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SAN DIEGO — José E. Feliciano, the new controlling owner of the San Diego Padres, lives in Los Angeles. You know, that place at the end of the Padres’ incessant “Beat L.A.” chants.
No worries, Padres fans. Feliciano is — make that was — a longtime New York Yankees fan.
“The good thing is,” he told me after an introductory news conference Monday, “rooting against the Dodgers comes naturally to me.”
It was only 18 months ago that Padres fans wondered whether the good times might come to an end, with the widow of beloved owner Peter Seidler suing his brothers for control of the team. For their part, the brothers said they had “no plans to sell the Padres.”
That sounds a lot like what Dodgers president Stan Kasten said Friday, amid a federal investigation into alleged financial improprieties among insurance companies controlled by Dodgers owner Mark Walter.
“The Dodgers are not being sold,” Kasten said. “They’re not going to be sold.”
Dodgers president Stan Kasten says the team is not going to be sold amid financial difficulties of majority owner Mark Walter’s companies and a federal inquiry into his insurance empire.
What is true today might not be true tomorrow. What is true today, as potential bidders for the Dodgers lurk and coalesce amid L.A.’s turn at uncertainty, is that the Padres have an energetic and effervescent couple as their new principal owners.
Feliciano, a founder of Clearlake Capital in Santa Monica, took the mound at Petco Park on Monday afternoon, working out of a stretch and looking toward an invisible runner at second base before delivering a pitch. In spring training, he said, he stepped into the batting cage to try to hit simulated pitches from Padres All-Star closer Mason Miller.
His wife Kwanza Jones, an artist and entrepreneur, led her husband into the news conference amid the sounds of a song she co-wrote, she said, inspired in part by a catch made by Padres outfielder Fernando Tatis Jr.
“My only musical talent is my name,” Feliciano said. “I humbly ask you to please add my middle initial so I never get confused with the singer.”
As the couple looks for a home in San Diego, Jones appealed to fans to share what they love about their neighborhoods. Later, the couple took selfies along the first-base line.
Their enthusiasm bubbled forth as the news conference proceeded, as their sense of whether the Padres might finally win a World Series got more and more optimistic.
