Here's the poll that jbox was referencing before. The asked a good number of MLB players what team they'd want to play for other than their own and Padres came out in the lead with 10% of the vote. I look at it and fight back a very strong urge to go "meh". Granted, they got 464 players to respond and that counts for over half of MLB's active rosters, but does this really prove that there's a San Diego discount? I dunno. Probably not.
I was trying to figure out a reason, other than the weather, for guys to say that they'd like to play for San Diego and I found that there are 31 MLB players from San Diego high schools in the bigs right now. Of the 31, we have 6 of them. So there are a number of players who'd like to come to the Padres beyond just the San Diegans. What I though was kind of interesting is the fact that there are only 34 SDSU Aztecs who've ever played in the big leagues.
Now this doesn't really speak to anything about that first poll I was talking about, but if San Diego has all this baseball talent, fantastic geographic locale, and a party school with a (would be) solid baseball program, then why don't the kids go there? And the reason is because they can't party when their parents are within 120 miles.
Also notice which San Diegans are playing for the Padres currently. They're all the ones whose parents allow them to party.
Therefore, bringing it all back, if we want ballplayers to come to San Diego, then they must be allowed to party. Of course, if you party too much, you get chlamydia. Chlamydia is commonly referred to as the "clap" and what do people do at ball games? They clap a lot. The thing with that is if you're clapping at your ball club and they all have chlamydia, then it's a crazy mean insult.
It's like winking at a person born without eyelids.
San Diegans in general are a polite bunch. The mean ones are often transplants or children of transplants. That's why, in general, most Padres fans won't clap unless the scoreboard tells them to. It's because they don't want to insult players with STDs on the team.
In conclusion, we still need to pay for players, because the ones we don't pay have genital herpes.
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