{"id":124299,"date":"2025-09-01T05:52:17","date_gmt":"2025-09-01T05:52:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/124299\/"},"modified":"2025-09-01T05:52:17","modified_gmt":"2025-09-01T05:52:17","slug":"san-diego-padres-have-come-a-long-way-from-their-early-years-of-fan-apathy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/124299\/","title":{"rendered":"San Diego Padres have come a long way from their early years of fan apathy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"rt-Text\">Collier had covered mostly the Dodgers and some of the Angels for the Tribune until 1969, when San Diego and Montreal received NL expansion franchises.<\/p>\n<p class=\"rt-Text\">Collier had been working for Jack Murphy in Fort Worth, Texas, and they went to San Diego as almost a package deal in 1951. Murphy\u2019s work as sports editor to make San Diego a major league market was so persistent that in 1981, months after his death, the name of San Diego Stadium was changed to Jack Murphy Stadium \u2014 and it remained that way for 17 years.<\/p>\n<p class=\"rt-Text\">Collier switched his coverage to the Padres, obviously, with the expansion in 1969. And it is stunning to look back at those early seasons: The Chargers, beloved as an AFL team and still beloved post-merger, were what mattered to the San Diego area sports fans.<\/p>\n<p class=\"rt-Text\">When the Padres played for those first several seasons, everybody went to the beach. The official attendance for the inaugural big-league season in 1969 was 512,970. The first five seasons, the Padres didn\u2019t reach 650,000.<\/p>\n<p class=\"rt-Text\">Asked for an explanation for this early expansion disaster, it was twofold: \u201cThey all have been raised as Dodgers fans down here, and the Padres stink.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"rt-Text\">Forward went Phantom Phil \u2014 still on the beat when the Padres brought in the ultimate Dodger, Steve Garvey (at age 34) in 1983 and went to the World Series in 1984, and the Murph was oft-filled.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Collier had covered mostly the Dodgers and some of the Angels for the Tribune until 1969, when San&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":124300,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[363,99],"class_list":["post-124299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124299\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/124300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}