Starting Over : That Has Become Plan for Padre Owners, Who Try to Erase Memories of Kroc Years and Return Team to Glory of 1984

They’re gone now, virtually every last one of them. If they haven’t been fired, they have quit. Some still are being paid by the club for services rendered. Others are being paid simply to keep their mouths shut.

The cast of characters, representing the wacky tradition of the San Diego Padres, is supposed to be fading into the sunset, soon to be forgotten.

Everything, in fact, is being done to change the image. The Padres’ new owners have hired a new front-office staff. They have hired almost a complete new coaching staff. They have brought in new players. They have changed uniform designs, team colors, even the team logo.

But as hard as they try changing things, there is not a thing they can do about changing the past.

“There’s been nothing in all of sports stranger than this,” said player-agent Tony Attanasio, who lives in San Diego and has worked closely with the club. “This is ‘Looney Tunes’ here. People would pay money to see what was happening in that front office.

“They made a mistake by not putting swivel chairs in the stands. Instead of watching games, (the fans) could have turned around and watched the owners’ box.

“It’s been an absolute, total comedy of errors.”

Maybe it started when the Padres played in front of their new owner, Ray Kroc, in the 1974 home opener against the Houston Astros. With the Padres losing in the eighth inning, 9-2, Kroc grabbed the public address microphone, and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I suffer with you.”

He stopped when a streaker leaped over the railing of the stands in left field and ran across the field. Kroc spotted him, and screamed into the mike, “Get him out of here! Throw him in jail!”

When the streaker disappeared into a tunnel, with security guards in pursuit, Kroc continued: “There is good news and bad news. First, the good news. You loyal fans outdid Los Angeles. They had 31,000 for opening night and we have nearly 40,000. God bless you. Now, for the bad news. I have never seen such stupid ballplaying in my life.”

Said Jerry Coleman, the Padre announcer who, adding to the wackiness, left the booth to manage in 1980: “I think everything got a little crazy after that. I mean, you could laugh about those things back then. But after a while, I don’t think anybody was being amused. It stopped being funny.”

Said Ed Whitson, one of three players remaining from the 1984 National League championship team: “It’s been plain embarrassing. Everything has been backwards. Instead of focusing on what was going on on the field, everyone was looking to see what was going on upstairs.

“Everybody wanted to know who was doing who, and what was doing what.

“I played 1 1/2 years with the Yankees, and I ain’t seen nothin’ crazier than what was going on here.”

Where else could you find the owner’s son-in-law running the club one day, then becoming the ex-club president when he became an ex-son-in-law the next? And his ex-wife begins dating an agent, who became her husband, then ran the club until he became an ex-husband?

Where else could you find a club president who was a two-time contestant on “Jeopardy,” a two-time loser on “Jeopardy” and whose baseball career ended with the flip of a finger to jeering fans on Fan Appreciation Night?

Where else could you find a manager who said he was going to quit after the season--or was he fired? Who was reinstated--or did he change his mind? And who eventually did quit on the eve of spring training--or was he forced out?

Where else could you find a general manager and a president who not only didn’t speak to one another but openly wished the other would be fired?

Where else could you find a team that allowed Kevin Mitchell, Kevin McReynolds, Ozzie Guillen, Ozzie Smith, Dave Winfield and Mark Davis to leave town in the last decade, with only Garry Templeton and Shawn Abner still around to show for it?

And you thought Roseanne Barr wreaked havoc in San Diego?

“I know every organization has its problems,” Padre pitcher Bruce Hurst said. “But nothing like this. I went through a period in Boston that was crazy, with the owners suing each other, and I thought I’d seen it all. It was nothing.

“I don’t think I was here for more than a few months before I said, ‘What in the world have I got myself into?’ ”

Said Dick Freeman, the Padres’ president, “We laughed a lot about everything that was happening. We had to, we absolutely had to. If we didn’t, we’d be crying.”

This is a team that actually was the best in the National League in 1984. It won the National League West title by 12 games and then became the first team in league history to overcome an 0-2 deficit in beating the Chicago Cubs for the pennant.

“They absolutely stopped this town,” Coleman said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. There was complete euphoria. You could walk along the beach from Coronado to Point Loma to La Jolla to Scripps Clinic and not miss a pitch. Everybody had their radios on.”

And why not? The last time anyone won a championship in town, other than the Sockers, the indoor soccer team, it was 1963 and the Chargers were making off with the American Football League title. It was not only the Padres’ first pennant, but only the second time in their history that they had finished above .500.

