Most of you should be pretty familiar with the following map:This is basically how we in the nine-county Bay Area view ourselves. There are some who consider parts of Marin County essentially an extension of San Francisco, and there are those who consider parts of San Mateo and Alameda Counties to be part of Silicon [...]

By now, many of you have already seen yesterday’s article by Joe Roderick in the Merc about third baseman Eric Chavez’s continued puzzlement with the lackluster attendance at the Coliseum. The important thing to note is that Chavez doesn’t blame the fans, he blames the venue. Chavez has been both praised and criticized for his [...]

There were a slew of articles in the last week about different BART projects and their respective funding difficulties. Here’s a recap: Oakland Airport BART Connector – BART is looking to private sources to build and fund the remainder of the Airport Connector. For now the project is a 3.2-mile people mover or monorail on [...]

An AP article that appears in Saturday’s Chronicle provides another recap of the ballpark situation. Most of it is available in other reports and on this blog as well. There was one new piece of info that I found telling: Oakland City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente said the city is committed to evaluating [...]

To illustrate how difficult it may be to get a quality radio deal, I’ve assembled a chart that lists every Bay Area AM radio station, signal strength, owner, and other information. The stations in gray are not considered likely candidates for the A’s due to existing programming incompatibilities or lack of signal, or previous history. [...]

Contra Costa Times columnist Neil Hayes has a pretty scathing indictment of the fanbase and the attendance woes in today’s edition. Like Hayes, I don’t have an explanation for it. The worst part of it is that it’s the one negative that the local media immediately latch onto here. I’ve heard comments from Gary Radnich [...]

Some bits of news from here and there…. … but first, I’ve had this asked of me frequently the last couple of weeks, so I should answer it: I haven’t heard anything new regarding stadium plans. In fact, I doubt we’ll hear anything significant for the rest of the regular season, and throughout the playoffs [...]

Radio Ink has a brief note and a quote about the sale Susquehanna Media. Yesterday was the deadline to submit bids, and it appears that it will take some time to sort them out. The York Daily Record also has an article on the deadline and sale as well.

An engaging report by SF Weekly’s Tommy Craggs discusses the evolution modern ballpark design, and how the design presented last month by Lew Wolff (drawn up by 360 Architecture) fits into the picture. There are excellent quotes by consultant John Pastier and architect/writer Phillip Bess, who wrote the excellent treatise on ballpark architecture, City Baseball [...]

The legislature ended its short session last night without SB 4 coming to a vote, which means any proponents will have to try again next year. As I noted earlier, the bill went through some major changes in terms of the bond approval mechanism, effectively neutering it. This effectively keeps the status quo, where groups [...]