Photo by Abigail Barnett
Kevin Gossett
As the San Diego Padres wind down another sub-par season, the fact that the team hasn’t been to the playoffs in over a decade is reason alone for many fans to stay home.
But Kevin Gossett isn’t interested in those fans. A die-hard Padres fan himself who goes to as many games as possible, he says there’s something to be said for a fan who sticks with a team through the ups and the downs.
“It’s a bit masochistic,” says Gossett, who has been a Padres fan all his life, but only recently rediscovered his adoration for the game. “Baseball is a fun sport and it’s a good story. It’s got a long history with good stories and good characters. Baseball is the same sort of thing that got me into studying literature.”
Photos by Kevin Gossett
This love of good stories led Gossett to start bringing his camera to games in order to snap photos of “the characters” at the park. He started posting them on Instagram under the handle People of Petco Park. Taken in and around the ballpark, the pictures range from casual to posed, young and old, but what mainly stands out is how Gossett manages to capture the essence of fandom without coming across as cheesy or as if he’s pandering to the Padres. After all, he isn’t doing this in hopes of selling the pictures (he often gives his info to his subjects in order to email them the pictures for free). He’s doing it for, well, the love of the game.
“People will say, ‘man, you should be getting paid for this! You’re doing the Padres a service,’” says Gossett. “But what I don’t like is feeling like I have a job, like I have to take pictures. I go to games as an escape just like everybody else.”
The other thing that stands out since the Instagram page started last year is how it has evolved into a storytelling platform as well. This year, he started asking people about themselves and using their quotes and stories as the captions for the pictures.
“At first, I would just hashtag it, because I didn’t want people to perceive me as making fun of anybody,” says Gossett, who even takes pictures of fans rooting for the visiting team. “Even when showing Dodgers fans or Giants fans, it would be a fun, playful way of representing them. That’s one thing I’m learning more and more: baseball fans are baseball fans.”
