Columnist Dean Juipe: Padres slap their fans in the face

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at [email protected] or 259-4084.

Betrayal is a tough word.

It connotes not only deception, but implies that the deceit may have been intentional or preplanned. Anyone feeling betrayed isn't just hurt or emotionally dinged, they're angry.

Fans of the San Diego Padres are angry. And the word betrayal has very much become a part of their vocabulary in recent days, the result of the Padres dismantling the team that won the National League championship in 1998.

But it isn't just the loss of slugger Greg Vaughn, ace starting pitcher Kevin Brown, fellow starter Joey Hamilton, All-Star third baseman Ken Caminiti and center fielder Steve Finley that is disturbing the San Diego populace.

It's the cunning way the Padres assembled a championship team to coincide with a city election that had one very expensive item on it for the voters: A new, taxpayer-funded stadium for the team.

The Padres won the NL title and played in the World Series, and all but simultaneously San Diego voters said "yes" to November's ballot proposal to replace Qualcomm (Jack Murphy) Stadium. While there was a time when the referendum was thought to be unlikely to pass, when the Padres earned the right to face the Yankees in the Series the tide turned and the voters reciprocated with a $300 million investment.

The Padres had made them happy, and they wanted to make the Padres happy in return. The measure passed and it assured not only a new stadium for the team, but that the team would remain in San Diego for years to come.

It was peaches and cream for everyone involved.

Now the voters would like to rub a peaches-and-cream pie in the face of Padres owner John Moores. Citing an excessive payroll and fabricating a need to rebuild with younger -- read, "cheaper" -- players, Moores gutted his team.

The previous NL champions, the Florida Marlins, did the same thing, albeit without procuring a new stadium first. In the Marlins' case, the "fire sale" may have been out of necessity.

In the Padres' case, it's simply a way of saving a few dollars after they got what they wanted from the voters. San Diego general manager Kevin Towers can say what he wants about downsizing the team's payroll, but the people who pulled the "yes" lever in the voting booth are taking it as a slap in the face.

Of course no one faults the Padres for losing Brown, who received a simply unbelievable offer ($105 million for seven years) from the Murdoch-supported Los Angeles Dodgers. But the Padres made only feeble attempts to bring back Caminiti and Finley, and they traded Hamilton rather than pay him accordingly.

It's possible even those losses were tolerable, but then came the decision this week to send Vaughn -- who hit 50 home runs and drove in 119 runs a year ago -- to the Cincinnati Reds for the injury-prone Reggie Sanders. The Padres netted $2 million in savings this year on the deal, and likely saved themselves several million when Vaughn's contract comes up for renewal at the end of the 1999 season.

They're going to need those millions after negating the positive effects of winning the league championship last fall. Instead of parlaying the city's enthusiasm for the team and its future ball park, the Padres have recoiled and alienated their once-perky fans.

As a result, the word "betrayal" is in vogue in a city where beatitude -- "supreme blessedness" -- was prevalent only a few months ago.

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