The “Principles” of Astroturfing
- 12.31.09, 19:20
- 163 Comments
That group Stand for San Jose is at it again, choosing New Year’s Eve to write a letter to the City. In the letter, the group is demanding that the A’s guarantee revenues as defined in the September Economic Impact report. Nevermind that the A’s did not write nor commission the report; it was handled by the City. Have the San Jose Giants ever promised any kind of economic benefit for San Jose? I’m afraid not, yet they’re happy to go to the public trough and then have the temerity to attack the City after they’ve secured a ballpark deal of their own.
Regardless of what you or I think of the group’s machinations, the City has already set up guidelines for negotiating with the A’s if/when they get clearance to move to San Jose. While these are just the beginning and the devil will truly be in the details, the principles approved by the Mayor/Council (PDF) are a good start towards making sure everything’s on the up-and-up.
- The stadium development must generate a significant economic benefit to San Jose and have a positive impact on the City of San Jose’s General Fund.
- The Major League Baseball team, at no cost to the City of San Jose, will be responsible for financing and building the stadium structure and improvements on the approximate 14-acre designated stadium site.
- The Major League Baseball team will be responsible for financing all stadium operating costs related to its activities within the stadium site and surrounding area.
- The name of the Major League Baseball team must include San Jose.
- If the City or Redevelopment Agency recommend a contribution in the form of land or a financial contribution for any other ballpark specific items, a vote by the citizens of San Jose will be required on the stadium project.
Not known to mince words, Mayor Chuck Reed had a select few for Stand for San Jose:
“I think this front organization for the San Francisco Giants should go to San Francisco and talk to their puppet masters and tell them to get out of the way so we can negotiate some guarantees,” Reed said.
While City Attorney Rick Doyle called it “unrealistic” for any team to agree to such a money-back guarantee, he said reducing the city’s financial risk is “very do-able.” Doyle pointed to the 1990 deal between the city and the San Jose Sharks over funding the arena, now called HP Pavilion.
Furthermore, Roger Noll characterizes a revenue guarantee (beyond a direct lease payment) as “improbable.” And to end the article on an unintentionally humorous note, reporter Tracy Seipel notes that the letter asks for an “economic benefits report card,” similar to audits done by Phoenix and Washington, DC. Except that those two cities don’t do such report cards. The supposed “responsible government” in the District put together (thanks Robert Bobb) one of the most egregiously one-sided, publicly-financed ballpark deals in the last 20 years.
Also, with the Lake Merritt Channel and the Estuary nearby, a ballpark on Victory Court will be directly linked to Lake Merritt and the Estuary via a new park directly behind the center field fence which will link directly to the new paths and foot bridges over the Lake Merritt Channel. These improvements are all paid for with measure DD money which has already improved paths and landscaping around Lakeshore and around the Lake Chalet Restaurant on Lakeside Drive. A Victory Court ballpark will feature functioning waterways with scale. Fans will be able to take a water taxi from either Jack London Square or the Lake Merritt Financial Center for ballgames and be left near the center field gate. People from the neighborhoods surrounding Lake Merritt and Jack London Square will be able to walk to games either via Embarcadero or by going around Lake Merritt and down the paths and foot bridges of the Lake Merritt Channel. In other words the waterways linking the ballpark will be in a more human scale than the large Bay in front of AT& T Park. A Victory Court ballpark won’t be as intensely urban as AT&T Park because of it’s proximity to the new park on Lake Merritt Channel and Lake Merritt proper.
barleby, not to belabor the point, but, the Tenderloin, Civic Center, and parts of South of Market, including China Basin, are considered “downtown San Francisco.” I submit to you that there is much more crime within a one mile radius of AT&T Park in San Francisco, than in a 1 mile radius of either of the two proposed Jack London Square sites. Also, as much as you like to make excuses for, and rationalize homicides in San Francisco and next to AT&T Park, you would no doubt include homicides within a one mile radius of the Coliseum to prove your point of “what a horrible location the Coliseum sits in.” Why do you then make excuses for San Francisco and At&T Park? Let’s be consistent. I’m not interested in “conventional wisdom,” or “perceptions.” I’m not interested in shallow thinking.
