New San Diego Ballpark Will Be Fans Dream Come True

San Diego sits at the epicenter of baseball’s millennium tremors. I choose these words knowing it’s a tad insensitive to whisper “EARTHQUAKE” in a city built atop a fault line and 11 feet above the Pacific Ocean, into which all might come tumbling down, ker-splash.

But the analogy is so apt as to defeat an ink-stained wretch’s feeble attempts at good manners. Besides, while I visit with the Padres president in the team’s shiny offices, not once does the mirror-walled tower quiver, not even when Larry Lucchino speaks forcefully of the fox that baseball has invited into the henhouse. Speaking here of Rupert Murdoch, the mightiest of moguls, owner of oceans and the sky, his latest bauble being the Dodgers.

“We’re a microcosm of baseball today,” Lucchino says, ignoring, as San Diegans must, earthquake talk. “We’ve got a new ballpark for 2002. We’re internationalizing the game by opening in Mexico this season. We’re a leading advocate of economic restructuring. And we’re a small-market team fighting a war with a large-market team, which we lovingly refer to as ‘the monster to the north,’ the Dodgers.”

The Murdochian monster sucks money from every corner of the globe. Some $105 million of it made winter miserable in San Diego. The loot bought Kevin Brown away from the Padres, whose offer of $60 million to their surly ace pitcher amounted to throwing spitballs at a battleship.

Lucchino still is distressed. The Padres wanted to keep the pitcher whose work helped them into the World Series and may have gained them goodwill that translated into voter approval of a new ballpark. They offered Brown the richest contract in Padres history.

Worse, Lucchino believes the $105 million deal proves that baseball’s economics are so far out of whack that the industry might collapse under the weight of financial burdens few owners could long carry. He wants evolution toward an owner/player partnership in controlling payrolls. Failing that, he foresees a competitive distortion that would leave even “the obscenely well-paid” players frustrated because they also are “intensely competitive” and surely will grow restive in a system that denies them a chance to win big.

“The Dodgers’ payroll this year will be $10-20 million more than the Padres’ gross revenues,” says Lucchino, a man discomfited by that truth as well as by the ominous symbolism of a $100 million player.

“Some franchises aren’t worth $100 million,” he says. And this is a 33-year-old pitcher demanding a seven-year deal, $15 million per. “The bizarre--is that the word, ‘bizarre’?--let’s say the unusual perks, the private jets, the going home from the team, all that bothered me.”

You’d think a man making $300,000 a week could buy his own airplane ticket. You’d think he could pony up for his own hotel suite. A fan would hate to think he’s coughing up $4 for an ugly hot dog just so Kevin Brown can get double chocolate mints on his pillow, free.

More power to the Padres, then, for drawing a line, even if that line came at an obscene $60 million.

Along with that decision to maintain a semblance of sanity, the Padres have won me over by designing a ballpark that is pure California dreaming.

It’s to be downtown, displacing the late-20th century decay found at every city center’s fringe. The plan approved by voters will pay for the ballpark through a $300 million panoply of urban fixtures such as hotels, bars, restaurants, offices and retail shops.

Not Camden Yards, not Jacobs Field, not Coors Field--and certainly not a stadium with a stadium’s blank stare--the San Diego ballpark will be a new paradigm: a baseball garden, palm trees everywhere, even in a center field park. Yes, a literal park inside the ballpark. The idea came to Lucchino in Yokohama, Japan, when he saw a city park across the street from the ballpark.

“It was like a carnival,” he says, “with a Ferris wheel, people walking with their families. And I thought, ‘It’d be nice to have that feel inside the ballpark.’ ”

Since buying the Padres after the ’94 season, Lucchino and Owner John Moores have done a wonder. They revived a franchise that had become the moribund victim of mismanagement. Their first act was a trade for stars Ken Caminiti and Steve Finley. Only later did Moores and Lucchino introduce themselves at a news conference.

Now all they have to do is do better. They’ve lost Brown, Caminiti and Finley to free agency. Bad enough, that. The real flak came when the Padres traded 50-home run slugger Greg Vaughn. Suddenly, deep thinkers with access to newsprint and air time noticed a trend.

“Some national media have made us into this year’s Marlins,” Lucchino says. He referred to Florida’s 1997 world champions, dismantled on orders from an owner fed up with spending money. “That’s a misperception. Our payroll budget is up from $44 million last year to $45 million. There’s a real sadness at the changing of the guard, but that’s different from the Marlins, a team that lost its will to win. We are committed to succeeding.”

Lucchino says the trade of Vaughn for the Reds’ Reggie Sanders was as traditional a trade as now can be made. If Vaughn had another big year, the Padres likely couldn’t have re-signed him for 2000. Besides, Lucchino says his baseball decision-makers believed Vaughn will not repeat the big year; they further believe that a healthy Sanders is the better player in any case.

Oh, and Larry Lucchino has come up with a way to raise Padres’ revenues. It’s an office rule. In references to the new ballpark, anyone heard calling it a stadium has to pay up. “The S-word,” the smiling president says, “is a $5 fine.”