Hoping to Be a Hit With Voters

Let’s talk sports.

In fact, let’s talk and talk and litigate and hold an election and maybe litigate and talk some more.

The roadshow that has toured a string of American cities in recent years has settled into San Diego for a lengthy run.

The plot poses a question capable of provoking debate in any barbershop or on any radio talk show across the land: Should the public coffers be raided to provide a venue for a privately run, for-profit sports franchise to display its wares? The show has played San Diego before.

For eight incendiary weeks in December, January and February, San Diego was ablaze with controversy over a plan to expand the city-owned stadium to keep the pro football Chargers from moving elsewhere. That controversy was cooled only by a judge’s decision thwarting a Libertarian lawsuit to block the expansion.

Now the topic is baseball and the Padres’ request for city backing to build an “intimate” baseball-only ballpark, a la Camden Yards in Baltimore.

Many of the same combatants are involved this time, and prospects are for a major league ripsnorter of a civic fight.

“I love the smell of political blood in the morning,” said Libertarian activist Richard Rider, a dedicated foe of public financing. “I’m ready.”

Fair enough, but there are differences in this Act II of San Diego’s version of the great American sports financing drama.

The details of the Padres’ deal--still being worked on--will doubtless present less of a drain on the public treasury than the Chargers deal. The Padres’ majority owner, computer software magnate John Moores, has a more favorable public persona than that of the Chargers owner, Alex Spanos.

And then there is the factor of Tony Gwynn, the Padres right-fielder and civic treasure.

“There is an intimate relationship between Tony Gwynn and the people of San Diego,” said San Diego sports agent Jack Bechta, who represents numerous NFL players. “San Diego trusts and likes Tony Gwynn both as a baseball player and as a person.”

Gwynn, 37, eight-time National League batting champion, 13 times an all-star, a Padre since 1982, is, by most accounts, the most popular professional athlete in contemporary San Diego, maybe of all time.

If there were an attitudinal/behavorial continuum for modern athletes, narcissistic bad boys like Dennis Rodman would be at one extreme, and the ever-buoyant, team-spirited Tony Gwynn would be at the other.

Already, a build-one-for-Tony sentiment is brewing.

Last week, a newly formed group called the Committee of 2000, made up of lawyers, business leaders, bankers and others, announced its intent to rally support for a new stadium and keep the Padres from vamoosing when their lease at Qualcomm Stadium--formerly San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium--expires in 1999.

“Tony Gwynn is the greatest Padre of all. Tony Gwynn is going into the Hall of Fame,” explained committee founder George Mitrovich. “Imagine how terrible it would be if, on the day Tony Gwynn is inducted into the hall, the Padres are no longer in San Diego. We can’t allow that to happen.”

The group has 119 co-chairmen, including a Catholic monsignor, a rabbi, the head of the Police Officers Assn. and arts patron Danah Fayman. The number 119 was chosen for a reason: Tony Gwynn wears number 19.

With an election tentatively set for June, both sides say that how the Padres and Gwynn are performing at the moment of decision could greatly impact the results.

“Selling the San Diego public on public financing of anything is very difficult,” said attorney Patrick Shea, chairman of a City Hall committee for a private-public financing plan to submit to voters. “This is an inherently conservative, pinch-penny city.”

He adds: “San Diego gets better government with less money than anywhere else and still bitches more about any use of public financing.” (A library tax lost last year.)

Yes, but if come next June the Padres have regained their form from 1996 (the team slipped from first to last place in 1997) and Gwynn is off to a fast start, and perchance the team has just beaten the hated Dodgers a few times, the civic mood could be bullish.

“Whatever methods are used in this campaign by either side may be less important than how well the Padres and Tony Gwynn and Ken Caminiti are doing on the day of the election,” said attorney Robert Ottilie, who represented the stadium expansion opponents.

(There is precedent for a winning season leading to public approval of a new stadium. In Seattle, after the Mariners beat the Yankees in the American League divisional playoffs in 1995, a project was approved that had earlier been rejected.)

Although he has yet to get the national endorsements of a Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods, Gwynn is much in demand in San Diego to endorse various products, including being named recently as the spokesman for Qualcomm, the wireless communications firm and San Diego’s fastest-rising company. He is also known for his many charitable and youth activities.

Columnist and television commentator George Will, who wrote about Gwynn in his book “Men at Work” and serves on the Padres’ board of directors, notes that, by becoming a free agent, Gwynn could have made more money by going to another team but chose to stay in San Diego because he loves the community.

“Probably nowhere else in the major leagues is there situation like San Diego, where one player is identified as carrying the franchise,” Will said. “That’s how important Tony is to the Padres.”

Strategically, the Padres’ request for help in building a stadium could not come at a worse time. Like the odor of fried fish, the Chargers controversy hangs in the air.

Now that Qualcomm Stadium has been expanded to 72,000 seats, it is tougher to sell enough tickets to convince the NFL to lift the local television blackout rule for home games. The Chargers first two home games have been blacked out, and the local griping has been scalding. Empty seats cost San Diego money under the Charger’s deal with the city.

“It’s unfair to burden the Padres with the controversy about the Chargers,” said Mitrovich.

A task force appointed by Mayor Susan Golding--after lengthy public hearings--produced a report in September stuffed with facts and figures about the Padres’ financial plight, the money brought to the city because of major league baseball, and the economic revival caused by new parks in Baltimore, Cleveland and Denver.

The task force asserts that financing a ballpark makes sense for the city--a contention hotly disputed by Rider and other, who have their own facts and figures.

But the gathering campaign will not be fought on numbers and revenue projections alone. There will be an emotive element, which Will finds only fitting. “Baseball teams and their cities are related in financial and psychological ways that are very complex,” Will said.

On the cover of the task force report was a picture that presages the campaign to come: A full-color picture of Gwynn and Ted Williams (San Diego native, member of the minor league Padres, 1936) standing side by side, each with a silver bat over his shoulder.

Says Rider: “I’m sure we’ll see Tony Gwynn as the pitchman for this scheme. We’ll deal with it.”

(For the record: Rider, too, admires Gwynn and would not like to see the Padres leave. He just prefers to have the owners pay for their own stadium.)

Gwynn is well aware of the pressure he and his teammates face next spring.

“Every year when we go to spring training, we want to win, to correct the mistakes of the previous year,” said Gwynn. “This spring it’s going to be even more like that because if we win, it will make that other battle a lot easier.”

Gwynn, who was born in Los Angeles, reared in Long Beach and attended San Diego State, said he is ready to contribute his voice to the stadium fight.

“I’ll be talking it up,” Gwynn said. “I’ve got to take care of my job, which is baseball, but I think it’s important that people know what’s at stake. I don’t want to have to move to Charlotte or Northern Virginia to play baseball.”