April 9, 1974, 50 years ago: The San Diego Padres begin the new baseball season. They were very close to beginning it elsewhere. They may have wished they had.
After 5 seasons in the National League, all in last place, all losing money, founding owner C. Arnholdt Smith reached an agreement to sell the Padres to Joseph Danzansky, who was going to move the team to Washington, D.C., which had lost the Senators 2 years earlier.
New uniforms were designed. A choice of new names was down to 2: Washington Stars or Washington Nationals. There were even baseball cards produced by Topps, showing "SAN DIEGO" replaced by "WASHINGTON NAT'L LEA." -- but also a backup sheet, keeping the Padres name, just in case the deal fell apart.
As if seeing the recently-acquired "Stretch" in any uniform
other than that of the San Francisco Giants wasn't weird enough.
This was one of those post-trade "Topps airbrush jobs."
It did fall apart: The sale became tied up in lawsuits, and on January 25, 1974, Smith instead sold the team to Ray Kroc, CEO of fast-food chain McDonald's, for $12 million. And he decided to keep the Padres right where they were.
On April 9, 1974, the Padres opened the season at home, at San Diego Stadium. The Padres started Steve Arlin. Having gone 9-19, 10-21 and 11-14 the last 3 years, he was the closest thing the Padres had to an ace. The opponents were the Houston Astros. They started their ace, Larry Dierker. A crowd of 39,083 people came out to a stadium whose capacity was then listed as 47,634.
Among the figures on the field for the pregame ceremony were Kroc, team president and former Los Angeles Dodgers general manager Emil J. "Buzzie" Bavasi, and... the KGB Chicken. No, not a Soviet spy. KGB was a San Diego radio station, 1360 on the AM dial. (In 2020, the former KFMB, at 760 AM, became KGB, and has an all-sports format.)
KGB broadcast football and basketball games for San Diego State University, and hired Ted Giannoulas, a 20-year-old journalism student at the school, to wear a chicken suit with the letters K G B (spread-out, possibly so people in that very patriotic city, home to a major naval base, wouldn't make the "Commie" connection), to distribute Easter eggs at the famed San Diego Zoo. This having worked well, the station made a deal with the Padres to make him a mascot.
Kroc spoke to the fans before the game, saying, "With your help, and God's help, we'll give 'em hell tonight." He and Bavasi then moved to the owner's box to watch the game together.
They may have been better off going to a McDonald's. Certainly, they would have ended up less salty. The Astros scored 3 runs in the 1st inning, and 3 more in the 2nd. The Padres scored single runs in the 2nd and 3rd, but 6-2 was as close as they would get. In the 4th, with the bases loaded and 1 out, Bobby Tolan popped up to the catcher. Thinking that was the 3rd out, Matty Alou -- mind you, entering his 15th big-league season, and, as it turned out, his last -- walked off 2nd base, and was doubled off. Then, in a stadium not yet 7 years old, a pipe burst in a concession stand, flooding the area. So things were also going badly off the field.
The Padres allowed a run in the 5th. In the top of the 8th, Padre reliever Mike Corkins allowed another run, on a single by César Cedeño. With Bob Watson up, he thought he could pick Cedeño off 1st base. Instead, he threw the ball away, and Cedeño got all the way to 3rd base. Watson then hit a sacrifice fly to make the score 9-2 Houston.
That really burned Kroc's sesame seed buns. He sent aide Dennis Walsh to the public address announcer's booth, manned by John DeMott, to ask DeMott if he could address the crowd. DeMott said yes, and, in the middle of the 8th inning, Kroc, whose voice was also carried over the radio, said, "Ladies and gentlemen, I suffer with you. I've never seen such stupid ball playing in my life!"
Ray Kroc
And then a streaker jumped onto the field, with security officers pursuing him. Still on the mike, Kroc yelled, "Get that man out of here! Arrest him!"
The Astros mounted a minor comeback, but the game ended Astros 9, Padres. 5. Willie McCovey, the newly-acquired former (and future) San Francisco Giants slugger, told Kroc he'd gone too far, and that the players were going to boycott the next game. Kroc wrote an apology, and asked McCovey to read it to the players. He did, and the boycott didn't happen.
McCovey told the reporters, "I've never heard anything like that in my 19 years in baseball. None of us likes being called stupid. We're pros, and we're doing the best we can. His words will ring in the players' ears for a long time." But Padre fans, having had 5 horrible seasons of poor play and seemingly apathetic ownership, knew they now had an owner who cared.
On June 15, 1974, having a 1-7 record and a 5.91 ERA, Steve Arlin was traded to the Cleveland Indians for pitchers Brent Strom and Terry Ley. Ley, as it turned out, had pitched his only 6 games in the majors for the New York Yankees in 1971, and never got out of the minors again. Strom gave the Padres decent seasons in 1975 and '76, then faded. Arlin pitched 11 times for the Indians over the rest of 1974, and never appeared in another major league game. So the Padres came out slightly ahead in that trade.
