There have been exceptions to the axiom that no fan ever buys a ticket to a major league baseball game to see a team's owner. One of them died November 14, two days before his fellow owners voted foolishly to allow John Fisher's hijack of the Athletics from Oakland to Las Vegas.
Fisher's one of those owners whom fans would pay to demand he sell his team, in their more polite moments of fury. Yankee fans of the 1980s didn't go that far but they didn't mind having chances to let George Steinbrenner have it over his Mad Hatter-meets-the-King-of-Hearts style in that decade.
Conversely, fans loved seeking Bill Veeck out (and he, them) when he owned the Guardians (known as the Indians in his day), the St. Louis Browns, and the White Sox twice. So did Mets fans seeking out their original owner, Joan Payson; so have Met fans with current owner Steve Cohen. And so did Padres fans with Peter Seidler, who died at 63.
What Seidler had in common with Veeck, Payson, and Cohen was that he loved baseball genuinely and wasn't afraid to wear it on his sleeve. He was known to walk around Petco Park with a baseball in his hand and a readiness to talk his love of the game at the slightest inspiration. Padres fans were known to wear team jerseys with his name on it as often as they wore those of various Padres players past and present.
Ground Floor Murals, a San Diego outfit known for having done mural tributes to various Padres players, wasted no time in hoisting one in Seidler's memory on a wall in San Diego's Little Italy section, just a short while after his death became news.
"Baseball is a social institution, and it always has been," he said in a 2021 interview. "I believe to this day it's America's pastime, and the impact that the San Diego Padres can have on the city and county of San Diego is something like no other business can have. And that was important to me."
He was talking about what provoked him to buy the Padres in the first place, in 2011, when by his own admission he was bored while undergoing treatment for non-Hodgkins lymphoma (a disease he'd beat twice) and discovering the team was for sale. He went to his first game at Petco Park. The simple allure of the ballpark joined his knowledge that San Diego had yet to party over a major sports championship.
Seidler was one of the grandchildren of legendary Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley but one who made his own way and fortune as a private equity investor. He joined his uncle, former Dodger successor owner Peter O'Malley, and his longtime friend Ron Fowler to buy the Padres, becoming its managing partner in 2020.
Seidler was known to be warm, gentle, and kind. Among other things, he was known equally around San Diego for his efforts on behalf of the homeless, which he believed was a problem that shouldn't be left to government alone. He backed that belief by creating the Tuesday Group and getting involved with the Lucky Duck Foundation that reaches to homeless youth.
"Peter was probably the most positive person I knew," Fowler told The Athletic's Dennis Lin after Seidler's death.
"To say he saw the cup as half-full is probably a misstatement. I think he saw it close to three-quarters full. He saw the possibilities, the upside in everything. He always said things could be fixed or "this will happen." He just was extremely positive with how he looked at people, problems, everything. He always saw the good. I think that was the way he was in relationships, that's the way he was in business, and obviously it served him well."
"How many baseball owners," asked one owner, the Brewers' Mark Attanasio, believed to be Seidler's closest friend among the owners, "can you say are gentle?"
Like his counterpart in Philadelphia, John Middleton, Seidler had neither shame nor remorse in actually investing in his baseball team. Among a very dubious fraternity that seems more than ever to believe baseball's common good equals making money for them, Seidler, like Middleton, really did believe there was honour in actually trying to win and keep winning.
"A lot of people thought that that San Diego would never be a baseball city," Attanasio told USA Today's Bob Nightengale. "It's a military town. It's a beach town. He made baseball more than relevant. He brought passion to that fanbase, and that's as loud a crowd as you will ever hear."
Nobody pretends Seidler didn't have a few trips and tumbles toward that goal. The Padres got as far as last year's National League Championship Series but lost in five games to Middleton's Phillies. They've gone to two postseasons in four seasons since Seidler became their managing partner.
He wasn't afraid to take the big swing whether it delivered big or imploded big. For every Manny Machado to whom he showed the glandular dollars there was an Eric Hosmer to whom he showed the dollars but got an aged shell for his trouble. He committed big to shortstop Xander Bogaerts, pitchers Yu Darvish and Joe Musgrove, and infielder/outfielder Fernando Tatis, Jr.
But he didn't deliver weekly fusillades demanding a World Series or bust like yesterday, either, before or after he ascended to the number one ownership slot. He didn't demand summary executions monthly over bad spells or decisions on the field.
So James Shields turned out to be less than his old and overstated Big Game James reputation? So Hosmer turned out to be old before his time? No sweat. Seidler just picked himself up, dusted himself off, started all over again.
So the Padres faltered last June, recovered slightly in July, faltered again in August, then put on a September stretch to a) be proud of; and, b) miss the postseason by a few hairs? Nobody doubts that Seidler would have done whatever seemed needing to be done to fix that. Even if it meant potentially dealing rather than extending Juan Soto. Even if it meant letting Blake Snell, this year's National League Cy Young Award winner, test his free agency market before possibly thinking of trying to re-up him for another tour.
When the owners locked the players out in 2021-22, the eventual five year collective bargaining renewal wasn't good enough for Seidler: he actually wanted a 10-year deal.
Seidler's death prompted an outpouring from Padres fans and from all around baseball, including a memorial set up at once outside Petco Park. Among the visitors to that memorial were several Padres players including Darvish, who probably spoke for most of Seidler's players when he Xtweeted after the news broke:
"My heart hurts with the unfortunate news of Peter Seidler's passing. I'm sure everyone that knew him would agree with me when I say Peter was a truly wonderful human being, and being in his presence was always a blessing. He was a teacher of life, and taught me countless lessons form the all the interactions we had. May his beautiful soul rest in peace."
Would Seidler have voted against Fisher's hijack of the A's to Las Vegas after too many years of playing Oakland for fools? Would he have stood athwart his fellow owners (even Anastasio and Middleton) in standing athwart Fisher yelling "Stop!" while reminding them how they were forgetting baseball as a social institution and doing their level best to destroy what remained of that status?
We'll never know now. Just as we don't know why Middleton and Cohen — and maybe Attanasio, plus one or two other owners to whom the game's good really does mean far more than just making money for it — threw their hands up, and let Fisher get away with gutting his team and without the usual relocation fee (waived by Commissioner Pepperwinkle) and with continuing to remain heavily enough on their revenue-sharing teat.
What we do know is that Seidler wanted his Padres to stand with and up to any of the other real or alleged big boys in baseball, and for his team and their fans not to back down to anyone for affection and achievement. The Padres didn't win the World Series while he was alive and operating, but Seidler did whatever was needed to make sure it wasn't for lack of trying.
As long as he ran the Padres, there was always the chance that somehow, some way, Seidler's example might yet affect enough of his fellow owners that they might, maybe, begin to think of baseball once more as far more than just a moneycatcher, far more than just a rude interruption to turns on the cell phones. Might. Maybe.
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