They got hammered by the Detroit Tigers in the World Series, but this was only the start. The Padres, everyone knew, were going to be a powerful team for a long, long time.

“It was Garv (Steve Garvey) who told us, ‘Tradition has just begun,’ ” Padre outfielder Tony Gwynn said. “ ‘From this point forward, the Padres will have a tradition. They’ll always look back to this day as the beginning.’

“We all knew we had the makings of something good. We figured we’d be right back in the World Series.

“Now, seven years later, look at us.”

The Padres have gone through four managers, one owner, two prospective owners, two presidents, two sons-in-law, 11 coaches, and two uniform-design changes since their pennant.

“Some tradition, huh?” Garvey said.

Their gloom began in January, 1984, when Ray Kroc died. The hamburger magnate could have run for mayor with his popularity. But then, the team was being left to his wife, Joan.

Whereas Ray had been fascinated by baseball, purchasing the Padres for $11 million in 1974, Joan couldn’t tell the difference between a double play and a double-switch. When he bought the Padres, her response was, “What on the earth is that, a monastery?”

Now, the team belonged to Joan. She originally was going to sell it during the summer of 1984, according to Dick Williams, then-manager, but changed her mind when the team started to win.

“She inherited a team she didn’t want,” Williams said. “But when we started winning, she was really getting into it. She became a very popular lady.”

Little did Kroc realize that the next six seasons would bring only heartache, and the turmoil she helped create caused misery that wouldn’t go away until she sold the team for $75 million last June.

“This woman ran the team like it was the YMCA,” Attanasio said. “She destroyed it. People like to talk about how she’s this great philanthropist. Well, a great many people are philanthropists, but they don’t stand on a mountaintop with a microphone and tell everybody about it.

“People say she had compassion. I never saw it. And what a mouth. I remember when I represented Dave Stewart, and he was launching an alcohol and drug program, ‘Just Say No.’ I told her about it, and she seemed interested, and then I made the mistake of saying, ‘Yeah, it’s the same program that Nancy Reagan is involved in.’

“She said, ‘Oh, that bitch.’

“And that was the end of that.”

Kroc, who is traveling out of the country, could not be reached for comment.

Then there also was the time in 1985 when Garvey went to a Republican Party meeting and donated a Padre jacket to President Reagan. Kroc, a staunch Democrat, was incensed. The next thing Walter Mondale knew, Kroc was giving him a warmup jacket.

It was only the beginning. In 1986, on the eve of spring training, the players realized Dick Williams was not returning as manager.

“I was being forced out,” Williams said.

Said Jack McKeon, who was general manager at the time: “Dick’s losing his memory. We didn’t force him out. He just quit.”

Said Williams, “He’s lying.”

Whatever, Williams was gone. A few weeks later, LaMarr Hoyt, the pitcher acquired from the Chicago White Sox for Guillen, was beginning a substance-abuse program. He had been caught trying to cross the Mexican border with three grams of marijuana, 79 Valium tablets and 46 Quaaludes. Less than eight months later, he was out of baseball, arrested for carrying more than 500 Valium pills and Quaaludes across the same border.

“You can’t imagine the impact of those losses,” Freeman said. “It was devastating. It was like someone came up and punched us in the nose.”

In between Hoyt’s drug busts, the Padres were playing baseball under Manager Steve Boros--and floundering. That was when Kroc became involved in a program called “Operation Cork,” the object of which was the reduction of alcohol consumption. Kroc decided that temperance should begin at home and in June, banned alcohol in the clubhouse.

“The timing was awful,” Garvey said. “I can understand why she didn’t want alcohol in the clubhouse for insurance reasons. But to do it in the middle of the season, when we were struggling, hit a raw nerve with some guys.”

One of those guys just happened to be relief pitcher Goose Gossage, who considered beer an essential part of anyone’s postgame spread. He called Ballard Smith, Kroc’s son-in-law and president of the team, “gutless.” And “spineless.” And “worthless.” And a guy who “listens to what Mom says.”

His outburst didn’t create any particular hostility until he included Kroc, saying, “And she’s poisoning the world with her hamburgers.”

Gossage immediately was suspended. He appealed, but 20 days later paid a $25,000 fine to charity and made a public apology.

