Padres Chairman admits he doesn’t have access to team’s uniform research

Ron Fowler was interviewed by Kevin Acee yesterday on the Mighty 1090. Acee brought up the fact that Fowler made a statement to the Voice of San Diego Podcast that the team’s research says fans don’t want brown uniforms.

Because the majority of our fans based upon both quantitative and qualitative research are not big on brown.

Then he made another claim that more fans tell him that they want red, white and blue PCL uniforms instead of brown.

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.

Yesterday Ron Fowler admitted that the current ownership hasn’t conducted their own research and he’s relying on old research from the Moorad group that he doesn’t even have access to!

I have tried to get my hands on research that was done by prior ownership, I was part of that group. There was a very thorough study done, both quantitative and qualitative.

My comments as it relates to brown, a lot of people talk to me about the old Pacific Coast League uniforms. They like the red, white and very dark blue. You know a lot of people come and talk to me about brown but for now we are where we are and I would say that in the next year or two years Kevin we’ll do a deep dive with both quantitative research and focus group research that we’ve done previously meaning this previous ownership group and we’ll make a determination, because frankly I’m not a fan of all these different uniforms.

I think it was a marketing tactic that some people like but I’m more of a traditionalist and right now — it’s a two year process by the way with baseball to get stuff like this changed — and we are where we are right now and we’ll take it under advisement.

I don’t think I’ve ever been accused of cooking the books on anything, but people thinking that I’m cooking the research, I’m not. I want to see it. I’m not as big a brown fan as other people are but I listen to the fans. At the rally on Saturday there were six that were very aggressive in telling me that brown was the way to go and that’s why we’re going to do the research and we’ll see what happens.

So what did we learn? It’s incredibly frustrating to listen to Fowler because it’s clear that as long as we are stuck with him, we are stuck with dull blue uniforms. He makes claims that fans want PCL uniforms, but admits that he also hears a lot about brown. Either way this is a bad way to judge, since 99% of fans don’t have any access to Fowler.

It’s clear that he ignores the pro-brown sentiments because it doesn’t fit his own sensibilities, which he also admits are not pro-brown, as if we didn’t know that.

He also denies claims that he’s “cooked” the outcome of the marketing research. But just 3 short weeks ago, he said that the research concluded that a majority of fans did not want brown uniforms, now he says he doesn’t have access to the old research and hasn’t conducted his own study. What gives?

No matter what the research says and how much ownership says they listen to fans, in the end, ownership always has the final call. If Fowler like, Moorad, favors blue, then the Padres will never switch fully to their true brown identity.