Replied Peters, “I’d like to be able to decide that myself.” “Sorry,” longtime journalist and Los Angeles Dodgers fan David Ogul chimed in. Peters tweeted back: “Disagree! Think your Boston would tolerate this even in the down years? It’s ridiculous.” Now back to your regularly scheduled not caring about not seeing them.” He’s congressional candidate and La Jolla resident Scott Peters.įed up at both my inability to watch the team and the fans’ seeming indifference, I tweeted this Sunday: “Hey Time Warner cable customers: The Padres are 30-50.
We should be able to decide whether we watch (semi?) professional baseball or not.Īnd you know what? I finally found a politician who agrees with me. Bottom line is they can’t get much worse, and we’re a baseball town. Or that every other team has scored more runs than them. Who cares that the Padres were the fastest team to reach 50 losses this year.
They should be writing letters to the newspaper, flooding the team and TV companies with emails and phone calls, protesting outside Petco Park with pitchforks. Padres fans should be up in arms, southpaw or otherwise. So who’s the fourth face deserving of mountainous criticism for this mess? And what do you hear from our politicians? Crickets. New York pols stepped to the plate after seven weeks. (Sadly, in San Diego, the only baseball player even remotely close to breakout basketball star Jeremy Lin is all-star Huston Street, and no one’s really rushing to trademark: “Huston, we have a problem.”)
Finally, TV executives restored MSG programming, which includes the Knicks, Rangers and Islanders sports teams, for 1.1 million households.Īdmittedly, there was also the little matter of Linsanity that spurred that deal along. Andrew Cuomo even made phone calls to hasten a deal. New York City Council speaker Christine Quinn threatened to hold a hearing that would bring executives from each company before an outraged public. State and local pols there stepped up in February to end a standoff between the MSG Network and Time Warner Cable. I can also tell you that New Yorkers faced just this circumstance this year. If a team were blacked out on TV once, I can tell you that fans - a group that includes most New Englanders with a pulse and many without one - would take to the streets with bats of their own. Next to Moores on the Mount Rushmore of blame, I’m putting San Diego’s mayor, Jerry Sanders, and its City Council president, Tony Young, who have been silent on the issue.Ĭan you imagine how fast the politicians in a city like Boston or New York would be lashing out at every TV executive in town to soothe the masses? That includes $200 million in upfront money the team got from a new, 20-year TV deal with Fox Sports.Ĭouldn’t Moores and Jeff Moorad, whose group owns 49 percent of the team, have made sure Fox’s deals with distributors got done? Couldn’t Moores have pressured, even shamed, all sides so La Jolla viewers like me and others across the county could watch their team? Shouldn’t that be a priority in this day and age? If and when a Padres sale happens, it looks like lame-duck (a lot of fans would now just say lame) team owner John Moores and his family will see about half of the $800 million in proceeds. There are more people to blame than television execs, of course. And the best way to get buy-in from fans (all of whom are long-suffering, whether by definition or in high-definition) is to get the games on TV. It’ll take buy-in from the nine guys on the field at any given time and from that 10th player: the fans in the stadium. I don’t care who it is, no new owner is going to ride into a town on a white Charger or sprinkle the team’s bats with fairy dust and turn the Padres into winners overnight. The fact that they can’t get a deal done - and may not this season - is just ridiculous. It is absolutely ludicrous that I can’t turn on my TV whenever the Padres play - a luxury after a long day, even with a losing team - and watch the game or just have it on in the background as I surf the web, talk to my wife (she would spy another joke there) or go to sleep.Ī ton of criticism has been lobbed at Fox Sports San Diego, Time Warner Cable, AT&T U-Verse and Dish for the impasses that have kept about 40 percent of San Diego County residents from watching the Padres from home this year. The joke here isn’t that my left-handed son can help the hometown nine. I can count the number of Padres at-bats I’ve seen on TV this season on my son’s southpaw. To read previous columns, go to /staff/matthew-hall