It’s a big day for San Diego sports fans. And a very big day for the Padres.
It is Opening Day of the season and there are big expectations for this 2023 team.
Today’s opening day lineup is filled with names of some of the very best players in major league baseball right now. It was very different at the first Opening Day for the then-brand new San Diego Padres on April 8th of 1969 at the also brand new San Diego Stadium in Mission Valley.
That first major league version of the Padres included names like Dick Selma and Ed Spezio, good players at the time, but names long forgotten 54 years later.
The San Diego Union Tribune today quotes a line from the then-Evening Tribune that Opening Day in 1969 that read that the city “waited a long time for the moment and win, lose or whatever, the 23,370 spectators on hand thought it was grand. The bigs had come to town.”
You see before the Padres joined the Big Leagues, the team was in the Minor Leagues and played at Lane Field downtown and Westgate Park where Fashion Valley is now. The big league team though lost many more games than they won for many years.
But now the 2023 Padres are the big news in baseball, coming off last year’s stunning and so-satisfying defeat of the Dodgers in the post season, they are now seen as one of the favorites to be in the World Series.
Petco Park, ranked in a new poll as being the best ballpark in America, will be a packed house tonight, with many fans hoping that America’s Finest City will be the home of America’s Finest baseball team this fall.
(Photo Getty Images)
Photo: Getty Images