Padres Owner Ron Fowler said the team plans to meet with reps from Time Warner Cable in a "face-to-face meeting to see if we can get things resolved" regarding the carriage dispute between the cable company and FS San Diego. Fowler, speaking on XEPRS-AM's "The Darren Smith Show," said, "We allowed other people to try to handle it, but it didn’t get done. We want our fan base to be able to get the games on Time Warner. A significant number of our season-ticket holders are Time Warner subscribers, and we’re hoping that the meeting that we’re going to have with them in the next week will help accomplish that." Fowler said he believes TWC is being "disingenuous because when you’re paying billions of dollars to get the rights to the Dodgers … why won’t you accept the market rate to carry the Padres?" Fowler: "It just doesn’t make sense to me, but we’ll have an answer from the highest levels of Time Warner next week.”
KEEPING TEAM TOGETHER WAS PRIORITY: Fowler also touched on the team's quiet offseason in regards to player acquisitions. He said when the organization “looked at the team at the end of the last season, we made a conscious decision to keep the team intact, and we’ve done that.” He noted the franchise's first priority was keeping the current team together, then to "improve the team if we could what I call have a ‘price value’ situation out there." Fowler: "Personally, after talking to our baseball people, I think some of the values put on free agents were far higher than we thought they would be.” Padres Exec VP & GM Josh Byrnes “looked at a number of opportunities and made the decision that some of these things just didn’t make sense.” Noting that there is "going to be increased national media money coming” for the ‘14 season, Fowler said, "It looked like some teams wanted to spend it early.” He also denied the $800M sale price for the team has “inhibited” the team from being active in acquiring players. He stated if Byrnes “felt strongly we needed to make a move, … I would have made it. But he did not recommend moves” (“The Darren Smith Show,” XEPRS-AM, 2/8).
