Padres fans should be thanking the Spanos family for taking the Chargers out of town. This isn't about those contracts which are unlikely to pay off when the players are 37,38+, but making the team the West Coast version of the Cardinals. Never in their history have they received this much attention.
One of the reasons the NBA's small markets are mostly places like Memphis, San Antonio, OKC, Salt Lake, Portland, Sac, Orlando, etc is because they don't want to go to metros smaller than Denver and then have to compete with MLB and NFL. In San Diego, the Hosmer signing, their first big FA contract in years, came the year after the Chargers left, the Machado contract one year after that.
Where I think the Nats have gone wrong is that the debacle of Snyder ownership opened up a big opportunity to take some of the DC area's sports $, but they've squandered that opportunity.