San Diego Magazine / April 2004 / Dick Freeman

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Dick Freeman

Dick Freeman has been with the Padres through thick, thin and thinner. Over 13 years, he witnessed considerable turmoil, much mediocre baseball and occasional extraordinary baseball. He left in 1995, after John Moores and Larry Lucchino bought the team. In 1996, he joined the Pittsburgh Pirates and oversaw the construction and opening of that city’s new ballpark. Freeman returned to the Padres last year, in time to usher in San Diego’s Petco Park. Dick and his wife, Judi, rented out their La Jolla house during their six years in Pittsburgh. This summer, they’re back in La Jolla, safe at home.

TOM BLAIR: Congratulations. With the opening of Petco, this makes two new ballparks for you in a couple of years.

DICK FREEMAN: With the Pirates, I really was involved from financing to completion—design, construction, the whole thing. Here, I came back and the financing was done, the design was pretty much done, and we were around 40 percent done with construction. So it’s mostly been about getting the place operational, and marketing it...

TB: And the joy of opening it.

DF: Absolutely.

TB: How do the ballparks differ?

DF: I think they’re the two best in the U.S. The thing that makes Petco unique is that they brought in a nontraditional architect [Antoine Predock] to give it a very different look—particularly the outside—whereas in Pittsburgh we used HOK [a sports facility designer] for everything. One of the things I love about the Pittsburgh ballpark is the simplicity. Great view of the downtown skyline. Not as enclosed as this one. But Petco has some unique features, like incorporating the Western Metals Supply building into the design.

TB: You’ve been a banker and CPA. From a financial standpoint, how important are these new ballparks to the bottom line for major-league clubs?

DF: You can’t survive without them. The economics of this—with club seating, control of all the advertising, control of all the concessions—it’s a dramatic change in our revenue stream. Of course, we have dramatically more expenses. Ballpark operation costs are probably three or four times what they were at Qualcomm.

TB: Most San Diegans probably figure if the Padres hadn’t gone to the World Series in 1998, Petco Park wouldn’t be here. But it’s been a long, dry spell since then. How much responsibility do you all feel, now, to field a team that’s worthy of the new park?

DF: Not only do we feel an obligation ... but we have to have it for success. I come from a franchise where as much as we wanted to do it right, we made some bad baseball decisions. That first year of not having a quality team hurt the franchise badly, and they’re still suffering. So it would just be stupid on our part to assume because we have a new ballpark, we can now put any kind of team out there.

TB: In ’98, the Padres got to the World Series because they were willing to spend a lot of money on players. Will that kind of spending ever happen again? Or has Yankees owner George Steinbrenner made it impossible for the Padres of the league to compete?

DF: It’s very difficult to put a team out there and sustain it every year like the Yankees do unless you’re in that kind of market. Still, I do think there are good examples of teams that are competitive. Look at the Marlins. The Giants are competitive year in, year out. The Diamondbacks and Seattle have been. We should be in the same category as those cities. And we have a lot of other advantages. We have weather nobody can match. Can we be like the New York Yankees? Probably not. But can we be like most of the other teams in baseball? We should be.

TB: On paper, the 2004 Padres look better than 2003, but they still have the same skipper. Bruce Bochy has had nine seasons as manager and only two winning seasons. Was it a tough call to extend his contract through 2005?

DF: It wasn’t for me. I’ve known Bruce since 1982, ’83. You can’t always judge managers by games won or lost; you have to take into consideration the product they’re given.

TB: Considering San Diegans are supposed to be fair-weather fans, the Padres have done pretty well at the gate while often playing very mediocre baseball.

DF: That’s been true going back to the ’80s.

TB: Your tenure with the Padres goes back to 1981-82, the end of the Ray Kroc era. What’s your most vivid memory of Ray?

DF: Seeing him get frustrated and boo players when they didn’t do what he thought they could do. He’d get very excited. I remember one night, when they called in Juan Eichelberger from the bullpen. Ray was at home, watching the game on TV. And as Eichelberger walks to the mound, the phone rings in the box and Ray screams, “Not Eichelberger, get him outta there!”

TB: Then you worked for his widow, Joan, whom many regard as a saint. What was it like working for a saint?

DF: The game of baseball was not something she was very familiar with. The business side, even less. And so she reacted a lot to anything in the media. You could get a call from her, and it would seldom be about dollars and cents, or even player moves. It would be about something in the media. If I said, “Oh, she was great to work for and it was a piece of cake,” I wouldn’t be telling the truth.

TB: What was the low point in your long tenure with the Padres?

DF: The fire sale in 1993. We had Tom Werner and the group as owners, and we came out of 1992 with a good team—we had McGriff and Sheffield—and that’s what made this so tough. I mean, other teams get rid of players, but not like when you have the batting champion and the home-run champ and we got rid of them both. We took what was a very, very quality team and really got rid of everybody but Tony Gwynn and Andy Benes.

TB: The high point?

DF: Steve Garvey’s 1984 home run [in a make-or-break game that helped lift the Padres into the World Series]. The excitement and elation of that one second was simply amazing. Try to relate this to someone who wasn’t there, and you just can’t.