Columnist Dean Juipe: Fans quiet as Stars end 18th season

Dean Juipe

Tuesday, Sept. 5, 2000 | 10:32 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or 259-4084.

Everything pointed to a beautiful afternoon.

The weather was spectacular, a jazz combo played leisurely outside the main gate and attendants were enthusiastic to an extreme.

Yet the smiles that were all around Cashman Field Monday for the Las Vegas Stars' season finale, with their nemesis Sacramento RiverCats providing the opposition, appeared to mask a foreboding sense of doom.

After 18 seasons, was this the Stars' final game as the top farm club of the San Diego Padres?

If it was, the union dissolved peacefully and without the rancor that typically defines a permanent breakup. At least from the fans' perspective, there was no ill will toward the Padres for saddling the Stars with what has amounted to a decade of frustration.

Perhaps those sentiments were expressed periodically during the season, but they weren't present as the Stars took an 8-4 victory to finish at 73-70. There were no hand-painted signs urging the Stars to cut the umbilical cord with the Padres, and no organized or vociferous outbursts of emotion from the long-suffering fans.

If anything, the crowd seemed charmingly indifferent to anything but having a good time, a feeling that made it easy to think the Stars and Padres should remain as one and extend a pact that has been in place since professional baseball arrived in Las Vegas.

Common sense, however, says it's time for a change.

Repeated promises aside, the Padres have done the Stars no favors in recent times. Year after year went by in the 1990s with the Stars stuck in the middle or toward the bottom of the Pacific Coast League pack, and 2000 proved no different.

Hard as it is to believe, the Stars' best one-season record remains their first one, 83-60 in 1983. Most seasons they were not championship material.

Yet they've had a cozy relationship with the Padres and they're geographic mates as well. After 18 years, each knows the other's faults but has always been able to see past them.

Now, however, the time may be right to find a new partner. And among the major-league teams shopping for a new triple-A alliance are the attractive Los Angeles Dodgers.

Yet the Dodgers wouldn't come with a clean slate. Not only are they no longer perennial contenders in the National League, they "used" the Stars and Las Vegas to feather their existing spring-training nest in Vero Beach, Fla. If there's any lingering animosity, they may not be welcomed by the Stars' front-office staff.

But forgiving the Padres may be just as difficult. Annually, they reap and plunder the Stars' roster -- as is their right -- and make no apologies for it.

Nor have they replenished the cupboard as they could have, and this year they kept promising first baseman Sean Burroughs at the double-A level when he could have given the Stars a boost both on the field and at the turnstiles. San Diego GM Kevin Towers has said "I wouldn't be surprised if Sean was in the majors by 2001" yet he kept the budding power hitter a notch down at Mobile.

Given the fact the 19-year-old Burroughs has also made the U.S. Olympic team, he probably could have held his own at Las Vegas this summer.

He may have even become the Padres' savior in Las Vegas, had they cared enough to send him.