VOICE AND VISIONARY HONORED BY PADRES
Announcer Leitner, exec Lucchino into team Hall of Fame
One was a voice of the team. The other was integral in building the ballpark that houses it.
Together, Ted Leitner and Larry Lucchino will enter the Padres Hall of Fame.
The team announced Friday that Leitner, the longtime radio (and sometimes TV) broadcaster for the Padres from 1980 through 2020, and Lucchino, the club’s president and CEO from 1995 to 2001, will be inducted into the Padres Hall of Fame before the July 7 game against the San Francisco Giants.
The ceremony, fittingly, will be at Petco Park, which likely would not exist without Lucchino, hired by John Moores two years after spearheading efforts to build Oriole Park at Camden Yards.
“We knew right from the outset that this was all about a ballpark play to stabilize the team,” Lucchino said by phone Friday afternoon. “But I had been warned by various people in baseball, including Peter O’Malley, that I should not come west for this experience, because I could not tell from where I was, but the Padres games are just where they should be. They should be on the Dodgers’ station because it was a strong overlap between San Diego and Los Angeles.
“While there was some overlap, I think San Diego has demonstrated to the world that it is a great baseball town.”
In San Diego, Lucchino promoted fellow Padres Hall of Famer Kevin Towers to Padres GM and then worked with Towers and manager Bruce Bochy to build playoff teams in 1996 and 1998. The latter team helped win a citywide vote in November 1998 that approved the building of Petco Park, which Lucchino then helped design.
“If not for Larry Lucchino,” former Padres owner John Moores once said, “there’d be no new ballpark.”
Petco Park became the second of five ballparks that Lucchino has overseen the construction of, most recently Polar Park, home of the Worcester Red Sox, Boston’s Triple-A affiliate.
“It’s a labor of love,” Lucchino, 76, said. “I once asked Bud Selig what’s the hardest thing he’s ever done in baseball. He said that’s easy, ‘Trying to get a ballpark built.’ It calls on a lot of skills and civic analysis and it’s a real challenge, but I’m also proud of what we accomplished on the field. We did go to the World Series in 1998. We did win the division in ’96, from the Dodgers appropriately enough.
“I think San Diego will be a baseball town for generations to come.”
Leitner — who also served as play-by-play voice of the Chargers, Clippers and San Diego State (which he continues to this day) — has been a fixture in San Diego media since joining KFMB-TV in 1978. He began working for the Padres two years later when Jerry Coleman moved from the booth into the manager’s office.
Coleman’s stint in uniform lasted just one year, but Coleman, owner Ray Kroc and Padres President Ballard Smith all insisted on Leitner continuing in the booth, as unorthodox as he was at times as an official employee of the team.
After all, with background in journalism, Leitner had a penchant for telling it like it is, for better (“My Padres”) or worse (“Your Padres”).
“That caused a lot of conflict with executives and owners and players,” Leitner, who will be inducted two days before his 75th birthday, said Friday afternoon. “The fact that that didn’t stop me is a credit to the Padres and all the owners throughout the years.
“All the checks cleared. To have this (Padres Hall of Fame induction) on top of that is more than anyone could have asked for.”