It's the City Edition of MLB Good Times, featuring San Diego, Omaha and Buffalo
By Jake Mintz
FOX Sports MLB Writer
Welcome to Good Times.
Every Monday, we focus on three things from the previous week in baseball — fans, managers, players, teams, cities, fan bases or mascots — for which the times were good. This week, we’re focusing on specific cities.
Call it the MLB City Edition if you want.
Let’s get right to it.
1. The city of San Diego
For the better part of two decades, the San Diego Padres were worse than bad. They were mind-numbingly boring. Sure, they had blips of adequacy from time to time and even a postseason appearance or two, but for the most part, the Friars were MLB’s most forgettable franchise. If you asked a baseball fan friend to name all 30 MLB teams, the Padres would be last.
Things are different now, and unless you’re Patrick Star, you’re hip to the recent San Diego baseball resurgence. The whole sports universe has been locked in on Fernando, Manuel Arturo and their jolly band of sports friends since the start of last season. They’ve become everyone’s second-favorite team and must-see late-night MLB TV.
But with the pandemic still rampant at the outset of 2021, Petco Park continued to limit attendance below full capacity. The fan base that sat through year after year of mediocrity then sat through a pandemic and then sat through half-full stadiums for a few months, just yearning for a time when it was safe enough to fill Petco to the brim.
Well, that night was Thursday, and it was a circus.
I’m not from Southern California. I did not grow up rooting for the Padres even a little. But I’ve been screaming that home run call from Don Orsillo — "INTO A SEA OF SAN DIEGANS" — all weekend.
The Reds eventually battled back, with four in the ninth after that El Niño tater, and they took a two-run lead into the bottom of the last. Then Eric Hosmer tied it, and Victor Caratini sent everyone into pandemonium.
Here’s another angle.
To put it simply: This is why people care about baseball and sports in general. For a city and a fan base to emotionally invest in a ballclub that for 10 years does the organizational equivalent of running on a treadmill? That’s disheartening stuff. But that commitment eventually pays off, if you commit long enough.
The Padres and, as Orsillo put it, 40,000 of their closest friends kept the winning energy rolling all through the weekend, sweeping the Reds in a four-game set. Shouts out to San Diego and all its baseball fans. I wish I had better words for it, but it just freakin’ rocks right now for all of you. I’m giddy for y’all. It’s just good stuff. It’s good times.
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2. The city of Omaha
The College World Series is back, my dear friends. There were four games over the weekend, and two of them — Vandy/Arizona and Texas/Mississippi State — were absolute bangers. If you haven’t yet gotten the lowdown on the showdown, make sure you educate yourself with this nifty preview that my BFF Jordan Shusterman whipped up in his word kitchen last week.
But the CWS is way more than the teams. It’s also about the setting of Omaha. You know how in most movies the main character is a person and the whole journey of the movie is what happens to that person, but then in a few movies, the whole thing is that the main character is actually the place itself? Think Los Angeles in "Collateral" or Rome in "The Lizzie McGuire Movie."
That’s kind of what the College World Series is like. The whole experience of taking in the CWS is equal parts baseball, colorful college sports laundry and Nebraska’s largest metropolis. Omaha is the perfect size for an event such as the CWS, too. If the CWS were in an MLB city such as Chicago or Denver or Cleveland, you'd be able to walk around the city and not even know the baseball was going on.
At the same time, Omaha is still a decently big city. More than 400,000 folks live there, and when the CWS rolls into town, the whole place gets behind it. The restaurants, the bars, the shops, everything. I went in 2018, and it was one of the coolest baseball experiences of my very baseball-y life. Not to mention, after the series was canceled in 2020 during the pandemic, Baseball America reported that the city probably lost around $70 million.
But thankfully, things are getting back to normal, and Omaha can yet again be destination No. 1 for the college baseball universe. If you ever have an excuse to go to the CWS, you better go. There are few things more beautiful than walking around a city knowing that almost everyone you come into contact with will chat baseball with you.
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3. The city of Buffalo
To be more specific, I’m really referring to the Yankees fans who live in the city of Buffalo. To be clear, that’s a ton of people. Even though the city of Buffalo is a 6.5-hour drive from the Bronx and only 1.5 hours from Toronto, the Yankees are pretty much the team of choice in New York’s second-biggest city. Because, like, duh, 27 rings, yadda, yadda, yadda, no big surprise.
Now with the Jays back in Buffalo for their home games, Buffalo area Yanks fans could see their beloved Bronx Bombers in their own city, in person, in a real, regular-season baseball game this past week. And they showed up big time.
The overwhelming majority of the crowd was clearly Yankees fans, all of whom were treated to an absolute show, as the Bronx Bombers took all three games from their division rivals.
I mean, this might as well be at Yankee Stadium — well, except for the lack of outfield seating, and the hot dogs at Sahlen Field in Buffalo probably don’t require a bank loan to afford. These games were a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Buffalo-based Yankees fans, and even though I’m not remotely close to what you’d call a Yankees fan, I think it’s pretty cool that the community came out and made some noise.
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Jake Mintz is the louder half of @CespedesBBQ and a baseball analyst for FOX Sports. He’s an Orioles fan living in New York City, and thus, he leads a lonely existence most Octobers. If he’s not watching baseball, he’s almost certainly riding his bike. You can follow him on Twitter @Jake_Mintz.