Pitch to Fans in Mexico Pays Off for Padres

SAN DIEGO — Buy a team and they will come.

That was the vision of Larry Lucchino, the chief executive of the San Diego Padres, who gazed south of the border in December 1994 and saw a 2-million-strong potential market of Mexican baseball lovers.

He also saw obstacles. Traffic at the border was so slow, Tijuana fans sometimes sat out the first inning in their cars. How could fans get game schedules, tickets and transportation without a lot of hassles? And how could the Padres help Mexican fans feel welcome in an era of strident anti-immigration rhetoric? Overcoming these hurdles required the intervention of top U.S. immigration and customs officials. Along the way, a groundbreaking cross-border marketing strategy was born and Lucchino became a key player in the successful lobby to speed up border traffic.

Today, buses shuttle fans to Padres games from six Mexican border cities every Sunday and, increasingly, during the week. They are greeted by mariachis, Spanish-speaking attendants and an extremely grateful sports business empire.

Mexican and U.S. Latino fans are the fastest-growing Padres audience, according to Enrique Morones, the director of multicultural marketing for the Padres, who estimates that Latino attendance from both sides of the border increased 350% between 1995 and 1996.

“Baseball has no borders, and we’re a living example,” said Morones, who is also the president of the San Diego County Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

The border baseball blitzkrieg is part of an overall Padres campaign--aimed not only Latinos but everyone from north county Republicans to east county ranchers--that resulted in the fastest attendance expansion in the major leagues.

Between 1995 and 1996, the Padres audience doubled, from 1.1 million to 2.2 million fans, a record, according to John Moores, Padres majority owner and chairman of the board.

Average attendance is still rising. It stands at 26,416 per game so far this year, the team says, compared to 23,959 for the same period in 1996.

The Padres’ Latino offensive is capitalizing on the historic popularity of baseball in northern Mexico that dates back decades before the 1995 signing of Mexican pitching legend Fernando Valenzuela brought a stampede of Mexican Padres fans--and a wave of “Fernandomania”--to San Diego.

Since its founding in 1925, the Mexican League has been the proving ground for 70 Mexican players who went on to the major leagues. The Pacific League, which has teams in Baja California, Sonora and Sinaloa, has groomed more than a few stars for the Padres, the Texas Rangers and other U.S. teams.

Many American baseball players also journeyed south of the border in days gone by. They were black American players shut out of the U.S. big leagues by Jim Crow sports regulations but recruited by Mexican teams who welcomed good players of any color.

Black American baseball star Buck O’Neil, 85, recalls his heyday in the 1940s, when he shuttled between the Negro Leagues and Mexico’s Liga del Pacifico, playing for Ciudad Obregon in another border state, Sonora.

“In Mexico I was a baseball player. In the U.S. I was a black baseball player,” O’Neil said at a Padres commemoration Thursday for Jackie Robinson, who in 1947 became the first black player in the major leagues. “In Mexico, I could go anywhere and play anywhere. In the U.S., I couldn’t.”

Discrimination in the United States made Mexico a magnet for some of the best baseball players of the Americas, helping to fuel a golden age in the sport, making it second only to soccer in nationwide popularity. Cuban baseball immortal Martin Dihigo was inducted into the U.S. Baseball Hall of Fame--but barred from all-white U.S. big league teams. He played for Monterrey instead, and is remembered in Mexico as a star.

In modern times, many businesses have realized that inclusion makes economic sense, and the current Padres campaign is no exception.

In many ways, western Baja California was a Padres fan club waiting to happen when the new owners took over in December 1994, Padres administrators say.

Tijuana’s own hometown Pacific League team, the Potros, collapsed amid mismanagement five years ago, leaving local baseball fans stranded.

Tijuana has a huge population of so-called fronterizos, or borderlanders, who are eligible to spend time on both sides of the border. The city also has a high percentage of U.S. citizens and U.S. residents, and many others have border-crossing cards and green cards, according to Nancy LeRoy, spokeswoman of the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana.

Moreover, greater metropolitan Tijuana boasts an ever-expanding population--some estimates run as high as 2 million--that is mostly middle class. Largely unaffected by the Mexican economic crisis, a large cross-section can afford leisure-time activities like baseball games.

“It was totally obvious,” said Padres owner Moores. “The conventional wisdom was that San Diego is a box bounded by the ocean, the mountains, L.A. and Mexico. We said ‘Wait a minute, here are 2 million people 20 minutes away.’ ”

The first hurdle was fairly basic--getting Mexican fans across the border. San Ysidro, the world’s busiest land border crossing, was also one of the world’s biggest traffic jams. Many Baja Padres fans couldn’t face the bumper-to-bumper anarchy.

So the Padres invited Doris Meissner, commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, to a meeting with other frustrated businessmen in September 1995. They also heard from Valenzuela and another Mexican-born Padres pitcher, Andres Berumen. And an official movement to keep border crossing waits to under 20 minutes was born.

Padres promoters also teamed up with the owners of one of Mexico’s most popular beers, Tecate, to provide a bus service for fans from the Mexican border town of Tecate to Padres Sunday games. The slogan--Domingos Padres--is a double-entendre that means both Padres Sundays or, in youth slang, “cool Sundays.”

Last season, 20,000 fans were bused in for Sunday games from Tecate alone, Morones said. The program was expanded, first to Tijuana and Mexicali and then to Ensenada, Rosarito and San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora. The program eventually was expanded beyond Sundays to include other key games, such as when the Dodgers come to town. Needless to say, Tecate beer flows freely at Padres games in San Diego.

To underline the commitment, the Padres and the New York Mets last August staged what was billed as the first U.S. big-league series held outside the United States and Canada. It was held in Monterrey, home of Mexico’s baseball Hall of Fame, where local sports officials hoped to jump-start flagging interest in baseball among the young. Fernando Valenzuela threw the first Padres pitch. A historic 70,000 beers were consumed during the three-day experiment.

Closer to home, the Padres opened an outlet in a popular Tijuana shopping mall, hired Spanish-speaking staff and began to present Mexican musicians and folk dancers.

“Symbolic steps were taken to open the ballpark as well as the border,” said Lucchino, who is also a minority team owner. “We couldn’t just give it lip service, we had to walk the walk. You want to make the ballpark a hospitable place for people from all cultures.”

Tijuana players from opposing U.S. teams are welcomed into the public relations fold. When Pittsburgh Pirate Esteban Loaiza pitched here a few weeks ago, the Padres gave his Tijuana family free tickets. Hundreds of his friends bought more. The hometown cheerleaders made for a lively crowd, and softened the blow of the Padres’ loss in their own stadium.

The Baja Padres explosion is being mirrored in the Mexican media.

In January, Television Azteca in Tijuana began to transmit Sunday games live, forcing other Mexican channels to step up their coverage.

Tijuana’s Radio XEXX 1420 AM buys the rights to the Padres broadcasts and resells them to eight Mexican stations. If Fernando Valenzuela is pitching, as many as 20 Mexican stations buy the signal, some from states as far south as Jalisco and Sinaloa, according to Eduardo Ortega, the Padres’ operatic Spanish-language radio sportscaster. Others simply pirate it, he said.

“It’s not true that Tijuana has no baseball team,” said Jose Manuel Carreno Perez, the head of investigations for the Tijuana Fire Department, as he joined a crowd of cheering firefighters watch San Diego beat the Dodgers 4-1 on Thursday. “We have the Padres.”