‘BASEBALL BEATLES’
NLCS run, big-bucks additions and more elevate Padres to rock-star status this spring
PEORIA, Ariz.
In the dusty, olden days of spring training with the Padres, say all the way back to 2017, roughly 1,000 years ago in the franchise’s current universe, it amounted to a quiet little affair.
There might be a father and son escaping the sun in one set of bleachers. A drag bunt away, a handful of kids would line a sidewalk. The soundtrack, most times, was limited to the crack of an occasional bat and throws punching leather.
Autograph seeking was a matter of minimal effort, or any effort at all, in the days of Kevin Quackenbush, Carlos Asuaje, Ryan Schimpf and Jabari Blash. The biggest name in camp? Wil Myers.
In 2023, kids scream at a galaxy of stars four fences away. They strain vocal cords for the slightest nod from Manny Machado. They plead for eye contact with Juan Soto. Wash, rinse and repeat for Xander Bogaerts and Fernando Tatis Jr. On Monday at the Peoria Sports Complex, one young boy gushed to friends, after yelling for Matt Carpenter’s attention, “Hey, guys, he waved at me!”
This spring brought rock stars. Are the Padres braced for the noise? Mike Shildt, a senior adviser who formerly managed the Cardinals, framed things aptly.
“We’ve got the baseball Beatles right now,” he said.
The learning curve is happening in real time for the Padres, who began building toward a spring like no other in recent years. Things accelerated massively, though, with the addition of Soto, Bogaerts, along with veterans such as Carpenter, Nelson Cruz and pitchers Michael Wacha and Seth Lugo.
Stir in a trip to last season’s NLCS after
knocking off the Mets and Dodgers, a pair of 100-game winners, and the scale and scope of the franchise’s fresh reality staggers.
First, it was FanFest. The event, held earlier this month, featured choked crowds and seemingly never-ending lines. In recent days, fans tightly cornered Tatis for autographs in front of a fence. When scores crushed in for the same from Soto a day later, with fresh caution tape creating a boundary, a woman begged for relief, saying “You’re hurting me.”
“There definitely are lessons you only learn by doing,” Padres CEO Erik Greupner said. “There’s so much star power on this team. And we haven’t fully seen the extent of it. I think we’ll be a hot ticket on the road, too.”
Greupner said the team has expanded its security team this spring, though not by leaps and bounds. There’s a fine line between protecting billions in assets without gutting the spring training experience for a fan base that showed uncommon patience the last two decades.
The balance? Well, that’s the thing.
“If you stretch your arms out, you might be this close to (Hall of Fame closer) Trevor Hoffman on one side and one of those (stars) on the other,” Greupner said. “You have the ability to get a lot closer than during the season. You’ve got to be careful. You don’t want to limit access too much, since that’s the beauty of spring training.
“But you’ve also got to make sure players are safe.”
Greupner marveled at a hitting group he watched the other day with Machado, Soto, Bogaerts, Cruz and Ha-Seong Kim.
“In that one hitting group, there’s as much talent as any group in the Cactus or Grapefruit leagues,” he said.
Not so many years ago, the biggest celebrity on a given spring training day was the bass boat former pitcher Andrew Cashner parked on a clubhouse-adjacent basketball court.
Now, fans are flocking to see the actual players in uniform.
“It’s awesome,” Machado said Monday. “It wasn’t even real camp yet and, you know, we had a packed house. Watching the Waste Management (Phoenix Open on the PGA Tour) and watching the Super Bowl, we saw a couple Padre hats out there. That just shows how much we mean to a lot of people … and the impact that we’re (having).”
In 2017, Myers’ base salary stood at $2 million. Six seasons later, there are 18 players making more than that this season, including five pocketing at least $20 million, according to Spotrac.com.
Two worlds, solar systems apart.
“It feels like it was ages ago,” Machado said.
It must feel a bit surreal for manager Bob Melvin, who has experienced nothing quite like this, despite leading teams for 19 seasons in Seattle, Arizona and Oakland.
Start with the gargantuan gulf in payrolls.
“You come to FanFest and literally it was like an NFL (game), it felt like a football game,” Melvin said. “Then afterwards, you know, all the restaurants and bars and so forth, it felt like we were leaving a football game that day. So we got a little taste of it.”
In some ways, the Padres see what’s coming. In plenty of other ways, how could they?
The rock concert is just beginning.