Alderson, Towers make dynamic duo

Kevin Towers, the San Diego Padres general manager, cast himself into baseball’s steroid furor by revealing he’d had dark suspicions about Ken Caminiti, and was called with a handful of fellow executives before the House Government Reform Committee.

Steroids, as it turned out, were not Caminiti’s ruin. Five months after his friend had died in a drug-ridden quarter of the Bronx, Towers would sit before Congress to take questions about the steroid era, as a face on the Caminiti experience.

He was there because of his link to Caminiti, who had admitted to steroid use in the 1990s, including his MVP season with the Padres, and Towers was told the interrogation would be pointed. When the Major League Baseball lawyers briefed its baseball panel before the hearing, Towers had two requests – not to be positioned between Commissioner Bud Selig and players’ union head Don Fehr, where the focus of the hearing would lie, and to be sat beside Sandy Alderson, baseball’s executive vice president, whom he admired.

Towers was 34 when he became general manager of the Padres almost a decade before. He was hired to right an organization that had floated between awful, mediocre and other shades of yellow, orange and brown for all but a couple years of its history, and his early attempts coincided with Alderson’s final seasons as president of the Oakland Athletics. He liked Alderson and admired what he’d done for those A’s in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. When Alderson left the A’s for the commissioner’s office in 1998, he and Towers again found a common interest; Towers became head of baseball’s scouting committee and Alderson held interesting opinions on player evaluation.

So, given the choice of being the Selig-Fehr middleman during a Capitol grilling or sitting to Alderson’s left, Towers chose familiarity.

“He’s the guy I wanted to be next to,” Towers said this week between innings of a game against the Dodgers. “As stressful a situation as that was, I felt most comfortable next to him.”

Four weeks later, he heard that Padres owner John Moores had spoken to Alderson about taking over the club’s baseball operations. A week after that, the confirmation arrived – Alderson was made chief executive, given an ownership stake and would replace President Dick Freeman as Towers’ conduit to Moores.

Towers is under contract through 2007. The club holds an option for 2008. Manager Bruce Bochy is in the final season of his contract – an offer of two more years was withdrawn when Moores began the process of hiring Alderson. Freeman previously was the CEO.

So the Padres, chosen by many to win the National League West, find themselves in organizational flux three weeks into the season, ill-fit to their own ballpark, dealing with injuries and slow starts, and around .500 after finishing six games behind the Dodgers a season ago.

Moores insists the hire has as much to do with his own desire to spend less time in the day-to-day operations of the club as with any dissatisfaction with the state of the Padres’ baseball operations.

When the Alderson hire was announced, Towers said, he heard from more than a few acquaintances.

“They asked, ‘You all right? What does this mean?’ ” he said. “But I don’t have an ego. I’ve never worn the title I have on my sleeve. To be successful, you have to be a team. … I still consider myself a young general manager. I hope I can learn from him. He’s walked in my shoes before.

“When I first heard it, the first thing I thought was, ‘Wow, we’re a better organization.’ Never once did I look at this as negative. You have to have confidence in your abilities, which I do.”