Westgate Park, on the other hand, was built in Mission Valley, which at the time was a mostly undeveloped pastoral heartland of dairy farmers, watered by the San Diego River as it led to the Pacific Ocean. The location for Westgate couldn’t have been more different than that of its predecessor Lane Field, a downtown park just a windblown popup from the briny waters of San Diego Bay. In the end the final cost for construction came in at around $1 million. Smith used his own money to build the new digs for his team. Arnoldt Smith, owner of the Westgate-California Tuna Packing Company (from which the new park derived its name). Upon completion, it only sat 8,268 fans, but a proposed expansion of the structure would give it a potential capacity of 40,000. Westgate Park was built to house the minor-league Padres, but it was also designed with the hopes of attracting a major-league team in the years to come.
San Diego didn’t want to face that future unprepared. Once that happened, the future of the Pacific Coast League would be anybody’s guess. Ever since the Boston Braves had moved to greener pastures in Milwaukee in 1953, followed by the Philadelphia Athletics’ transfer to Kansas City two years later, there was a sense that it was only a matter of time before a major-league team ventured all the way out to the fertile California coast. It had been a decade of hope and uncertainty. The Padres, and their fans, welcomed the change In 1958, the brand-new Westgate Park opened its doors. Termites had also eaten away at the structure. By the mid-1950s, however, the waterfront ballpark’s wooden construction had been ravaged by years of San Diego Bay’s salty winds. The Pacific Coast League’s San Diego Padres had played in Lane Field since their inaugural season in 1936.
0 kommentar(er)
