So It’s Root, Root, Root for the Giveaway Prize

During moments of delirium, such as when the Padres have a 10-0 lead in the second inning, folks hereabouts take to making rash statements with little basis in reality.

“It’s about time,” they exclaim, “that a great baseball town gets a great baseball team.”

School is out, to be sure, whether this is a great baseball team. It has been splendid offensively. And it i s a contender in the National League West. It’s a little too early, maybe much to early, to evaluate the “great” part.

However, this is not a great baseball town.

Far from it.

When last this team was in town, the home stand ended with a Wednesday afternoon affair against the Pittsburgh Pirates. I looked around and wondered where everybody was.

The turnstiles stopped at 16,338.

I suppose everybody was at a swap meet or garage sale.

That’s what we have in San Diego . . . shoppers, not fans.

The fans come when they get something in addition to baseball, such as a cap or a towel or a bag or a firework. Baseball by itself is not enough. Some of them are probably surprised to find a baseball game is going on when they show up to collect their loot.

I’m not talking 1992. I’m talking historically.

It hasn’t been since the Randy Jones phenomenon in the mid-1970s that a team or a player here has been a gate attraction on merit. All those Padres had to do to pack them in was list Jones as the probable starter.

Since then, yawn.

On the day the Padres cinched the pennant in 1984, they drew a “crowd” of 15,766. That’s not a misprint. That was the paid attendance the day the Padres wrapped up the only pennant in their history.

Shortly thereafter, folks were falling all over one another to climb aboard the NLCS bandwagon.

Where had they all been?

The stretch run in 1989 was also an interesting study in apathy. The Padres had charged from 12 games behind in late July and entered the final week of the season with a chance at a genuine Mission Valley Miracle.

With the Cincinnati Reds in town, the Padres drew 12,535 on Tuesday and 17,136 on Wednesday. Put those games in Boston or St. Louis or Chicago or Detroit and there wouldn’t have been enough empty chairs for a bridge game.

Where was everybody?

Let me give you a clue. The Padres were mathematically eliminated from the pennant race that Wednesday. After a day off on Thursday, they played San Francisco on Friday night.

Attendance? Try 52,089.

You don’t suppose they were giving away Padre pens or Padre belts or Padre socks or Padre makeup cases, do you? Naw, folks wouldn’t stay away from such pivotal games to wait for a giveaway, would they?

Take a look at some attendance figures from consecutive games in 1991: 17,749 . . . 54,517, 16,239 or 23,524 . . . 52,488 . . . 23,212 or 19,049 . . . 39,551 . . . 15,066.

They read like on of those logic tests where you have to choose what doesn’t fit, like apple . . . gorilla . . . orange. It’s pretty easy to figure where the promotional event fit into those sequences. You dangle a carrot and you get them to come to the diamond.

I have often wondered if baseball teams end up hurting themselves with these big promotional events. Folks--I hesitate to call them fans--get conditioned to going to games only when they are rewarded for going to games.

If there were no promotions, would the other games draw more people?

I suppose the honchos in baseball’s upper echelons have given this some thought, but it really isn’t an easy question to answer. If the other crowds would not get any larger, then the fan base is a frighteningly low 15,000 to maybe 23,000 a game here in San Diego.

That’s not much.

What the Padres have put together this year is the most interesting and exciting team in their history. If the pitching comes around, it will be the best team in their history.

Offensively, at least, the 1984 championship team is thunder and light years behind this one. Tony Gwynn is a constant, of course, a .350-plus link between the two. However, the highest average other than Gwynn’s in 1984 was .284. No one hit more than 20 home runs, and the RBI in leader had 86. This 1992 team is high voltage.

Incredibly, attendance is down in 1992 from what it was in 1991. This might have been understandably if something like nasty weather--you know, snow and sleet--had kept people away for all of April.

Sorry, no such excuse.

But isn’t the economy dismal? It wasn’t exactly booming last year.

Again, no excuse.

As the Padres take the field tonight to open a home stand against Atlanta, they have drawn 621,447 fans for 27 dates. That compares with 687,139 for the same number of dates last year. That this team is less of an attraction than that team is amazing to the point of being ludicrous.

It will be interesting to see what size crowd greets their return tonight.

Saturday night’s crowd won’t count, not by my measure. They are giving away duffel bags.