San Diego - A city that's easy to love ... With a team that can blow a big lead

June 2, 2016
Mariners 16, Padres 13

(Randy's Perspective)
I've fallen in love with places before. New Orleans, for example. I love New Orleans. The Mississippi River. Cafe de Monde. Jazz on the streets and in the clubs. Rice and beans and jambalaya. Pat O'Briens and Hurricanes. Streetcar rides through the Garden District. Preservation Hall. Jackson Square. Bourbon Street barkers. And those are just the touristy things.
Did you know you can buy a drink in one French Quarter establishment, carry it into a second establishment, and actually not piss off the proprietors of the second joint?
Yes, New Orleans is a grab bag of different.
Here's a second example - another place I kind of love, not as well known: It's  Hartwell Lake, a terrific body of water on the Northeast Georgia-South Carolina border. I probably fell in love with Hartwell Lake when I was 10 or 11 years old.
I grew up near this lake, learned to ski on it, spent a million hours on it as a teenager and young adult. More than 20 years ago, I even owned two small houses on its shoreline. I loved the lake life.
But no place is perfect, I surmise. New Orleans can be hotter than the hinges to hell's door in the summer and early fall. And there are a lotta, lotta drunks in the French Quarter, which can be fun sometimes and a little aggravating others.
Hartwell Lake rises and falls and gets really crowded on spring, summer and fall weekends. Also, those little houses I sold at a 20 percent profit are now worth - I kid you you not - between three and four times what I sold them for. Now that's disheartening.
The point, again, is that no place is perfect. That's what I thought.

Then came San Diego.
Penny and I traveled to San Diego, for the second time in the past month combining a visit with one of our kids and a Major League Baseball game.
Let me just say up front, we had a great time at Petco Park and saw a historic game - the largest comeback in Seattle Mariners history.
But, first, about San Diego.
With Penny's son (my witty, observant stepson) Derek as our full-time guide (and his friend, Karen, and his fabulously well-trained pit bull, Sheba, as part-time guides), here's what we discovered in San Diego.

• The weather was, and apparently almost always is, spectacular.
• The views from every place we visited - including Coronado, Pacific Beach, Ocean Beach, La

  

  The Star Bar, in the Gas Lamp District, found Derek and Penny

  Jolla, Soledad Mountain, just to name a few - were also spectacular.
• North Park and Normal Heights are cool neighborhoods and a great place for one of your kids on a budget to live. The neighborhoods have no shortage of high-quality, affordable restaurants, interesting shops and a lot of brew pubs. We spent eight hours on Sunday walking these neighborhoods, stopping occasionally for food or beer or to listen to some live music.
• The Gas Lamp District downtown is comprised of block after block of (once again) high-quality, affordable restaurants, interesting shops and great bars - and the district offers a lot of energy after dark.
• There are a lot of outstanding Mexican restaurants in San Diego.
• Dogs are almost as welcome as humans.
• There are lots of places to walk, run and ride a skateboard, if any of that attracts you. We rented kayaks and paddled the waters of an enormous marina in Point Loma. We got great views of downtown San Diego from the harbor. 

San Diego is hilly and breezy, and the breeze is always pleasant, unlike - as Penny pointed out - the 25-mph gales accompanying 55-degree temperatures that scream: We are San Francisco.
We even got to chill on the beach at La Jolla and watch Derek surf.
When not watching Derek and the other surfers, we could look to our right and see some of those fabulous Pacific cliffs that I had only seen on television and in movies.
Penny and I are at home in the mountains of West Virginia.
But... I have to agree with my fabulous wife, who said sometime mid-day on our third day in San Diego: "I could move here."

Before we saw the beaches and experienced most of the bars and the Mexican restaurants, we hit the ballpark. Petco Park. This is park No. 20 for us. Two-thirds of the way home to seeing every Major League stadium in America.
One of the problems with assessing ballparks is that every park in America is really special and good in its own way. Even Oakland, though some might debate.
So when you get to No. 20, you know there is some sameness in the branding of all stadiums. You're usually going to get:

• A park with character, one that looks like a baseball stadium, not like the cookie-cutter, multi-purpose houses that were Veterans, Three Rivers, Riverfront, Atlanta-Fulton County, (old) Busch stadiums and the Astrodome.
• A park that tries to tie in a local theme.
• A park that has decent sight lines, with no massive beams to obstruct views.
• A park that seeks to have decent, eclectic concessions.
• A park that brings fans closer to the action.

You get all those things at Petco. There is also the extremely odd presence of a building in the left-field-line corner of the park, right by the foul pole. It is the Western Metal Supply Company building. The short story is that building was declared a national landmark in 1978, and -try as they might - the Padres couldn't tear it down.

So they build around it.
In the perfect baseball architectural world, the Western Metal Supply Company building would give Petco a Camden Yards feel, where the warehouses are as much a part of the ballpark as hecklers behind the visitors' dugout.
It doesn't quite work. Almost. Not quite.
Penny seemed to think the building looks totally out of place (and she loooves Camden Yard). I stared and stared at the Supply Company's three-story building. I wanted to make it work but couldn't quite get there.
Speaking of hecklers, San Diego has a famous one: Harry the Heckler, who's been sitting on the third-base side for decades. He's considered the most obnoxious heckler in baseball.

Before getting to the game itself, I have to mention that for the second time in our past three road trips, I don't have a long history of memories with a team. Eighteen of 20 places we've visited, I have vivid memories of the teams we saw: things I learned or saw on TV or admired about a team.
The Texas Rangers were the first to bring me little to no nostalgia. The Padres are the second.
That lack of history seems a little odd, even to me, because the player in my lifetime that I admired almost above all others was a Padre. He was Tony Gwynn, Mr. Padre.
Gwynn was the Ted Williams of the late 20th century. The guy was a hitting machine. He had a lifetime average better than .330, could hit to all field, won a bunch of gold gloves and was a genuine and nice guy, according to all things I have heard and read.
Gwynn loved San Diego so much he spent his entire career there. He refused better money just to stay in San Diego.
Although loyal to San Diego, the Padres didn't reward Gwynn with great teams to play with. The Padres have been far more mediocre than good. Occasionally, they made pennant runs. The Padres have competed in two World Series: 1984 and 1998. They lost both.

So with that kind of franchise history, what happened against the Mariners shouldn't have been a surprise.
The Padres led by 10 runs after five innings. Yes, 10 runs. 12-2. There was a four-run first inning and a seven-run fifth inning. This deal was over. We even discussed the almost unthinkable - leaving after the eighth inning.
I was trying to remember if I'd ever witnessed live a seven-run inning. I remember that yes, Penny and I saw the Blue Jays drop seven on the Red Sox in Fenway. But still, seven in an inning is amazing. Padres centerfielder Jon Jay was 5 for 6 on the night. Sweet.
So.... we actually HAD seen a seven-run inning.
We had not, however, witnessed a nine-run inning, which the Mariners posted in the seventh. The nine-run seventh followed a five-run sixth inning. So if you're scoring at home, as they say, the Seattle Mariners went from a 12-2 deficit to a 16-12 lead.
Although it seemed meaningless at the time, Mariners rightfielder Nelson Cruz hit a gargantuan home run in the fourth inning.
In the end, the Mariners won 16-13. Even friendly, laid-back San Diego booed its bullpen.
Other than booing the bullpen, the home crowd was pretty quiet. An oddly large contingent of Mariners fans was anything but quiet as run after run after run kept crossing the plate.
It appeared from our first-base-line vantage point that even Harry the Heckler went quiet.