SAN DIEGO _ Football was king in San Diego, and the king wore blue and gold, and the king reigned for nearly six decades.
Yes, baseball had moments. There were All-Star games, World Series games, Hall of Fame players. However, the baseball Padres never crowded out the football Chargers for long. The NFL gobbled up too much ground, in San Diego, in the whole country, for the Chargers to stay in the shadows.
"I think the Padres were always No. 2 to the Chargers here," said longtime San Diego broadcaster Bob Chandler, a San Diego State graduate whose career dates to the early 1960s.
Even after the announcement to relocate, the Chargers continued to cast a shadow over the little Pads. It took the football team six months to clear out of San Diego. By then the Pads were more than halfway through another low-watt season.
Now comes a sea change. For the first time for a full year, the Chargers will be elsewhere than the big-league Pads.
Don't crown the Pads just yet. They've not joined a playoff race in any of the past seven years. They have the National League's worst record over the past 10 years. They've not won a playoff game on San Diego soil since San Diegans voted them a new ballpark in November 1998. Oddsmakers peg the team for under 75 wins this year.
Nor is San Diego entirely there for the taking, even with the Chargers out of the picture. The digital age has shredded the entertainment dollar into small pieces. Young adults are cutting the cord to cable TV, a main connector between the Pads and San Diegans. Baseball has become an often-tedious three-hour-plus game dominated by outcomes that don't include putting the ball in play.
Let's just say the Pads have a great opportunity within their realm, here and now. They're uniquely situated as the only Major League Baseball franchise of the 30 without an NFL, NBA or NHL team in its market.
Before the Chargers planted themselves in San Diego in 1961, the Pads were a minor league team in the Pacific Coast League. A small Navy town then, San Diego now is the country's eighth-largest city.
