The MLBPA acknowledges that teams in several of baseball’s smaller markets have no realistic chance of getting to the World Series. But rather than a systemic issue, the union frames it as a problem with certain owners.
“We believe that every team starting the year has the wherewithal to be the last team standing,” Tony Clark, the MLBPA’s executive director for the last 13 years, said in an interview shortly before he resigned in February. “But in part because of how well the industry is doing, a handful of teams aren’t as interested in that.”
For years, the Padres were among them. The team was a perennial loser with a diminishing fan base when Ron Fowler and the Seidler and O’Malley families bought it for $800 million in 2012. It was the equivalent of a teardown, one of the worst houses on the block. But in 2018, the owners began to spend — at a level that, as Clark’s replacement Bruce Meyer points out, would probably not be allowed under a salary cap. The payroll jumped from $68.5 million in 2017 to $157 million in 2020 and $255 million in 2023.
“If you invest in the product on the field, you’re going to get everything back from it and more,” Manny Machado, who signed a 10-year, $300 million contract with the Padres in 2019, says now. “Invest in your players, invest in your product and you’ll get winning and fans in the stands.”
The owners’ sudden commitment changed the way the team felt about itself, and the way San Diego felt about it. In 2020, the Padres made the playoffs for the first time since 2006. In 2022, they played the Phillies for the National League pennant. Last year, they drew more fans than the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, Braves or Cubs — more than any other team in MLB, in fact, except the Dodgers. “The Padres are the perfect blueprint,” pitcher Nick Pivetta said. “And it didn’t seem to take that much, just one guy who was really passionate and involved. ‘Let’s just try to win games and bring in good players.’”
Peter Seidler, the lead owner, died in 2023. To avoid a rancorous legal battle, the ownership group last month sold the Padres to José E. Feliciano and his wife, Kwanza Jones, for $3.9 billion, or five times what Seidler and his partners paid 14 years ago. As a data point that the existing system works for the owners, it’s a persuasive one. While it is surely beyond their financial wherewithal for most teams to spend like the Dodgers, the union makes the case that any of them could conceivably become the Padres.
Except that, for everything they’ve accomplished during their revival, they still haven’t won a World Series, or even played in one. And to many fans, the owners well understand, nothing else matters.