I Come To Bury Peter Seidler, Not To Praise Him…
San Diego Padres owner Peter Seidler died earlier this week at the age of 63. Obviously I am not here to sing the praises of any owner…
…but it has always puzzled me why Seidler did not get the rapturous coverage that fellow owner Steve Cohen got. Both took over their teams in 2020, amidst the pandemic, while baseball’s finances were very uncertain, and both massively increased their team’s payrolls.
But while Cohen was treated as a potential savior for the Mets, and a fundamental change to the game — the league imposed a new luxury tax known as the “Cohen tax” because it seemed specifically designed to limit Cohen’s influence on the game — Seidler’s spending got only a fraction of the media coverage, and was treated as little more than a personality quirk.
And yet Seidler’s spending was, if anything, more impressive. Although the Mets’ payroll had always been lower than the team’s fans would like prior to Cohen’s arrival, they DID have periods where they were among the league’s big spenders. It wasn’t consistent and they had stretches where they were near the bottom of the league in team spending, but they also had periods near the top and were usually in the top half. They made moves for big free agents like Yoenis Céspedes, Carlos Beltrán, and Bobby Bonilla, and they were able to retain franchise players like Mike Piazza, David Wright, and Jacob deGrom throughout their primes.
But this was never true for the Padres. Prior to 2018, San Diego had never really been players in the free agent market. They consistently ranked near the bottom of the league in team spending, and often had to trade their most talented players, like Adrian Gonzalez and Jake Peavy, because they “couldn’t afford” to keep them. After all, while the Mets play in the biggest media market in the country, the Padres play in lowly San Diego, where it’s the only team in any of the four major sports.
So even though the Padres never caught the Mets in terms of their payroll, their spending in recent years has been more surprising. San Diego is, as people like to say, a “small market.” And yet in recent years, the Padres gave long-term, nine-figure deals to Eric Hosmer, Manny Machado, Fernando Tatís Jr., and Xander Bogaerts. They also traded for Blake Snell and Juan Soto, two superstars cast off by teams unwilling to meet their contract demands.
Of course, the spending sprees did not really work out for either the Padres or the Mets, both of whom missed the postseason this year. As I covered earlier this season, money only gets you so far in baseball. But going into 2024, I think you’d definitely rather be rooting for the Padres.
Still, Seidler’s spending spree was just not as interesting as Cohen’s. Cohen’s wealth comes from fancy deals with Wall Street intrigue that they make movies about.
Seilder was just a guy born into a rich family that has owned baseball teams since the 1940s. While Cohen owns the Mets, who have a rich history in the Big Apple, the media capital of the world, Seidler owned a team that has never won the World Series and plays in a city famous for how laid back it is. And while Cohen keeps trying to reinvent the wheel or outsmart the game — hiring and firing executives every year, trying to add stars while still maintaining payroll flexibility — Seidler built the Padres like a kid in a candy store, signing guys for eye-popping contracts even when it made no sense, like signing a second shortstop less than two years after giving his first shortstop a 14-year extension.
For at least two decades now, we’ve been building up the idea that the best owner is someone like Cohen: someone smart and innovative with deep pockets. In other words, we want an owner who brings something to the table, whether that’s expertise or money.
But no owner brings anything to the table; the best you can hope for is they don’t knock anything over. Supposedly smart and innovative owners, who are actively involved in running the team, just get in the way. Cohen, for example, has become such an intimidating presence in New York that he’s had trouble getting anyone to actually work for him. Meanwhile, Seidler kept the same General Manager in place for ten years.
The best owner, in reality, is simply the one who gets out of the way and does the least amount of damage. It doesn’t even matter if the owner is actually wealthy because, as fans constantly need to be reminded, baseball makes money. The revenues generated by the players themselves are more than enough to cover the operating expenses and the high salaries of the players on the field.
What you want to avoid are the owners who want to extract money from their teams, who keep payrolls artificially low so they can pocket the revenues generated by the game. Sometimes that’s an owner who is in debt or living above his means — but sometimes that’s an owner who has made a name with “smart” and “innovative” ways of cutting costs.
Luckily for Padres fans, Seidler didn’t seem to care if the team made a profit; he wanted to win. It didn’t matter that he didn’t have another source of major wealth, like Cohen. And it didn’t matter that he could use the excuse that San Diego wasn’t a big enough market to compete in.
Maybe it was because Seidler was a real baseball fan. Maybe he knew his health was failing and wanted to see a World Series before he died. Or maybe it was because he felt guilty for his grandfather robbing baseball from Brooklyn and displacing a whole community in Los Angeles. But for whatever reason, he was willing to get out of the way and plow the money baseball makes back into the on-field product. And that’s really the best fans can hope for. The better owner is the one who does the least — the best owner is no owner at all.