1-Man’s Opinion on Sports-Thursday “Padres-Chargers-Why Do They Do What They Do?”

Posted by on November 24th, 2016  •  0 Comments  • 

“Happy Thanksgiving”

“Strange Way to Do Businees”

-0-

It’s late in the season and the Chargers are struggling to stay in the playoff race.

It’s early in the off season and the Padres haven’t done very much to improve on their near 100-loss season of last summer.

Off the field, it’s also been strange too.

Voted down in the stadium measure, the Chargers are dropping hints to their favored out of town media “LA is a real possibility-their hand may be forced”.

You’d think Dean Spanos would have learned from last year’s failed ‘scorched earth policy’, that no one in this town is going to be bullied into giving a rich man a new football stadium.

Why bring up LA again, when it’s not really a viable option? Why not use the olive branch that is out there, to patch up bad relationships, to see if downtown can be re-visited, or whether something creative at the Qualcomm sight can be made to work to benefit all?

As the team staggers to the finish line, with another likely non-playoff season, we see the diminished fan support. The (1-15) season was 15-years ago, and the Chargers are home attendance is threatening to bottom out close to what they had that horrific year.

The Bolts are averaging (55,819) fans a game at home, with lots of out of town guests buying up tickets. Look at the club seats and sky boxes, and see how emtpy they are.

That 2000-nightmare of a season saw the franchise draw an average of 54,182 per home game. Ah the Ryan Leaf era of error.

Failing to win, trying to intimidate the fans to vote ‘yes’, and the nine month seige of negativity spewed by Mark Fabiani, has hurt the Spanos family name and the relationships in this town.

An unpopular coach, who remains on the job, hasn’t helped either.

The Padres have ridden an emotional roller-coaster of good news, bad news, high expectations and failed experiences.

The bad season was followed by the bad ending to the job status of President-CEO Mike Dee.

Then a month after he was axed, comes this generic press release, in which both sides compliment each other over their failed relationships.

Of course no one wants to comment about why you’d send this release out the night before Thanksgiving, when you buried Dee a month earlier.

Truth be, Dee probably threatened unlawful termination, and the Padres threatened to sue him for some of his business transactions. Yes there are pretty steamy rumors out there about the reasons for the parting.

And no 3-sentence press release will make that history go away.

And then the Padres decided to change their uniforms for 2017, but do so without a press conference for the media, using only social media to tell the fans, bland blue and white is what they’ll wear, probably to match the bland roster they will put on the field.

A chance to get some good publicity, and this is how you handle an opportunity, by locking out the key local media, so you can put stuff out on twitter.

Oh by the way, keeping score at home, by a vote of 96%-to-4%, fans taking part in my CW-6 twitter poll, were aghast at the new look uniforms, and the decision to remove the popular blue-gold and white uniforms, unveiled last year.

This is the same ownership group that fought the decision on ‘bring back the brown’ for a couple of season. Now fans are wearing the original colors all over town.

And much like the Chargers, we are still suffering the spillover from the ouija board roster moves in the 2-and-half year reign of GM-AJ Preller.

Who knows what December will bring to the Padres, but anything has to be better than what we have seen the last 18-months.

You just wonder.

All these rich people, successful in other business ventures, Spanos, Fowler, Seidler, why do they keep doing things the way they do things with the franchises they own?.

Strange way to do business, when your business in the NFL and MLB seems to be floundering.

-0-

Please follow and like us:

Leave a Comment:

Your email address will not be published.