of casual fans. Home runs have and always will be the glamor play of baseball, but another play that always gets people to stand up and cheer is the stolen base. This regime that is in charge of the Padres knows that they can't build a powerhouse lineup and succeed at Petco Park, so they are going to outrun everyone and build through the farm system. I will elaborate more on the Padres blueprint in a future post.
In closing it is difficult for a big fan like myself to admit that their might never be a great following of the San Diego professional teams, and this same lack of passion is what leads people to believe that San Diego could not support an NBA team. Also the problem is not just limited to San Diego, it is more of a Southern California issue (I'm talking to you LA). There is a reason the NFL hasn't been successful there, because LA doesn't support losing teams. The Lakers have been winners for a long time but they haven't always been a draw (Between dynasties, not the best example haha), but the Clippers haven't been a draw until recently and the Dodgers don't draw as well as they did in their semi-dynasty years. The difference between LA and San Diego sports wise is that LA will not tolerate a loser, and in that media market teams can't get away with mediocrity and lack of stars on their teams, teams in San Diego can.
