Every baseball fan base has its own identity. A Philadelphia Phillies crowd is intense. Fans of the Los Angeles Dodgers are raucous (but late-arriving, fighting through the traffic bottlenecks). New York Yankees fans are anxious, emitting murmurs of distress between pitches.
In San Diego, as Padres manager Mike Shildt said, "every game is like a party."
That was late owner Peter Seidler's vision for this team, which will manifest today in Game 3 of San Diego's division series against the Dodgers. Seidler died in November at the age of 63 (the cause of death for Seidler, a two-time cancer survivor, was not disclosed).