When Will Padre Fans Wake Up and Smell a Pennant Race?

It would be tempting to succumb to the hype and hoopla and say that a touch of Padre fever is racing through the populace hereabouts.

There was, for example, the long and enthusiastic ovation following Garry Templeton’s grand slam in Monday night’s 7-3 victory over the Houston Astros.

And there was the long and enthusiastic ovation for the Atlanta Braves’ 6-5 victory over the San Francisco Giants after Tuesday night’s 9-0 victory over those same Astros.

But a couple of inescapable facts intervene.

Paid attendance Monday night was a mere 12,705.

Paid attendance Tuesday night was a modest 16,509.

Yawn.

Is anyone awake here?

Painfully, inch-by-inch and game-by-game, the Padres have crawled into the pennant race in the National League West. They have done it by embarking upon the most prolonged stretch of outstanding baseball in the history of the franchise, and that includes the pennant-winning 1984 season.

Meanwhile, their fans are whispering at the water coolers and taking portable radios on their boats and maybe listening to baseball while they’re watching football, but what they’re not doing is going to the ballpark in numbers that would indicate anything at all is going on with the hometown heroes.

In the five dates of the current home stand through Tuesday night, the Padres have averaged 21,973 paid fans. I emphasize “paid,” because the radio broadcasts always inflate the number by announcing total in the park.

This is interesting because the Padres are averaging 24,835 for the season, meaning their fans are not even doing well compared with themselves in this most interesting time of the year.

In truth, no one in the Padre organization can say this team is being poorly supported. Paid attendance through Tuesday night was 1,788,141. An average of 26,482 through the final eight home dates would produce the second two million attendance year in the club’s history, the first being 1985’s 2,210,352.

The thing is, we’re now talking pennant race. Whether or not the Padres catch the Giants, they are engaged in the most interesting September they have experienced. Remember that they ran away and hid in 1984, thus depriving themselves and anyone else of the frenzy of a pennant race.

To assess interest in the Padres, it is necessary to examine the interest in other teams with championship aspirations.

Between Friday night and Tuesday night, there were 38 games in which a contending team was at home. The Padres, as stated, averaged 21,973 for their five home games. The other 33 games had an average attendance of 30,285 . . . or 37.8% more than the Padres were drawing for the identical span.

Given that we are talking exactly the same dates, all of these teams had to contend with the same potential deterrents . . . high school football, college football, professional football (including the Monday night opener) and school nights.

Consequently, the only logical conclusion is that there is less interest in San Diego than there is elsewhere.

There have been two outward manifestations of interest, the first being the 1,000 fans who greeted the team when it arrived home from a trip at 1:30 a.m. last Friday and the second being the fans who stayed after the game Tuesday to watch the Braves beat the Giants on the scoreboard television.

But the “greeting” was hardly spontaneous, having been contrived and orchestrated by a radio station whose best interests are served by hyping the Padres. A little gathering of 100 fans showing up on their own would have been more impressive.

The excitement over watching the Giants lose on the scoreboard television was considerably more genuine. Those people were into it.

Of course, the Padres themselves can probably be blamed for interest being so slow to stir.

That, to be sure, is the opinion of one Jack Clark, who has been a party to a number of pennant races in a number of different venues.

“We’re getting close,” he said before Tuesday night’s game, “but we’re not close enough to make it real interesting. They’ve supported us pretty well, but we’ve been so inconsistent. When we start to play well, and they come out, we put on a bad show. It’s up to us to get closer and prove that we’re for real, like everybody thought we’d be from the start.”

It has been quite a good show of late. Maybe it will last, and maybe it won’t.

There is, of course, the matter of that three-game series in San Francisco this weekend. Those will be moments of truth, followed by a trip to Cincinnati and Los Angeles for three games each.

If that nine-game swing does not upset the bandwagon, I suspect that San Diego’s reluctant faithful will finally be on it. The season would conclude with six home games, three each against Cincinnati and . . . yes, the Giants.

“If it means something coming down to that last home stand,” Tony Gwynn said, “a lot of people will be coming out here to cheer us on.”

If it doesn’t mean anything, a lot of people missed a nice little run from the edge of nowhere to the edge of contention.