The Padres finished 60-102, their exact same record from the year before, again finishing 6th and last in the NL Western Division. To his credit, Kroc was willing to pay big if he thought it could bring big results. He tried picking up the pieces of the dismantled Oakland Athletics dynasty, signing relief ace Rollie Fingers and 1st baseman Gene Tenace, and nearly signing slugging right fielder Reggie Jackson before the Yankees' owner, George Steinbrenner, reminded Reggie that, while Kroc was offering a higher salary, Reggie could make more money in endorsements in New York than in San Diego.
The 1978 Padres featured 4 future Hall-of-Famers: Fingers, Gaylord Perry in a Cy Young Award-winning season, Dave Winfield just entering his prime, and a young shortstop named Ozzie Smith. They also had slugger Oscar Gamble, speedy Gene Richards, a briefly revitalized Mickey Lolich, and established Padre ace Randy Jones. Despite all this talent, they only managed a franchise-best 84-78. And they were mocked for having some of the worst uniforms in baseball history.
They did not win an NL West title, or an NL Pennant, until 1984. By that point, they had almost a completely different team, now led by batting champion Tony Gwynn. Kroc had died earlier in the year. In 1990, his widow, Joan Kroc, sold the team to Tom Werner, later a part-owner of the Boston Red Sox. He sold them to John Moores in 1994.
Seeking a new ballpark, Moors threated a move to, yes, Washington. But the team's 1998 Pennant led to a favorable vote on a bond issue that built Petco Park, so the Padres have stayed put. In 2005, the Montreal Expos moved to the nation's capital, and took on the name Washington Nationals.
The Padres are the only team left in San Diego: They had lost the NBA's Rockets in 1971, lost the ABA's Sails in 1975, lost the WHA's Mariners in 1977, gained the NBA's Clippers in 1978 but lost them in 1984, and lost the NFL's Chargers in 2017.
San Diego Stadium opened in 1967, for the AFL's San Diego Chargers. The Padres debuted there in 1969. In 1980, it was renamed Jack Murphy Stadium, in honor of the San Diego Union sportswriter who had so long advocated for the city to reach the major leagues. A statue of him was placed outside the stadium. His brother was Bob Murphy, the Hall of Fame broadcaster for the New York Mets.
In 1997, the stadium was renamed Qualcomm Stadium. In 1998, it hosted Super Bowl XXXII, with the Denver Broncos beating the Green Bay Packers; and the World Series, with the Padres losing to the New York Yankees. This made it the only stadium to host the Super Bowl and the World Series in the same calendar year.
(The Metrodome, in Minneapolis, hosted both events and the NCAA Final Four between October 1991 and April 1992, but not all in the same calendar year. Prior to the Super Bowl era, the Polo Grounds hosted both the World Series and the NFL Championship Game in the same calendar year in 1936; Cleveland Municipal Stadium did it in 1954; and Yankee Stadium in 1956, 1958 and 1962.)
The Padres moved into Petco Park in 2004. The NFL's San Diego Chargers played there until 2016, then moved to Los Angeles. The football team at San Diego State University continued to play there until 2019. In 2020, the stadium was torn down, and San Diego State's new home, Snapdragon Stadium, opened on the site in 2021.
As for the Chicken: Giannoulas became an indelible fixture on the San Diego sports scene. On the film of the 1978 Chargers-Raiders game, he can be seen, in his original costume, fainting in disbelief in the stands over what became known as the "Holy Roller" play.
In 1979, KGB fired Giannoulas, and they hired a new man to wear the Chicken suit. Fans knew it wasn't the same guy, and they booed him. In June, Giannoulas won a lawsuit, which allowed him to resume performing in a chicken suit, on the conditions that it wasn't the same suit, and that it made no reference to radio station KGB.
On June 29, a full house of 47,000 people came out to see his "grand opening." A giant egg was brought onto the field. As Also Sprach Zarathustra (a.k.a. the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey) was played, it hatched, and Giannoulas emerged in his new costume, to a standing ovation.
Now known officially as "The Famous Chicken," but usually called "The San Diego Chicken" or just "The Chicken," he had surpassed Mr. Met and the Phillie Phanatic as baseball's most popular mascot. In 1981, he joined the cast of NBC's children's show The Baseball Bunch, hosted by Johnny Bench, with remote guest appearances by Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda as "The Dugout Wizard."
Bench liked the Chicken in real life, but, as characters on the show, they had a rivalry. Lasorda hated all mascots, and eventually had tussles with both the Chicken and the Phanatic. To this day, the Dodgers have never had an on-field mascot.
Since 1996, the Padres have had a costumed representation of their "Swinging Friar" logo as their regular mascot. In 2016, though long past his peak of popularity, but still very much in demand all over the country, Giannoulas gave an interview in which he said he was cutting back on appearances. He said, "It's not the end, but I can see it from here." As the 2024 season dawns, he still performs, at age 70.