San Diego sports teams on the decline

Ryan Plourde / Staff Writer / The USD Vista

“America’s Finest City” is the logo marked on every police car in San Diego, but apparently cop cars do not refer to sports. In a city with only two mainstream sports teams, the San Diego Chargers in football and the Padres in baseball, expectations run high every year. This is not a Los Angeles or New York sports scene where fans enjoy a multitude of teams that play in?a variety of seasons. This is a town where sports fans cling to the only teams they can.

The only word to describe the 2007 season for San Diego’s football and baseball teams is heartbreak. The Padres fell one game short in post-season, losing to the Colorado Rockies in a one game playoff for a post-season birth, while the Chargers fell only one game short of Super Bowl XLII, losing to the New England Patriots in the AFC Championship game.?

This year’s season has come and gone for the Padres, who boasted a 2008 records of 63 wins and 99 losses, one of the worst records in baseball. The Padres saw one of their starting pitchers, Chris Young, injured by a line drive hit by St. Louis Cardinals’ first baseman Albert Pujols, a ball that Young, painfully, caught with his head.

Looking to forget this disappointment, San Diego fans turned to the Chargers; a team favored by many to win the Super Bowl this year; however, after a disappointing loss to the Buffalo Bills, the Chargers find themselves holding a dismal record of three wins and four losses. The Chargers saw all-star linebacker Shawne Merriman fall to injury, two ligaments torn in his knee, while running back and team leader LaDainian Tomlinson has not run the same since injuring his toe in the first game of the year.?With additional injuries to other key players in the NFL like New England Patriots’ quarterback Tom Brady and Dallas Cowboys’ quarterback Tony Romo, the NFL has since become a league with no clear dominant team.

Thus far, 2008 has not been the sports year San Diego fans had imagined. All they can do is continue to lift the spirits of their teams and say, “maybe next year.”