He’s the kind of guy who would (a) want to be commissioner and (b) would chair a team that tries to convince its fans that they’re better off without having Mookie Betts around, so, you know, not exactly like Kroc, who at least attempted to give away the franchise she owned to the city who hosted their games. Werner, you might recall, is currently one of the owners of (and the chairman of) the Red Sox, and was defeated by current commissioner Rob Manfred in the battle to succeed the previous commissioner Bud Selig. The Los Angeles Times covered this story back in 1990, when Kroc had managed to successfully sell the team to a group of San Diego investors headed by Tom Werner.

For example, Joan Kroc once attempted to truly make the Padres the San Diego Padres, by giving them to the city rather than selling them to some guy with the money to purchase them. Her own schemes, at least, seemed like ones that could benefit more than just the businessmen who felt MLB was their toy to play with. Now, this is not the same as saying her time as an owner was different to the point that she is without sin or what have you - after all, she was running the Padres during the collusion years of the 80s, so even if she wasn’t doing the scheming and getting quoted by Helyar because of it she was still taking part in the scheme. Joan, though, was different than her husband in a few respects. Her then late-husband, Ray Kroc, shows up a bunch of times, but that’s because the man who helped make McDonald’s national and then global was pretty standard as far as the kind of businessmen who owned MLB teams went. Here is a fun little note about a particularly tumultuous time in Major League Baseball labor history: Joan Kroc, the principal owner of the Padres from 1984 through 1990, does not appear in the index of John Helyar’s vital work, Lords of the Realm, which details the history of the owners’ feudalistic system that organized players eventually stood together to dismantle. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here. This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one.

The Lords of the Realm by John Helyar