Tonight’s Padres starter, Randy Vásquez, grew up playing “vitilla” in the Dominican Republic — a form of backyard/street baseball that uses water jug caps for balls and broomsticks for bats. (There’s a Wiki page about vitilla here.) Throwing those caps gave his hands/arms a instinct for spinning baseballs, and he’d build his arm strength with a homemade ball made of rags and black tape, which he’d throw against a wall over and over. It’s an inspiring, literal rags-to-riches story of perseverance.
Now lets hope the Twins pummel him, since he’s probably the weakest started the Padres have. Vásquez throws a 94-iah fastball, a cutter, sinker, slider/sweeper, curve and change; amazingly, with all this gunk flying around, he doesn’t walk a ton of guys or give up a ton of homeruns. He’s kind of a “pitch to contact” guy in the mold of the 2000s Twins not named Johan or Brad, averaging a very low 5.76 K/9… so watch him mow down Twins hitters tonight, just because.
The history of long-lost Twin Cities entertainment venues fascinates me — read about Diamond Jim’s in Mendota Heights sometime, that place sounds like it was wild (live trapeze above the dining room!). Another, far less wild joint was the Criterion on University Avenue. Where the Trung Nam French Bakery is today. (I’ve heard it’s really good, just never made it there yet.) The Criterion seems to have been kind of the sparkly-teeth dream world of the Mad Men era, with a ScandiGerman twist added. Plus, um, parrots:
They also had live music, I’m not entirely sure what kind, but it did involve one Joan Smith from West St. Paul for awhile. Here’s one person’s memories of the restaurant and Joan Smith:
“I grew up at the Criterion during the ’50s and ’60s. Besides their fantastic popovers, they were famous for their Criterion salad. The Criterion was owned by the Sandler family and Mickey was the parking lot attendant who could converse with you in Yiddish. When you would walk in the restaurant their was a lobster tank by the entrance. As a kid, I would sometimes sit on Joan’s lap when she played the organ (when she wasn’t at the piano in the bar) and that is how I learned to play my Hammond B-3 organ. The Criterion was much more than just a Saint Paul supper club, it was an institution.” (From this site, dedicated to the history of live music in the Twin Cities.)
In 1957, a traveling businessman named Ray was in town to check on a local venture, and he wound up in the Criterion, and he was immediately smitten by Joan Smith. Alas, he was 26 years older, and both of them were married. But some connection must have formed, because Ray & Joan would eventually both divorce their spouses and marry in 1969.
What local venture was Ray checking on? The one that would run ads like this:
You see, Ray was Ray Kroc. The founder of McDonald’s. And Jim Zien, by then the owner of the Criterion, was trying to open that very McDonald’s in St. Louis Park (the local city officials were kinda hesitant). Scarily, Jim Zein’s daughter would later be kidnapped for ransom by a family friend. She fortunately escaped, but that goes to show you, never have family friends.
Anyways, Ray Kroc married Joan Smith. And, after he retired from McDonald’s in 1973, Ray Kroc bought the San Diego Padres. He’d always been a baseball fan (the Cubs, specifically, he grew up in Illinois), and had read that the Padres’ owner was looking to sell; a new owner might move the team. I guess Ray Kroc wanted to support teams staying in their communities.
(You can read about the Padres’ almost-move to Washington D.C. at SABR here. The story tangentially involves songwriter Burt Bacharach. Who may not know the way to San Diego, but he does to San Jose.)
Now Ray Kroc was nothing special as a baseball owner; in his ten years as owner, the team averaged 72 wins and finished above .500 once. During the Padres’ first home game with their new owner, the team was down 9-2 in the eighth inning. Kroc waltzed into the P.A. booth and demanded the mic. He said “ladies and gentlemen, I suffer with you. I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the Dodgers drew 31,000 for their opener and we’ve drawn 39,000 for ours. The bad news is that this is the most stupid baseball playing I’ve ever seen.” Although this had also been interrupted by Kroc yelling “get that streaker off the field, throw him in jail!”
(Players’ union rep Wille McCovey did not take kindly to the “stupid” comment, and nobody let Ray Kroc near the P.A. mic again.)
After Kroc died in 1984, the Padres made their first World Series appearance (losing 4-1 to the Tigers and the dominant Jack Morris). That was a heckuva team; Steve Garvey, Graig Nettles, Goose Gossage, Tony Gwynn, and a backup infielder named Tim Flannery who had a kinda of Punto-esque energy; the team organist would play Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkries” whenever Flannery came up to bat.
Following Kroc’s death, the Padres were inherited by his widow, Joan Smith (now Joan Kroc). She immediately moved them to her hometown of West St. Paul, where all the players died while cave spelunking. No, that’s not what happened. She owned the team for a few more years, and seemed to have a decent time at it:
Joan would eventually sell the Padres in 1990, at which point she was 71 and looking to focus on her charity work (she donated upwards of $2 billion). However, before selling the team, she met with the mayor of San Diego, Maureen O’Connor. Kroc intended to GIVE the team to San Diego. With a $100 million trust fund to help it through the transition. Needless to say, O’Connor was excited about the idea, and wanted to set up a non-profit corporation to own/operate the team.
And then MLB said “hell no, we’ll tell you who you can give a team to.”
The eight-member “owners’ screening committee” chaired by Peter O’Malley nixed the idea. O’Malley, but the way, owned the Dodgers (inherited from his dad Walter). Isn’t that a bit of a conflict of interest? Not wanting your division rival to spend 100% of revenue on salaries forever?
Besides, it’s crazy that MLB gets to pick/choose who gets to own a team and who doesn’t. If when I die, I want to give my strip club to the city of Saint Paul, the other strip club owners don’t get to band together and stop me. But, that’s what having an antitrust exemption means. MLB is a legalized monopoly. They have a kind of owner they prefer. As Craig Normandin points out, in 2008 the Padres were sold to a guy who bought the team with so much leveraged debt that he spent years repaying the debt by slashing payroll. That’s the sort of owner the league wants.
Could the city-owned Padres have worked? I don’t see why not. There’d always be temptation for the city to take team revenue and use it for the general fund, but a non-profit corporation set up in Joan Kroc’s lifetime (and she oversaw the set-ups of several) could have had pretty ironclad rules about where the money went.
It’s neat to imagine an alternate universe where the money from naming a stadium “Petco Park” (or “Target Field”) went into team salaries and not in owner’s pockets. Where “how important is it to maximize payroll” versus “how important is it to keep games affordable for fans” was actually a subject of serious discussion.
In any case, the organ-playing lady from West St. Paul ended up doing a lot of good with her husband’s money, and tried to do some good for the baseball fans of San Diego. And was hers a happy marriage? I dunno — I wouldn’t have wanted to be married to crotchety Ray Kroc. But she chose to be buried next to him in San Diego’s El Camino Memorial Park:
As they say, love is blind. Although I agree with Ben Jonson on that one.
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