Scioscia Goes South to Play With Padres : Baseball: Catcher agrees to one-year contract after 12 seasons as a Dodger.

The Dodger catcher of seasons past became San Diego’s veteran presence Thursday night, when the Padres reached agreement with Mike Scioscia on a one-year contract.

It will be a season of firsts for the 34-year-old catcher.

This will be the first time Scioscia will be out of a Dodger organization uniform in 17 seasons, 12 of which he spent in Los Angeles. It will be the first time he will play for a major league manager other than Tom Lasorda. And it will be the first time in 12 years he will be battling for a starting role with a projected incumbent and three others.

And he’s looking forward to it.

“I feel good the decision has finally been made after all this time,” Scioscia said Thursday night at his home in Claremont.

“We (Scioscia and his agent, Richie Phillips) started out negotiating with about nine or 10 teams that showed interest, then we narrowed it down because I wanted to stay in the National League. But as we got deeper and deeper into negotiations in the off-season, it became clear that San Diego was going to give me a chance to play. I think it’s a great city and everything seemed to fall into place that it was the right place for me to be.”

What didn’t fall into place for Scioscia was that the Dodgers did not give him the chance to come back after his and the team’s worst season. The Dodgers said they knew that Scioscia did not want to settle for a teaching role for their top catching prospects, Mike Piazza and Carlos Hernandez, and the club’s choice was to go with youth.

“There’s no bitterness toward the Dodgers,” said Scioscia, who hit .221 with three home runs and 22 runs batted in last season. “I wasn’t looking for a guarantee to start for anybody. I just wanted to be brought in as a guy who is projected to have the capabilities to catch 120-130 games. I didn’t want to go into spring training as a guy projected to only catch 40 games.”

The Padres let Benito Santiago sign as a free agent with the Florida Marlins because they have Dan Walters, who filled in for Santiago last May and was the No. 2 catcher the rest of the season.

Scioscia caught a Dodger-record 1,395 games. But he made only 99 starts last year because of the rib injury, ending his string of eight seasons with 100 or more starts.

His career average is .259, with 68 home runs and 446 RBIs.