Fair-Weather Fans (Literally)

IN FEVER PITCH, Jimmy Fallon plays a—pardon the redundancy—diehard Boston Red Sox fan with prized season tickets. There’s a scene in the movie where he makes his friends vie for tickets to attend certain games with him. Fallon forces the guys to dance and otherwise degrade themselves. And they oblige. Hey, anything to attend the Yankees series.

I can’t imagine this playing out in real life in San Diego. This isn’t a city imbued with sporting lunacy. Nobody’s channeling Usher to get tickets to the Arizona Diamondbacks’ first Friday tilt with the Padres.

The boilerplate response: San Diegans are mostly from other places, and San Diego teams are their second loyalty. And since there’s so much to do outside year-round, why go sit in a stadium for three hours? Oh, you’ve got an extra ticket behind home plate? Thanks, but the waves are breaking 5 feet at Swami’s.

I love Padres games but no longer have season tickets—no need for a 20-game mini-plan anymore; hardly any games sell out. But there’s a guy in my former section who is quite entertaining. He has a Rollie Fingers–style handlebar moustache. And he always wears the old-school, ugly brown Padres jersey. He never wants to sit down. Mainly because he’s usually yelling something at the opposing team’s left fielder. Sadly, he is singular in devout desire to do his part in cheering for the team—no matter what the score. Unlike the laid-back majority, he pipes up before “Hell’s Bells” has signaled the arrival of closer Trevor Hoffman.

Characters like the Rollie Fingers guy are a Petco Park anomaly.

Ever watch a Padres game on Cox Channel 4? There are “dugout” seats right behind the plate at field level. The seats are in TV view via a center-field camera that shoots home plate before each pitch. Take a look into the crowd during these shots. Watch Padres starter Chris Young rocket a fastball for a called third strike. See if the businessman in the second row puts down his cell phone and lets out a “boo-yah!” Or if the blonde with a spicy tuna roll drops her chopsticks and yells, “Way to go, Chris!” More likely they both continue their conversations and wait for the pealing of “Hell’s Bells” before wondering, “Who’s winning?”

SAN DIEGO HAS BEEN a graveyard for attendance-challenged professional sports teams. The NBA Clippers lasted here from 1978 to 1984 and saw crowds shrink to an average of 4,500 per game just before the team left for Los Angeles.

The Spirit, led by feisty Julie Foudy, brought professional female soccer to town in 2001, but two years later the Women’s United Soccer Association was out of business.

The Sockers won an amazing 10 indoor North American Soccer League titles, but after the team joined the Major Indoor Soccer League, in December 2004, it kicked the bucket.

The Riptide was an Arena Football League franchise that played indoors at the ipayOne Center from 2002 to 2005, managing just a 28-38 record over four seasons. The team made the playoffs once, with an 8-8 record in its first year.

When the Gulls were brought to life (for a second time) in 1995 in the West Coast Hockey League, they won five of the league’s eight championships. On June 30 of this year, the Gulls formally ceased operations in the Pacific Division of the East Coast Hockey League. An attempt to sell the team by owner Ron Hahn was unsuccessful.

In a statement that’s starting to sound familiar to San Diegans, Hahn says, “This has been a very difficult process . . . I would love to see hockey return to San Diego in the future. We were deep into negotiations with a couple of solid groups; however, there was simply not enough time to move forward for this season.”

Though it’s not a done deal, there certainly is plenty of talk about the Chargers moving on. The team’s ownership wants a new stadium that voters won’t pay for and isn’t at the top of the San Diego mayor’s TODAY’S PROBLEMS list. The San Diego City Council has allowed the team to search for other sites in the county. But come January 1, the team will be allowed to field offers from other cities. Groups in San Antonio, Las Vegas and Los Angeles are already salivating.

At the risk of piling it on, let’s briefly revisit the Chargers’ universally maligned “ticket guarantee.” It finally limped away. But while the city was on the hook for unsold tickets to Chargers games, the solution could have been simple: Sell out games. The Chargers didn’t—except for games against the Raiders. And you can thank the Raider Nation for filling up half the stadium at those games.

THE PADRES ATTRACTED 3,040,046 fans for the inaugural 2004 season at Petco Park. That was roughly a million more than the previous year’s season, played at Qualcomm Stadium. But in 2005, even though the team finished as the National League West division champion, attendance fell by 200,000. This season, at the halfway point, the team was averaging about 31,000 per game. That’s roughly 4,000 less per game than last year, which pencils out to 2.5 million for the year, a half-million off from two years ago. And that’s with the Padres spending a majority of the first half of the season in first place.

Padres executive vice president of business operations Jeff Overton says the attendance drop-off was anticipated, and it doesn’t mean San Diego’s seemingly distracted fans are not good fans.

“During some lean years the team has had, we’ve had very supportive fans in San Diego,” says Overton. “And we are very proud of our 2005 division championship, but we only won 82 games. We know it’s fairly traditional that new parks have a drop-off. This year, it’s down again, but I think attendance will pick up in the second half.”

Overton says San Diego baseball fans may have had trouble staying on the bandwagon in the past because of the up-and-down nature of play the team has presented.

“What the Padres are working very hard at now—through the efforts of [CEO] Sandy Alderson—is to sustain winning,” he says. “My very strong feeling is that we have very good fans in town, and we’re going to engage them better by putting winning teams on the field year after year.”

SO IS A BANDWAGON FAN a good fan? Not in my definition.

“You can look at this on different levels,” says Hall of Champions president Al Kidd. “In San Diego youth sports, we have passionate parents—some are even rabid.” And he says the high schools section of the hall’s Web site (sdhoc.com) gets 1.9 million hits per month.

“But college level is fickle,” says Kidd. “With basketball, students don’t come out unless the local team is good, or if quality teams like Gonzaga or Arizona come to town. And with the pros, it’s all about winning. It’s only the players on winning teams that you hear saying ‘We have the greatest fans,’ right?”

Kidd says great fan bases—and he points to Notre Dame football and the New York Yankees—have something not installed in San Diego: tradition.

“Tradition is huge, and we don’t have it, yet,” he says. “On the professional level, it’s really only been since the Sixties that we’ve had football and baseball. But we’ve got some great, stable management now. Jim Steeg with the Chargers and Sandy Alderson with the Padres are two of the best guys in the business. I hope they have time to put their imprints on and produce quality teams. After that, it’s up to the fans to embrace them.”

I’ll buy the idea that a tradition of excellence can create a fan base of knowledgeable die-hards. And this city is still a teenager compared to the grown-up sports programs of the East Coast. But please stop agreeing that San Diego has great fans. Yes, it was loud at Qualcomm when the Yankees stopped by to pound San Diego in the 1998 World Series. And it was just as ear-splitting when the Chargers played the New York Jets in the playoffs last year—until the Jets’ upset win was solidified.

Good fans are unwavering. Try the Fever Pitch test. Ask your friends to dance funny in exchange for a Padres ticket. Watch them smile and head for the beach.

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