Gossage happened to be a client of agent Jerry Kapstein, who also represented such Padre veterans as Garvey, Andy Hawkins and Graig Nettles.

Later, after Ballard and Linda Smith, Kroc’s daughter, were divorced, Linda married Kapstein. The ceremony, on Oct. 12, 1988, was at the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club.

“That was too weird,” said one of Kapstein’s friends. “I mean, it was a shock, an absolute shock. All we knew is that we were going to meet him at the club for a party. No one knew anything about a wedding.

“It was crazy. Here’s a guy who’s gone to battle with the owner over Goose Gossage, and now all of a sudden she was his mother-in-law!

“San Diego is a pretty small town. There’s not too many social circles. And this just blew everyone away.”

Meanwhile, Chub Feeney, who had been hired to replace Ballard Smith, was being taken to task in the newspapers and on talk shows for what was perceived as laziness. Feeney maintains to this day that he was at the stadium from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. OK, so maybe he peeked at a few TV game shows while at work. Is that a crime?

Fan Appreciation Night, Sept. 24, 1987, finally ended Feeney’s tenure with the Padres. Some fans were walking along the stadium concourse carrying a sign that read: “Scrub Chub.” They stopped, looked up at Feeney and yelled.

Feeney waved at them. With one finger. The middle finger on his right hand.

Perhaps he could have gotten away with it, because he certainly tried, denying that the incident ever occurred. But the trouble was that the TV cameras happened to be on Feeney at the moment. The footage was shown that night.

Kroc called for a meeting at 7:30 the next morning in her La Jolla home. Chub ‘fessed up. Adios, Chub.

Say, just what happened to that “Scrub Chub,” banner, anyway?

“It’s in my garage,” Gwynn said. “I was coming to the park the next day, and I saw a security guy carrying it out. He was going to throw it away.

“I said, ‘Hey, that’s OK, I’ll throw it away for you.’

“That’s as wild as it got,” Gwynn said. “Chub flipping them off and Roseanne were the two lowest incidents.”

Ah, yes, Roseanne Barr, the woman who managed to get President George Bush to talk about the Padres.

Gwynn said, “I had just seen Johnny Carson three nights before and Jay Leno asked Roseanne if she could sing. She said, ‘Sure.’ She started singing some James Brown song. I think it was ‘Hit Me.’ She was awful.

“So by this time, I had a feeling it could be pretty bad. I decided to play it safe. I stood by the entrance to the (dugout) tunnel, knowing that if she was really bad, I could go hide in the tunnel and laugh without anyone seeing me.

“She sang that first note, and I was gone.”

For once, Kroc didn’t have to worry. She had sold the team a month earlier, on June 15, 1990, to TV producer Tom Werner and 14 partners. Kapstein had tried to persuade her to hang onto the team. He had been put in charge of baseball operations in January of 1990--two months after she announced her intention to sell the club--but was having such a great time, he hated to give it up.

“That was an unbelievable couple of months,” one Padre front office employee said. “He was calling me 10, 15 times a day. He’d call at 6 in the morning. He’d call at midnight.

“He was obsessed with running the ballclub. Either he was going to have a heart attack, or I was.”

Kapstein’s reign lasted about four weeks. Linda Smith, who retained her last name, filed for divorce. The next call Jerry got was from Joan. He wasn’t going to be running the Padres any longer.

It was the beginning of a new regime. There were no sons-in-law in the organization. The Taco Bell uniforms, as Templeton called them, were gone. So was nearly everything else from the Kroc era.

McKeon, who had been in the organization since July of 1980 and was the brains behind the baseball operation, was fired on Sept. 22, 1990. It was the beginning of a front-office sweep that left 31 people looking for jobs.

“I have nothing to be ashamed of,” McKeon said. “Nothing whatsoever.”

It’s unknown, of course, just how the Padres will sail on a sea of tranquility. Will peace rejuvenate their talents? Will it bring more people through the gates? Will it bring back respectability?

“I think a team’s only as good as the owners,” said Joe McIlvaine, who replaced McKeon as general manager. “If you don’t have strong leadership, you’re not going to have a strong ballclub.”

But what is that guy doing here? Isn’t the guy with the spectacles and the salt-and-pepper mustache Dick Williams?

What’s he doing making $30,000 as a part-time scout, anyway?

“I don’t think it’s that strange to have me back, do you?” Williams said. “Hell, they’ve won only one pennant, and that was the team I managed.

“Why, someone getting worried?”