It was a late September day and the Padres, yes, the San Diego Padres, were on the cusp of a postseason clinch for the first time since 2006. Back then, Mike Piazza was their starting catcher and Eric Young (Sr.) was patrolling their outfield. Now, in 2020, they're replaced by superstars like Fernando Tatis Jr. and Manny Machado.
San Diego has never won a World Series in its 50-plus years of existence. Padres fans are long-suffering, like Cubs or Red Sox fans before them, but maybe even more so. Chicago and Boston are towns where baseball is religion, it was normal and natural to cheer for the home team. While San Diego -- although it had a long baseball history -- is more of a surf city, probably better known for its beaches and tacos. If you were a diehard baseball fan there for 50 years, you were one of the diehardest.
93-year-old Ardie Hamry was one of those.
I had heard about Hamry through an interview she did with a local San Diego news channel last season. She had not only been rooting for the Padres since they debuted as a Major League team in 1969, she'd also been going to games since the team first started in the Pacific Coast League by the same name way back in 1936. A mind-boggling 84 years. She was quite possibly the longest-cheering Padres fan on planet earth.
So, I called her up to see what it's been like being a fan through the good (and mostly bad) times and how she feels about the team's chances this season. At first she sounded a little bit embarrassed, saying, "Oh boy, I don't know," but eventually she agreed to talk -- as long as she could bring her grandson Blake along to help her fill in any holes.
Hamry first started attending games at Lane Field -- the stadium built for the PCL Padres after they moved from L.A. in 1936. It was an 8,000-seater on the waterfront.
The way Hamry describes her first games there is a reminder of simpler times.
"I was nine years old and Lane Field opened," Hamry tells me. "Tickets were probably 25 cents. I had a friend across the street and the two of us would take the streetcar downtown. Those days you could send little kids anywhere you want. We also had an extra nickel to spend at the ballpark."
Hamry says she just grew up a big sports fan. She played shortstop in softball. Her mom didn't go to games, but she'd listen to them on the radio. Her dad "could care less." Her two older brothers were also big baseball fanatics -- one of them was even on the same San Diego high school team as Ted Williams. Although Hamry's brother was a towel boy and Williams was, well, one of the best hitters of all time.
Most know Williams for his time with the Red Sox, but the San Diego native first played for the PCL Padres from 1936-38. He was already a stud back then -- when Red Sox GM Eddie Collins was scouting him he said, "[Williams] stood out like a brown cow in a field of white cows."
Even with all-time Major League greats like Tony Gwynn and Trevor Hoffman, Hamry says The Splendid Splinter is her favorite player to ever wear a Padres uniform. She reminds me of the mythical Lane Field tale that Williams once hit a home run onto the back of train running beyond the right-field fence. The train traveled 120 miles up to Los Angeles, thus making Williams' homer the longest ever hit.
Hamry, not from a wealthy family, did whatever she could to go to games as the Padres moved from Lane Field to Westgate Park to San Diego Stadium. Babysitting was a good way to earn some cash. Still, she usually didn't have the best seats in the house.
"Beyond the playing field, there was this grassy bank [at Westgate Park] and that's usually where we sat," Hamry remembers. "The cheapest ones. I felt like I was in hog heaven whenever I got to sit up behind home plate. Or along the third-base line or first-base line, too."
And then, in 1969, San Diego moved on up: They were entered as an expansion team to Major League Baseball. Hamry was excited, but like many expansion teams in their first seasons, the Padres lost. A lot. They had at least 100 losses in four out of their first six seasons. The other two they lost 99 and 95.
"Yes, bad is an understatement," Blake says, laughing.
"I think pathetic might be a better word for it," Hamry says.
But Ardie continued to go to games. She had seats, as she describes it, "way out in the outfield." But she would scoot down to lower levels with her two daughters if fans cleared out. She went to the All-Star Game when it was at San Diego Stadium in 1978. That one was with her late husband, Will.
"When I married my husband, he was a big baseball fan, so that worked out well," Hamry says, laughing. "We'd leave our kids with this girl across the street who babysat so we could go to games by ourselves. And then they also started going to games one by one."
When the Padres finally made a World Series in 1984, Ardie gave away her tickets to her two daughters. And for the '98 World Series, she gifted her tickets to Blake and his family. Some extremely unselfish gestures for someone who had dedicated her entire life to watching the team.
But talking more to her, her fandom doesn't seem to really be all about winning and championships. When I ask what she loves about baseball, she talks about just enjoying the view, "when you have those perfect seats ... being able to see the entire ballpark at once." Blake expounds on his grandmother's love for the game.
"It's not one thing about baseball that she likes," he says. "It's the whole experience -- from watching the grounds crew water down the dirt to seeing the very last pitch. The whole start to finish experience is what does it."
In her later years, after her husband passed away, Hamry and a friend signed up with a ballpark tour company to see every stadium in the country. She talks about visiting the old and new Yankee Stadiums fondly, and last season, at Petco Park, she even got to throw out a ceremonial first pitch.
"So we get out there and the whole time we're practicing throwing underhand, we gotta throw underhand," Blake says. "[The Padres] say, 'OK this is good, we're gonna scooch you up closer to the plate, nobody's expecting you to throw 90 mph.' We get up there, they say, 'Ardie, throw your pitch.' And sure enough, she throws overhand. We're walking off the field and I'm like, 'Grandma, why didn't you throw underhand?' And she says, 'We don't throw underhand in the bigs.'”
As far as this year's team, Hamry loves that they brought back the brown uniforms. She likes Tatis Jr. "a lot" and calls him an "exciting player." But her favorite person to see at games is Wil Myers.
"I call him cutie," Hamry says. "[At games] I like to rile my kids up and start hollering, 'C'mon, cutie!' My girls get embarrassed but that's OK."
Hamry and her family have since developed a fun relationship with Myers and his wife Maggie.
And finally, the ultimate question: Can the San Diego Padres, the 2020 Slam Diego Padres, after a half-century of never winning a World Series and nearly a century of Ardie Hamry cheering them on, win it all?
"Of course they can," Hamry says without hesitation.
I mean, who would know better?