Tom Krasovic: It’s baseball Mardi Gras at Petco Park, with a fun team to match

Fifty dollars to park. Ten-story building.

Don’t tell anyone, but they could’ve charged $60.

Several drivers near that East Village parking tower were turned away Sunday afternoon, soon after Padres righty Dylan Cease threw the ballgame’s first pitch.

Inside the ballpark, another big crowd was gathering. The capacity turnout moved the Padres ahead of the New York Yankees for second in home attendance this season, behind only the Los Angeles Dodgers.

If you were among the fans who wore a Padres jersey — listed at $150 to $200 after taxes at MLB’s online shop — you shared a fashion statement with thousands of others in the announced crowd of 44,709.

But in San Diego, it was just another day of baseball Mardi Gras.

The crowds always exceed 33,000, the beverages always flow like at a German beer garden.

Used to be when the St. Louis Cardinals visited Mission Valley or downtown, bright red appeared in streaks throughout the ballpark.

Surprising no one, that wasn’t the case Sunday. Padres brown and gold prevailed, other than in the field-level sections near the visiting dugout. The Padres are spending the early part of this week in Phoenix, taking on the Diamondbacks. They’ll return home Friday to face the Red Sox.

The pro-Padres vibe in this transient region has soared in recent years. Two inflection points: Dean Spanos taking the Chargers out of town in 2017 and the Padres, five years later, knocking off the Dodgers en route to their first National League Championship Series since Bruce Bochy’s team reached the 1998 World Series..

Sunday, coastal weather rewarded players and fans. Cardinals players would’ve laughed at complaints about rising humidity alongside San Diego Bay.

The Padres will blow past 3 million in home attendance next month, making it three years in a row they’ve cracked baseball’s golden marker at the gate.

Here in the Union-Tribune sports department, the main focus on the Padres is two-fold: this particular Padres team, which seems headed toward the postseason; and this Padres era, which, assisted by MLB’s expanded playoff format, has produced a franchise-best run of relevance. The Padres will secure a playoff berth sometime next month, barring a drastic change in outcomes. It will be the club’s fourth in six years.

The quality of baseball, though, is just one ingredient in the ballpark experience. And it’s irrelevant to many people who buy tickets.

The downtown traffic can be tedious. The trolley ride into the East Village reminds no one of Japan’s hyper-efficient bullet trains. Some folks have told me they don’t like the hassle of attending Padres games.

Yet a coastal locale in one of the world’s best climates gives the Padres a huge head start at the gate.

“Look at that view!” declared a young woman earlier in the week from a ballpark concourse, while the Padres and Mets were playing Wednesday afternoon.

Leading a party of young adults in the middle innings, the jersey-clad woman was walking away from the ballfield, which was out of view. The group descended to a party deck sponsored by a local craft brewery.

The views were of San Diego Bay and the Coronado Bridge. Ballgame or no ballgame, a winner.

Even if the Padres were fielding bad teams in this post-Chargers era, the home attendance wouldn’t plummet to levels anywhere near those now in Miami, Pittsburgh or the Southside of Chicago. Or, in recent years, Oakland, Kansas City and Tampa-St. Petersburg.

Good-time vibes count for a lot. See the attractive home ballpark of the wretched Colorado Rockies, and large crowds chatting and drinking on a large party deck and elsewhere.

Coors Field, writes Ben Markus of CPR News, is often called the best bar in Denver’s LoDo neighborhood.

Never mind that the Rockies are pacing toward some 115 defeats or that the franchise has never won the National League West race. Some 30,000 fans will show up, placing MLB’s worst team 15th of 30 clubs in attendance.

“You can’t beat Coors Field, it’s just so beautiful out here,” one Rockies customer, Roland Barcal, said while walking into a game recently. “My aunt and uncle, who were actually born and raised out here, they always come to the Rockies games just for the beer.”

The Padres being good at baseball provides the club more than a perk, though.

Playoff contention has pushed attendance above several big-market clubs in every season since 2021. And when the 2022 and 2024 squads reached the postseason, capacity crowds paid for the more expensive tickets.

Now, the excitement may be building. The Padres have a chance to challenge the Dodgers for the franchise’s first NL West title since 2006. A.J. Preller’s recent flurry of trades resonated with many hardcore fans, even if some may have misgivings about the cost in prospect talent.

The financial cost was minimal, making me wonder if many teams’ obsession with young (cheaper) talent has gone too far. Because Preller’s trade partners agreed to pay down the big leaguers’ salaries in return for minor leaguers, the Padres’ net cost was only $1.5 million.

Here’s a forecast as reliable as predictions of sunny weather in San Diego and heavy traffic on the local interstates: The trades will increase revenues by a lot more than $1.5 million.