The San Diego Padres could have been ours

The Padres' owners are selling the team and are poised to make billions. It calls to mind Joan Kroc, who tried to give the team to the public.

Former Padres owner Joan Kroc in 1984 (San Diego Union-Tribune)

The family that controls the San Diego Padres announced this week that they’re exploring a sale of the team. The Seidlers and their co-investors will make billions—billions that, except for the intervention of monopolists in 1990, could have existed in the public trust in perpetuity.

Ray Kroc of McDonald’s fame and fortune bought the Padres in January 1974 in an eleventh-hour deal that stopped the struggling franchise from relocating to Washington, D.C. It cost Kroc $12 million, or $79 million in today’s dollars, which anymore is about the cost of a number-five starter.¹

After that season’s home opener, in which the Padres lost to the Houston Astros 9-5 to remain winless, Kroc got on the public address system. “I have good news and bad news,” he said. “The good news is that the [Los Angeles] Dodgers drew 31,000 for their opener and we’ve drawn 39,000 for ours. The bad news is that this is the most stupid baseball playing I’ve ever seen.” Over fifty years later, the Padres’ attendance is still strong for a small-market team that’s never won anything, and the Dodgers still are superior.

Joan Kroc took over the club after her husband’s death in 1984, and two years later she kicked the tires on a sale. Baseball was Ray’s thing, an obsession since childhood. After his purchase of the Padres was finalized, he told the San Diego Union-Tribune that he just wanted “to have fun with an expensive hobby.” Joan’s hobby was philanthropy, and she didn’t need the Padres for that. She had McDonald’s stock.

She finally decided to divest herself of the team in 1990, but not before trying to make one last charitable act as owner. She wanted to give the team to the city of San Diego.

“Mrs. Kroc was definitely serious. It would have been the coup of the century for the city,” then-San Diego mayor Maureen O’Connor told the Los Angeles Times. “I was shocked when she offered it and I was excited about the opportunity for the city, and we thought we could do it.”

The idea was to move the club to municipal ownership and establish a nonprofit operating entity, seeded by a $100 million trust funded by Kroc, to run it. Revenues from ticket sales, merchandise, broadcasting, etc. would be reinvested in the club and community. O’Connor used the Green Bay Packers as an example.

Apparently, Dodgers owner Peter O’Malley had never heard of the most successful franchise in the history of professional football. “It sounds impractical,” he told the Times, referring to municipal ownership. “But I really haven’t thought it through.”

O’Malley served as the chair of MLB’s committee responsible for assessing team sales, which refused to even entertain the idea and told Kroc to drop it. She did, probably thinking the Padres weren’t worth taking on a bunch of monopolists. Because of MLB antitrust exemption, the league can legally conduct anticompetitive practices, such as blocking ownership transactions and franchise relocations. (Al Davis was able to move the Raiders so often and generally be a giant pain in the ass to other football team owners because the NFL does not have the same exemption.)

There should be professional baseball everywhere

(In a twist of fate, O’Malley, grandson of the legendary Walter O’Malley, sold the Dodgers in 1998 and would later form an investment group with his nephews and businessman Ron Fowler. The group purchased the Padres in 2012, and in 2020 one of the nephews bought out Fowler to become the single-largest shareholder of the team. That nephew’s name was Peter Seidler, and it’s his brother and current team chairman John who issued the statement that the family is selling. I am not at all a conspiratorial person. Peter O’Malley blocking the Padres transfer to the public in 1990, only to buy the team twenty-two years later, and have his family stand to make billions in an upcoming sale is a coincidence, and it speaks more to the small universe of baseball-minded ultra-rich people, but…)

Late Padres owner Peter Seidler (Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images))

Joan Kroc would ultimately sell the Padres to TV executive Tom Werner for $75 million. Now, the franchise is worth around $2 billion, but considering recent sports team sales, the Pads will surely be sold for more. With that amount of money being thrown around, I can’t help but think of the alternate universe in which the Padres are a public asset.

I worked for almost five years at the city of San Diego and know firsthand how woefully underfunded public services are. (That’s due in large part to a freeloading and exploitative corporate class, but I’ll save that analysis for another essay.) The city’s general fund, which pays for services that benefit everyone, like public safety, libraries, and parks and recreation, is about $2 billion. It is a pittance relative to San Diego’s population and land area. How much better off would San Diegans be if, for the last 35 years, the city had the Padres on its balance sheet? What life outcomes would have improved? In an era of stratospheric growth in professional sports, what public services and infrastructure could be added or enhanced by leveraging team profits?

There’s also something spiritual about the public owning an asset like a sports team. Packers are the U.S.’s best example, and many of the world’s biggest soccer teams are community-owned, creating an almost religious attachment to the clubs. I have said many times in these pages that nothing in America brings more people together more often than baseball. That civic role—the idea that we all live and die and contribute to a common idea—would only deepen with a publicly owned team.

I don’t mean to suggest that the city try to buy the Padres from the Seidlers. It wouldn’t have enough money if it bonded against every single one of its assets. That ship has sailed. And, of course, the league would still not approve of it. I also don’t mean to suggest that governments should start prioritizing buying and owning sports teams. Let’s first get, like, trains in the U.S. to work and go places.

But the antitrust exemption was not handed down by God. The Padres were not an immaculate conception. These are things made and sustained by people, and nothing in human relations is inevitable. If we want things to change, if we want an alternative to the status quo of billionaires getting theirs, then we must believe they are possible. Joan Kroc did.

1. I’m sorry, Taijuan. I will apologize if you are a useful player in 2026 and help the Phillies win the World Series.