Padres’ Value Placed in $100-Million Range : Baseball: The for-sale team is reportedly worth more thanks to TV contracts and a good year on the field.

The San Diego Padres baseball team should fetch $85 million to $100 million, or at least $20 million more than what the team nearly sold for in early 1987, according to a nationally prominent appraiser of professional sports teams.

Steven Matt, manager of appraisals and valuations at the Arthur Andersen & Co. office in Dallas, said the increase in the team’s value over the past two years is mainly because of the television contracts signed by major league baseball and the CBS and ESPN networks earlier this year.

The new pact calls for each major league owner to receive an average of $13 million a year over four years for national broadcast rights, starting in 1990. The payments, which are twice what owners were getting, greatly enhanced the value of all baseball teams, Matt said.

Padres owner Joan Kroc announced Tuesday that she plans to sell the team that her late husband, McDonald’s mogul Ray Kroc, bought in 1974 for $12 million.

Kroc’s son-in-law and player agent Jerry Kapstein is representing her in talks with several potential buyers. Kapstein was unavailable to comment Wednesday on the identity of bidders or on what sort of price the team might fetch.

In arriving at his estimate of the Padres’ worth, Matt said he factored in tangible concerns--such as cash flow, the team’s farm system, attendance and player salaries--as well as intangibles, such as future prospects and image. Ultimately, the Padres’ sale price will probably be figured as the current value of annual cash flows expected in coming years.

A definite selling point for Kroc is that the Padres made a strong second-place National League West division finish this season, an indication that the team is a good bet for making it to the lucrative World Series playoff games in the future.

“One thing San Diego has going for it is a good nucleus of players,” Matt said. “Their performance (this year) demonstrated they are a contending team. It’s one of the intangibles that can have a very tangible effect on the bottom line. A contending team means higher attendance and more money.”

The Padres’ attendance of 2,009,000 this year was “about average” among major league teams but impressive in light of the size of San Diego’s area of dominant influence, or ADI, a measurement of the market area served by a team’s radio and TV broadcasts. San Diego’s ADI ranks 24th among the league’s 26 teams.

The New York Yankees, for example, drew only slightly more attendance (2,170,000) than the Padres in 1989 in a market area with four times the population of metropolitan San Diego, Matt said.

The prices paid for the three other major league baseball teams that changed hands this year also had a bearing on Matt’s price estimate. The Seattle Mariners, for example, were sold last month for a reported $80 million. The Baltimore Orioles sold earlier this year for $70 million. The Texas Rangers sold for $85 million, but the price included the team’s home stadium and real estate, Matt said.

The Mariners were sold by George Argyros, the Orange County developer who agreed to pay a reported $65 million for the Padres in 1987 before the deal collapsed. Argyros had planned to sell the Seattle team and buy the Padres.

Calling the two franchises comparable, Matt said he expects the Padres to sell for a “premium” over what the Mariners sold for because of the Padres’ better performance this year. But a price of more than $100 million is “getting aggressive,” he said. The Mariners drew 1.3 million in 1989, or about 700,000 fewer fans than San Diego.

The generally favorable terms of the Padres’ lease agreement with the city for San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium that runs through the year 2000 is another selling point for the team. According to Assistant City Manager Jack McGrory, the Padres pay the city a flat 10% of ticket sales revenues, but the team controls all concession sales. The city gets all parking revenues.

All told, the city receives about $3 million annually from the Padres, McGrory said.

“Virtually every city has to make big concessions to keep their ball clubs. The free rent and large amounts of money that Sacramento and Oakland are offering the Raiders typifies the situation,” he said, referring to the football team now in Los Angeles.

The Padres lease “would be considered a good deal for the city considering the climate in which the lease was negotiated in,” McGrory said. For its part, the city received a 13-year commitment from the Padres to stay in town with no reduction in lease revenue, he said.

Another factor in appraising a team is how much revenue the sale of local broadcast rights to cable, local TV and radio stations is bringing in. Matt said most teams get $3 million to $6 million from the sale of those rights. An associate of Kapstein’s declined to disclose the Padres’ broadcast revenue.