Padres Chairman Fowler doesn’t like ‘baby poop’ brown uniforms

The Mighty 1090 had Padres Chairman Ron Fowler on the show and, as usual, all I cared about was when the Padres are going to bring back the mother effin’ brown and gold uniforms for everyday use. Ron and his answers were a disappointment as they always are. I get the feeling that Fowler, Peter Seidler and his marketing decision makers think that if they just stall long enough then public opinion will change in their favor or they’ll be on to their great reward without ever making a selfless decision for a long-tortured fan base.

Fowler makes a claim when the subject of uniforms is once again addressed. “I’ve mellowed on the entire subject in the last 5 years.” Keep in mind the team’s uniforms have declined rapidly in those 5 years, becoming the most generic and forgettable in baseball history. So in contrast, I’ve grown beyond irritated with this team and its owners.

“We wanted to do some quantitative and qualitative research at the end of the year to see how the team was perceived. We had so many questions that we did not do any questions on the uniforms.”

You’ve got to be kidding me. The one subject that is constantly being asked of them and they had too many other questions. It’s obvious that they don’t want to know what the fans want, so they can remain hopelessly out-of-touch.

Fowler used to quote anti-brown research and then later claimed he’d never seen actual research results done prior to his taking over. So now after 5 years of inaction he claims they are starting a new study.

“We have now put together a quant study that we are going to do on uniforms that should be on the market, that I would guess in the next couple of weeks, to show people examples of uniforms that might make sense and we have representatives of the brown — I heard Joe say earlier that he likes the ‘98 uniforms, we’ll have something similar to that — and it’s going to be a scientifically real research project and we are looking at a major firm doing it for us and we want to see how it comes out.”

I hope the results aren’t biased in any way by an owner that thinks that the fan favorite uniforms look like baby poop. And for the record Tony Gwynn’s opinions evolved throughout the years.

“I think I’ve told the world that I’m not a fan of the — as Tony Gwynn used to say the baby poop brown and the yellow uniforms — but I think there is some brown that is very, very classy and we’ll see what the market tells us but it’s two years away before we can do anything but the process is you have to go through with baseball so it’ll probably be the 2020 season before we see anything. This year we’ll be back using the same uniforms we did last year, except we’ll have the Navy ‘blueberries’ replacing the camouflage for the Marines.”

The only good news to come out of this interview is that it sounds like he and his old timey friends have finally given up trying to push the PCL uniforms on us.

“We have a variation of that [PCL uniform] yes, but when we did some informal research a couple years ago that seemed to be popular with guys my age and older and we probably want something that is more universally popular than that.

...like I don’t know the extremely popular brown and gold.