Padres, Mariners making 'Vedder Cup' official

SAN DIEGO — Wait. The Padres and Mariners are making the “Vedder Cup” official?

Talk about a grass-roots “campaign” sprouting out of press box shenanigans in Peoria, Ariz., and climbing all the way up the corporate ladder.

The Dodgers and Angels made sense in the “Freeway Series.” So did the A’s and Giants in the “Bay Bridge Series,” the Yankees and Mets in the “Subway Series” and even the Brewers and Twins in the “Border Battle.”

But the Padres and Mariners?

Yes, they are complex-mates in Peoria, but why had Major League Baseball lumped those two “rivals” together as a mainstay of expanded interleague play?

So, according to one origin story, two Padres beat writers in the early days of the social media app formerly known as Twitter took to the masses to seek a name for this rivalry.

“We never thought of it like anything serious,” said Dan Hayes, who covered the Padres for the North County Times and now reports on the Twins for The Athletic. “We were just messing around on the internet. The thought of where it is now is amazing. It’s incredible.”

Indeed.

The Padres, Mariners and Eddie Vedder, a one-time resident of San Diego and Seattle, a Rock & Roll Hall-of-Famer and Pearl Jam front man, have announced that the that the two teams will play annually for the Vedder Cup, beginning in 2025.

But why Vedder?

Well, he moved to San Diego County as a kid and later relocated to grunge-rock mecca Seattle, where he joined Pearl Jam as the lead singer, songwriter and guitarist.

When Hayes and former MLB.com Padres writer Cory Brock crowdsourced Twitter to come up with a name for this “natural rivalry” before the start of a Mariners-Padres spring training game in 2011, @LeftCoastBias connected the dots for them.

But really some talk of a Vedder Cup or the “Battle for the Eddie Vedder Jug,” as @LeftCoastBias referred to it in February 2011, predated the query from Hayes and Brock.

“It grew from me sitting on the couch board and tweeting out some ideas,” said Geoffrey Hancock, AKA @LeftCoastBias, an attorney who grew up in Oceanside as a Padres fan, blogged about the team and was on the ground floor of what grew into “Padres Twitter.” “The point of it was silly. It was silly that the Padres and Mariners were ‘rivals.’ That was sort of the joke. … I remember people getting a kick of out of it and then Dan really amplified it.”

Said Hayes: “Social media was fun back then; social media was so new. It was just something to get the fans involved. It’s (March). Baseball is … weeks away. We asked, what do you think the connection is? We had maybe a combined 1,000 followers. One guy said Eddie Vedder. It helped that Cory and I were huge Pearl Jam fans.

“It sort of took off.”

Kind of.

You had to be terminally “online” to even know of the joke. Then one year “Vedder Cup” was uttered in some capacity on a Fox Sports San Diego broadcast. Hancock said he remembers hearing a player or two say it. Then-manager Bud Black certainly uttered the phrase a time or two in at least off-camera gatherings with media, but Hancock certainly never had any inkling it would evolve beyond the joke Little League-style trophy that he and a Seattle-based DJ friend would mail back and forth each year.

That friend still has the trophy, Hancock said, but not because the Mariners took three of four last year from the Padres.

Just because the fun of it wore off at some point.

Hancock is well out of law school now, living in a suburb of Sacramento and entirely checked out of the platform formerly known as Twitter.

But news of the official Vedder Cup still made its way to him on Friday morning. Better yet, the actual trophy that will pass between the two teams will include a guitar provided by the Eddie Vedder, who is actually a Cubs fan. Also, as part of the “Vedder Cup,” which will include a theme-ticketed game in each city during the series, the Padres and Mariners will make annual donations to the EB Research Partnership, a nonprofit charity founded by Eddie and Jill Vedder to fund research for Epidermolysis Bullosa.

“It’s blown my mind, to be honest,” said the 44-year-old Hancock, who still attends a handful of Padres games a year, either in San Francisco or in San Diego. “And what’s wild is (Vedder) is involved in it and helping to design (the trophy). I love that (donations) go to his charity. The idea that he’s even heard of it is beyond my wildest dreams.

“I mean, this was not a well-read blog.”

The Vedder Cup trophy will be unveiled before the start of this year’s series. The Padres will host three games at Petco Park in May (16-18) and will play a three-game series in Seattle in August (25-27).

In the event of a series tie, the run differential of the series will determine the winner. The highest exit velocity of a recorded hit for either team will serve as the second tiebreaker.

Real serious stuff, right?

You just can’t have any ties when hardware is at stake.

“We ran with it and we ran it into the ground because it was fun,” Hayes said. “I mean c’mon — it was absurd.”

And now the Vedder Cup is official official.