Swinging For The Border

The concession stands at Petco Park in San Diego offer a deal that makes health freaks shudder and recessionistas swoon. It is called the 5 for $5, inspired by a lagging economy, reminiscent of a bygone era. For a fiver Padres fans can gorge on the five ballpark food groups: hot dog, peanuts, popcorn, chocolate chip cookie and soda. But the 5 for 5 still isn't the best value at Petco, not with a 27-year-old first baseman in the prime of his career who, for the relatively low price of $3.125 million, is among the major league leaders in home runs, plays Gold Glove defense, reaches base more than 40% of the time, hits to every part of the field, attracts fans from both sides of the border and does it all in a stadium seemingly built for him to fail and in a lineup that often "protects" him with a .245 hitter. "Adrian Gonzalez," says teammate Cliff Floyd, "is the best bargain in baseball."

Nobody is going to take up a collection plate, but Gonzalez makes less than the major league average ($3.15 million) and much less than a lot of average major leaguers. Gonzalez is the rare arbitration-eligible All-Star whose long-term deal makes him affordable to a struggling small-market franchise. Considering that the Padres are trying to strip their payroll to $40 million, have tried for eight months to unload ace Jake Peavy and are in the midst of a cumbersome three-year ownership transfer that has prompted players to compare themselves with characters in Major League, the fact that they control Gonzalez's rights through 2011 gives them some relevance and hope. "If I were in another city, I might be in a hurry to leave this situation," says Gonzalez, his chin framed by a trimmed black goatee. "But here, it's different."

San Diego sprawls on one side of the border, Tijuana on the other, and Gonzalez belongs to both. He was born in San Diego, moved to Tijuana when he was a baby and back to San Diego when he was in fifth grade. As a boy in Tijuana, he and his older brothers, Edgar and David Jr., would hit bottle caps with broomsticks in the streets. As teenagers in San Diego they would hit 90-mph cutters off the state-of-the-art pitching machine in their backyard. "They had the best of both worlds," says their father, David Gonzalez, who owns an air-conditioning business. Once a first baseman on the Mexican national team, he understood that the ultimate modern ballplayer would blend American and Latino baseball cultures.

Adrian logged as many as 120 games a year, playing on manicured fields in San Diego's South Bay during the week, then crossing the Otay border and playing on potholed fields near the Tijuana airport over the weekend. By 15 he was a regular in Tijuana's famed "Sunday games," hitting against former pro pitchers who still touched 90. A self-made first baseman, Gonzalez does everything righthanded except hit and throw. His style is an elegant amalgamation of Southern and Baja California. The way he fields a ground ball, off to the side with one hand, is smooth and instinctive. "That's from Mexico," Gonzalez says. The way he approaches at bats, poring over scouting reports and game tapes, is obsessive. "That's from the United States," he says.

And the way he swings, his bat level through the zone, hands inside the ball? "That," he says, "is from Tony Gwynn."

With ocean to the west, desert to the east and Los Angeles to the north, the Padres have spent decades trying to expand their market south. In the mid-1990s, tired of losing Latino fans to the Dodgers, they launched a bold initiative to take back the Baja. They opened a team store in Tijuana, rebuilt local Little League parks, offered bus rides to games from Tijuana and played a regular-season series against the Mets in Monterrey. The campaign was designed to foster loyalty among the next generation, but Gonzalez was already on board. He and his brothers sat in the field-level seats at Qualcomm Stadium—"Jack Murphy Stadium," corrects Edgar—fuming when the ownership group led by Tom Werner gutted the team in 1993 and rejoicing when John Moores put it back together and funded a World Series run in '98. Adrian wore number 19 at Eastlake High in honor of Gwynn; when his girlfriend, Betsy Perez, graduated from nearby Bonita Vista High, he hired a plane to fly over the ceremony dragging the banner: I LOVE BETSY, #19. They married two years later and now live in the Gaslamp Quarter, a short walk from Petco Park.

"Adrian Gonzalez is the perfect representative of this region," says Enrique Morones, a civil rights activist who was in charge of the Padres' aggressive Latino relations program in the '90s. "You ask people from San Diego about him, and they will tell you, 'He's one of us. He's a San Diegan.' Then you ask people from Tijuana about him, and they will tell you, 'He's one of us. He's a Tijuanense.' And they're both right."

The Gonzalez boys had their most fantastic childhood dreams come true—Adrian is entrenched at first base for the Padres, while Edgar, 31, is a backup at second—except that Moores is in the process of gutting the team and selling it to a group led by former Diamondbacks CEO Jeff Moorad. Again, the brothers have a field-level view of a turbulent era. When Morones ate lunch recently with Tijuana mayor Jorge Ramos, Ramos told him, "Well, at least they have Adrian Gonzalez." That could be a new slogan. At week's end Gonzalez had also scored or driven in more than a third of San Diego's runs.

This month, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, Gonzalez became the first player of the live-ball era to draw multiple walks in eight straight games. The choice confronting managers—face Gonzalez or cleanup hitter Kevin Kouzmanoff—has been a no-brainer. "It's become like it was with Barry Bonds," Dodgers starter Randy Wolf says. "You don't pitch to [Gonzalez], because when you do, he hurts you."

The Marlins drafted Gonzalez out of Eastlake with the first overall pick in 2000 and projected him as a power-hitting lefty, sending moonbeams over the rightfield fence. But Gonzalez was more comfortable slapping line drives to left, much like Gwynn, and in 2003 Florida shipped him to the Rangers, whose minor league coaches believed they could unlock his power by persuading him to pull the ball. One hitting instructor at Double A even advised Gonzalez to yank balls foul in batting practice. The more home runs he tried to belt to right, the more ground balls he wound up rolling to second.