San Diego leads ESPN’s ‘Sports Misery Index’ – The San Diego Union-Tribune

Good morning.

As Cleveland sports fans nurse celebration hangovers, pundits are left to weigh the fallout of Cleveland finally winning a major sports title.

Such as…which major American city now assumes Cleveland’s spot as the unluckiest spectator sports market?

Bill Barnwell of ESPN.com, indulging his zest for sports analytics, devised a Sports Misery Index. When the point-tallying was done, the successor to Cleveland was, predictably, Cleveland West.

San Diego, you get to wave a foam finger.

With a nod to the hardcore fans of the Chargers and Padres, the pundit also threw cold water on a popular theory that San Diego sunshine dulls the pain of local sports fans.

The idea of fans suffering in perennially gorgeous weather by the beach feels wrong, like there’s something inherently more meaningful about losing when you have to trod back home and shovel snow for six hours.

There’s not. San Diego fans have suffered for 53 years while barely sniffing a title; there are grandfathers who have spent their entire lives in San Diego rooting for local teams without ever feeling for a moment like they’re close to winning a championship. That’s every bit as depressing as it must have been for Cleveland fans during their dry spell…

Exit Cleveland. Enter San Diego, now the most tortured sports city in North America.

My take: The monthly rent bill in San Diego can feel like torture. Caring about the Chargers and Padres? I’m just an observer but would go so far as to say as it’s not a walk on the beach, unless you’re barefooted and broken seashells abound.

Barnwell’s article and the comments from readers triggered several thoughts on the San Diego sports scene.

1) San Diego’s spectator sports experience rewards out-of-town sports fans and locals who grew up elsewhere. They get to see their childhood teams in pleasant conditions.

Admittedly, venerable but woefully neglected Qualcomm Stadium is past its prime.

2) Chargers fans are known to sell game tickets for the same reasons the Spanoses charge $9 for beers and $25 for parking: profit.

3) Paradise ain’t cheap. San Diego is very expensive, even more so for locals because incomes here haven’t kept pace with soaring costs.

Sports palaces are costlier to build here, by a lot, than in many other cities like Phoenix or Las Vegas.

Yet even when money was tight, the City of San Diego guaranteed for almost 10 years to buy every Chargers ticket that went unsold.

4) No other major league baseball city can beat the San Diego experience for the non-fan of the home team when it comes to proximity to airport/local fun spots/lodging, predictably good weather, availability of tickets, ballpark amenities and polite hometown fans.

(I’ve been to some 40 other major league ballparks. Petco Park isn’t quite in my top-5, but the whole San Diego experience — see the above list — is relatively low hassle and affordable. And not cretinous. At ballparks in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco, I’ve seen fanatics direct unspeakable abuse at fans of visiting teams.)

5) All money is green, meaning operators of the Padres and the Chargers benefit from San Diego’s status as a tourist destination. Is there less incentive, then, for ownership to go all out to deliver a championship?

6) I’ve attended every Padres postseason game in San Diego and am sure that pro-Padres crowds, long ago, were as loud as in most other cities. Former Braves pitchers Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux said Padres playoff crowds in 1998 were the loudest they’d heard, anywhere, during their yearly trips to the postseason. Back then, the Padres played in Mission Valley, which isn’t the tourist destination that downtown is.

7) The days of San Diegans actually caring about the Padres feel like several lifetimes ago.

8) San Diego is a good football market, and historically more ardent about the Bolts than the Padres.

Even when the Chargers lost the Super Bowl, some 150,000 fans turned out for a pep rally.

Pro-Chargers crowds are a noisy bunch, louder than the Raiders home crowds of the 1980s and early 1990s at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. They’ve caused communication snafus for numerous opponents dating to the days of Air Coryell (or earlier). Playoffs games were very loud in the Boss Ross Era and in the mid-to-late 2000s.

Attendance fluctuates, but the Chargers, who would lose 12 of 16 games, still sold more than 90 percent of their tickets last season (yes, opponents’ fans helped). Ratings for their game telecasts tend to hold steady. Zero times in 50 trips has the journey reached the ideal destination — a Super Bowl winners circle — but the journey is still interesting to a large number of San Diegans.

9) Were the Chargers to move downtown, I think the vibe would end up being similar to at Petco Park if the team didn’t also take care of business on the field.

10) I’d wager Tevas are more popular with tourists than with San Diegans.

11) I think the Chargers would own a Lombardi Trophy, had team owner Gene Klein paid Fred Dean instead of trading him to Bill Walsh’s 49ers.

12) Kyrie Irving is the Cavaliers point guard whose 3-point shot ended Cleveland’s sports title drought.

Chargers tight end Antonio Gates is Irving’s NFL spiritual doppelganger. But only to a point, unless the Bolts can win a Super Bowl. Like, eight or 20 months from now.

The previous NBA Finals, Irving tried to play through injuries, only to break his kneecap in Game 1.

Irving when healthy cannot be stopped by one man, as the Golden State Warriors discovered this month.

Gates was like that when he was Irving’s age, not that he’s a slouch today at 36.

For any football fan not for the Patriots, watching a hobbled Gates in the 2007 AFC Championship Game was a downer. Bill Belichick put linebacker Teddy Bruschi on him and got away with it because a dislocated toe robbed Gates of his explosiveness (and because Philip Rivers was limited by a torn anterior cruciate ligament).

Gates, like Irving, made a complete recovery. And when the 2009 Bolts got the AFC’s No. 2 seed, Gates was quietly confident about what would unfold. Months later, he said he had believed the ’09 Bolts were set up very well to win the Super Bowl trophy.

Gates did his job in the playoff opener, catching eight passes and creating space for teammates. But the Chargers made too many mistakes, got outplayed, and lost to the New York Jets as a 9-point favorite. The New Orleans Saints, led by ex-Bolts quarterback Drew Brees, would win the Super Bowl.

13) I think the 1998 Padres were the best of San Diego’s major sports teams not to win a championship.

They won 98 games. They had a first-ballot Hall of Famer in Tony Gwynn, a future Hall of Famer in Trevor Hoffman (yes, he’ll get in) and an ace on the verge of becoming baseball’s first $100-million pitcher in Kevin Brown.

Greg Vaughn hit 50 homers. Steve Finley, a Gold Glove center fielder, would go on to stardom with the World Series-winning Diamondbacks. Ken Caminiti was a unaminous MVP two years earlier. Wally Joyner could hit top-flight pitching and was a deft first baseman. The bullpen was very good, and the rotation behind Brown was also stellar. The middle infielders almost never made a mistake.

The manager, Bruce Bochy, will get a bronze bust in Cooperstown.

The Padres, unlike many other San Diego teams that won a division, raised their game in the postseason. They beat the Astros, who won 102 games. Winning the pennant, they wiped out the Braves, who won 106 games.

Then they ran into a great Yankees team and got swept.