Padres Chairman Ron Fowler says team’s research shows fans don’t want brown back

The Voice of San Diego Podcast had Padres Executive Chairman Ron Fowler as a guest last Friday. Hosts Scott Lewis and Andy Keatts had a very productive and informational discussion with him about the Padres relationship with the city and yes, they asked about bringing back the brown uniforms.

Spoiler alert: Fowler said that ain’t gonna happen anytime soon, so y’all are stuck with the plain Jane uniforms the team unveiled last fall.

I heard from the Kept Faith Podcast on the VOSD network that Fowler would be a guest, but I completely forgot to subscribe until I saw Padres Jagoff tweet some of Fowler’s quotes yesterday. He blogged about the podcast in its entirety, so I’d recommend dropping by there if you want some opinions on the rest of the content.

But regarding the brown:

AK: Any chance when those guys come up they’ll be wearing brown jerseys predominantly?

RF: If you told me, Andy, if brown jerseys would solve all of our problems, we’d be in brown, okay?

It really could solve so many of the Padres identity and branding issues that can be accurately described a current SNAFU state. Fowler said less than a month ago to the Union-Tribune that the Padres don’t have tradition except brown. Yet both he and Seidler refuse to make the change based on their admitted lack of interest in uniforms.

AK: Is there any chance to bring back the brown completely? Or at least help me understand why not? Because to be perfectly honestly I just love the jerseys and most people I’ve talked to do too. So why not?

RF: Because the majority of our fans based upon both quantitative and qualitative research are not big on brown. We’ve got them on a weekly basis when we’re home on Friday nights. We are going to do a thorough research project and when this thing starts getting hot— I have more people telling us that they want uniforms consistent with the old Pacific Coast League Padres, the red, white and blue than brown so for now it’s blue with brown with fall backs for some other jerseys. I think Andy, when they start winning baseball games, I think people are going to be less focused on brown and more on winning more games.

I’ve been blogging the Padres for a long, long time, since 2005. I’ve been exposed to a lot of fan opinions in that time. I have heard one person in all that time want PCL Padres uniforms. At Padres FanFestin 2014, former President Mike Dee did a quick vote for PCL uniforms and Enberg was the only one who raised his hand. He unfortunately had a microphone though and told everyone that they were “handsome”. The Padres must only be doing their research on ownership’s crusty old friends.

Their excuse that fans will share their disinterest in uniforms once the team starts to win is a truly awful way to treat the team’s branding and the fans that care about it.