Lakers Heirs Buy a Stake in the Padres, Completing a Transition That Took, So Far, One Season

SAN DIEGO — The two youngest sons of the late Lakers patriarch have joined the new ownership group of the San Diego Padres, a move that completes, in the language of the family’s representatives, “a natural transition,” and in the language of everyone else who has followed the family’s recent history, a move that took, so far, about one season and a great deal of paperwork.

Joey and Jesse Buss, the youngest of the late Jerry Buss’s six children, will come in through Buss Sports Capital, the investment firm the brothers established following the family’s sale of the Los Angeles Lakers, and their stake, per the reporting that first confirmed the deal, is roughly 5 percent of the club. The group they are joining is led by José E. Feliciano and Kwanza Jones, a pairing that, in the last few months, has done the quiet institutional work of turning a franchise that was, as recently as last offseason, described by its own front office as “in transition,” into a franchise that is, as of this week, described by the same front office as “settled.”

The number that has done the most work in the local press is not the 5 percent so much as the fact that it is the Buss name, and not the Buss name that has, for the last several decades, been the single most recognized in the building the family no longer owns. The Lakers, for the purposes of this story, are a sold asset, in the way that a house is a sold asset, and the two brothers in question are, by the count of the people who grew up watching the games, now, in a technical and entirely non-sentimental sense, available. The Padres, for their part, have, in the statement released on the announcement, described the addition as “a welcome addition to our ownership group,” which is the phrase a franchise uses when the alternative would be to explain, in the same statement, exactly what a 5 percent stake by two men named Buss is, in a city that has, until this week, had no particular relationship to the name.

The practical effect of a 5 percent minority stake is, in the day-to-day operation of a major-league club, a matter that has, in the last several ownership transitions, been described by the people who actually run the clubs as “a matter of the partnership,” which is the industry’s term for a question that has an answer, and the answer is no, and no one is going to be the one to say it out loud. The brothers, per the reporting, are not taking seats in a front office, are not naming a hitting coach, and are not, as of this morning, in a position to do either of those things, which is the kind of ownership that, in the family’s own history, has, at various points, been described as a foundation, an investment, and, in one widely reported interview, “a way to stay close to the sport,” which is, in the language of the front office that is not theirs, a perfectly reasonable thing to want, and a perfectly reasonable thing to fund.

The larger story is the one that does not require a press release, and it is the one the family has been living through for a little while now: the slow administrative work of a name that was, for a generation, the building, becoming, by a series of transactions that each one was, on its own, a reasonable decision, a stake in a different building, in a different sport, in a city that is, by the account of the people who have done the arithmetic, about a flight and a half away from the one it came from. None of this is, in the language of anyone involved, a loss, and all of it is, in the language of the people who grew up with the name, the kind of thing that does not announce itself so much as it arrives, one 5 percent at a time, and one season at a time, and one “natural transition” at a time.

At press time, the brothers had not announced a game plan, had not announced a seat in the suite, and had, by the account of the family’s representatives, not yet decided, in any permanent sense, which city they would be considered, on a given Tuesday, to be from.