How a milkshake salesman and an enlightened philanthropist permanently preserved a city’s sporting soul.
In this episode of Empty the Bench: Small Market Edition, Callan McClurg strips away the modern corporate sports narrative to dissect the exact, chaotic moment the \"Almost\" Padres were rescued from the moving trucks to become San Diego’s team forever.
We map out the staggering, rapid-fire collapse of the franchise's original five years under founding owner C. Arnholt Smith. Once universally revered as \"Mr. San Diego,\" Smith’s entire regional empire evaporated practically overnight into a house of cards. We break down the historic, systemic failure of his United States National Bank—then the largest bank collapse in American history—colliding violently with a $23 million IRS tax lien. Desperate to cut his astronomical losses, Smith quietly executed a $12 million sale to Washington D.C. grocery store magnate Joseph Danzansky. The moving vans were literally idling at San Diego Stadium, the National League had approved the relocation, and Topps had already printed baseball cards rebranding the roster to the nation's capital.
Then, the ultimate capitalist epiphany intervened. We trace how McDonald’s mastermind Ray Kroc—who spent decades as a relentless corporate grinder selling paper cups, playing jazz piano, and distributing multi-mixer milkshake machines before discovering the McDonald brothers—found out about the unfolding sports crisis in a morning newspaper while relaxing on a yacht in Fort Lauderdale.
Driven by a lifelong passion for baseball and an total lack of ties to Southern California, Kroc orchestrated a lightning-fast pivot. We review his legendary, brief face-to-face meeting with a disgraced C. Arnholt Smith, where Kroc asked for the price tag, heard \"$12 million,\" and finalized a transaction to completely save the franchise for San Diego faster than it would take a fast-food kitchen to fulfill a standard lunch order.
This is a story of economic ruin, a city fighting to protect its civic identity, and the extraordinary billionaire who decided a baseball diamond was worth a lot more than a monastery.
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