Try and get your arms around idea of Peter O’Malley owning Padres

I’ve known Peter O’Malley longer than I’ve known my wife, and have no doubt he would like any news that he is interested in purchasing the Padres to be buried in paragraph 14 in a story about their impending sale.

But I’ve followed the Dodgers longer than I’ve known O’Malley, and have no doubt what the reaction to this news will be from their faithful:

Are you kidding me?

Peter O’Malley own the Padres? It almost doesn’t compute. The family that brought the Dodgers to Los Angeles, that owned the team throughout each of the six World Series championships, that built Dodger Stadium, that watched the team grown into a part of the city’s cultural landscape … wants to own a different team?

What next, the Steinbrenners buy the Orioles? Jerry Buss moves in on the Warriors? Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly have a love child?

It’s almost too foreign a concept to grasp. Better to try and convince us the Farrelly brothers’ next film is a serious biography on E.M. Forster. That the moon landing really was filmed in a soundstage in Burbank.

One of the reasons O’Malley originally wanted to sell the team was because he was worried about being able to pass it on to his and sister Terry Seidler’s children. Now he wants a team to pass on to them? That inheritance tax is a serious moving target.

O’Malley deserves all the benefit of the doubt, but surely understands Dodgers fans are going to have one difficult time with the concept. It’s a story brought to you by Shirley MacLaine’s astrologist.

All this does is make you want to scream out again at the forward-thinking Los Angeles politicians who backed the Coliseum as an NFL site, convincing O’Malley to drop his bid to build an NFL stadium next to Dodger Stadium. That ultimately led to his selling the team to Fox.

With proper leadership, O’Malley would not only still own the Dodgers, but Los Angeles would likely have had an NFL team for the last 10 years.

Now he wants back in, after having made a failed run at buying back the Dodgers. And the Padres? I’d wonder how that would play down in we’re-not-a-Los-Angeles-afterthought San Diego, if I still wasn’t wrestling with the concept of O’Malley down at Petco Park throwing out a first pitch.

Does this mean we’d get Sea World or just Shamu? Better throw in the zoo.

O’Malley and the Padres. Say it ain’t so, Peter.

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Try and get your arms around idea of Peter O’Malley owning Padres