Final Draft: Padres Are His Team

Tom Werner, veteran rotisserie league baseball exec, tipped his hand when he was drafting his 1990 team a couple of weeks back.

“After the sixth round,” he said, “someone said, ‘Tom, can you tell us why everyone you’ve drafted has been a San Diego Padre?’ ”

Werner could, but didn’t.

One way or the other, it seemed, he was going to own the Padres this year. He was either going to have Tony Gwynn and Jack Clark and Joe Carter and Bruce Hurst on paper or he was going to have the same bunch in person.

As it turned out, he will have them in person.

Werner, of course, is the Hollywood mogul who heads the group of 10 that has gone into what amounts to escrow to purchase the Padres from Joan Kroc.

I don’t know the workings of rotisserie league baseball, but I suspect owning the real players will cost a few more bucks than picking up the services of Benito Santiago at the kitchen table with a bunch of cronies.

What struck me, however, was that this was a man so interested in baseball that he would take the time and make the effort to involve himself in a rotisserie league. These people might be the most fanatic of fans, what with their attention to updating statistics, tracking young prospects and constantly monitoring their rosters.

Rotisserie owners from here to Maine and back dream of owning or at least running their own team, but most have to settle for the vicarious thrill of operating their fantasy rosters of real players.

Werner, however, had both the wherewithal and the interest to get the real thing. It helps that he is producer of “The Cosby Show,” “Roseanne,” “Grand” and “A Different World.” It might also be assumed that his bank account is in a somewhat different world from most rotisserie aficionados.

To be sure, he is not in this enterprise by himself. He is the point man for a group that is essentially a who’s who of San Diego civic leaders.

These two groups, Werner and his friend Russell Goldsmith and the San Diego Eight, were pursuing the Padres from different directions when they became aware of one another and, more important, what they offered one another.

As San Diegan Bob Payne said: “We had a solid San Diego group, but we needed another dimension. We needed expertise in the entertainment business. And we needed a guy who wanted to be active on a day-to-day basis.”

For his part, Werner needed the San Diego group to help establish ties to the community and hasten his acceptance as more than a carpetbagger from Glitter Gulch. Buying a home here, which he said he would do, would be nice, but it would do little in terms of credibility compared with being linked to the likes of Payne, Art Rivkin, Art Engel, Leon Parma, Jack Goodall Jr., Ernest Rady, Malin Burnham and Scott Wolfe.

“I felt it was quite important to meet and partner with some people from San Diego,” Werner said. “It was not only good business, it was the right thing to do.”

Werner spent most of the time at Monday afternoon’s press conference being very careful to say all the right things. He was not yet the club’s managing general partner and he was not about to say anything that might remotely sound like a second guess of the way things are going.

Indeed, the conference opened with an incredibly stupid question from a radio guy about what Werner intended to do about Tony Gwynn’s contractual situation.

“I’m not going to comment in this forum,” Werner said evenly, “other than to say Mrs. Kroc is running the club in a first class fashion.”

There were very few clues about how Werner will, in fact, operate the club, though he left the impression his stewardship would be marked by steady, strong and responsible direction. There was none of the Hollywood/Beverly Hills flamboyance and bluster that made Donald Sterling so notorious hereabouts.

If anything, Werner seemed soft-spoken and understated. There wasn’t a gold chain in sight.

This guy, in essence, just happens to love baseball.

“Anybody who listened to Red Barber when he was growing up would have liked to someday be involved in a management position with a major league baseball team,” Werner said. “Baseball’s an amazing sport . . . and it really is the national pastime.”

Wait a minute, I said, most kids grow up wanting to play major league baseball.

“I did play,” Werner mused, “but I batted ninth. Good field, no hit.”

This was an afternoon when the focus was on Werner. He was comfortable with that, but anxious that the focus ultimately stay with what’s happening on the field.

“To quote Will Clark,” he said, “once he crosses that line, he plays baseball.”

It takes a baseball fan to quote a Will named Clark rather than a Will named Rogers, and what Clark had to say underscored the basic simplicity of what really matters. Owners have considerable input on what happens beyond those white lines, but owners themselves never cross those lines.

As for Tom Werner’s other team, it no longer exists.

“Effective now,” he said, “I’m resigning from my rotisserie league.”