On that last sentence, after you put another team into your “driving distance” market, and subtract out the fans from your own nearby area that leave to watch that other team, you haven’t improved a heck of a lot. Half of 7 million seems okay, but in this case you’d be hard pressed to come up with much more than 2.25 million people within 20 miles, so it’s a real lopsided divide. I’ll repeat one final time: the biggest concentration of affluence which accounts for so much of the South Bay’s appeal, despite smaller population, lives on the SM-SC boundary, where there is likely to be significant built-in support for the other team right now. Let’s face it head on. When the Giants say they have huge support from the South Bay, they’re really talking almost excusively about 15 square miles or so around Stanford University, where the people are very wealthy, and largely on their bandwagon already. I doubt they give a flying eff about San Jose proper. If the A’s can’t steal a big piece of the action from the Palo Alto area, they’re in big trouble trying to get the rest of Santa Clara County and southern Alameda County to pick up the slack.
Also, the “million dollar” thing is the value of the home, not income, units of which have an exact count in the census, so I used that in another post, which you apparently didn’t read, to compare real numbers of wealthy households, rather than extrapolate from median income figures.
Finally, I get the “work location” thing, but it’s not as big a deal as you want to believe. People do like to bring their spouses and children to games, and since they also have to go home at some point anyway, the ultimate draw down is towards home.
Great point, people in Palo Alto will still drive 30 miles to San Francisco instead of 20 miles to downtown San Jose. If it’s a about “glamor” and “world class city status,” these folks will no doubt go to a waterfront park in SF, as apposed to a park in downtown San Jose. The Oakland Athletics would be much better off if they learned to appreciate what they had in the East Bay, instead of always looking with covetous eyes towards the South Bay. As TPS mentioned, without getting that southern Peninsula demographic, the A’s would be pinning themselves into a corner in downtown San Jose. Also, considering the fact that the only truly successful franchise in San Jose history has been the Sharks, this makes the proposed relocation to San Jose anything but a huge gamble on the part of Lew Wolff and John Fisher. I wont even mention ethical factors like loyalty to your fans and to the community which has supported the franchise for over forty years in Oakland.
Navigator,
Once again, you’ve completely misread two posts, misrepresented the facts, and missed the point. From an office in Palo Alto, San Francisco is indeed thirty miles away, but downtown San Jose is only fifteen. During rush hour it takes about an hour to get to AT&T park but only twenty minutes to get to downtown San Jose. This is both because the distance is twice as great to SF and because the traffic gets way worse as you actually enter the city. In contrast, traffic into San Jose on 280 never gets that bad even during rush hour.
Bottom line: for a weeknight game, it takes THREE TIMES as long to get to AT&T park as it does San Jose. So for San Mateo county residents who work in Santa Clara county (which is a large percentage of them), it will still be more convenient to get to SJ than SF (and of course WAY more convenient than the 1 1/2 to 2 hour trip to Oakland). The trip home is almost a push, but as I noted below it’s the intial drive that’s the bigger issue and will drive the decision for many.
I know these time estimates are accurate because I have personally driven to sporting events at all three locations on weeknights many times over many years.
So, San Jose will do very well with the “southern Peninsula demographic,” thank you very much, for the same reason my friend from San Mateo chooses to go to Sharks games rather than Warriors games. In any event, as I posted previously, the demographic “San Mateo county residents with income over 1 million dollars” that TPS was writing about is a small number of people and not critically important to the success of a ballpark in San Jose. Plus, whatever percentage of those people would not choose to go to a ballpark in SJ over AT&T Park would not choose to go to a game in Oakland, either.
Finally, you continue to ignore the inconvenient fact that huge numbers of East Bay residents work in the South Bay while the reverse is not true. The A’s will draw East Bay fans in SJ far better than they would draw South Bay fans in Oakland.
The “driving distance” market is primarily relevant to heavy repeat customers, especially season ticket holders. This is the core of your business, especially with respect to premium seat customers. Since premium seat season ticket holders drive the business these days, you want to locate where it’s convenient for them. But you still draw from the rest of the Bay Area, especially on weekends.
Million dollar homes prices seems an arbitrary measure of where this “core affluent customer” base resides, but if you want to use that, you’re dead wrong in saying they’re primarily limited to the “SM-SC boundary.” Nearly every house in Los Gatos, Saratoga, Cupertino, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills and Palo Alto is worth over one million dollars. The Silver Creek neighborhood in East San Jose is made up of million dollar homes. Mountain View and Sunnyvale south of El Camino are mostly million dollar homes, or close to it. In fact, many areas which are not made up of million dollar homes are very close to it (places in the 800-900K range like Almaden Valley or Campbell).
I live and work in the “15 square miles around Stanford University,” and work closely with the executives of these companies. There is genuine excitement here about the possibility of MLB in San Jose. While it’s true there are more Giants fans than A’s fans, it’s not as big a difference as gets represented here. But in any event, many fans who may maintain the Giants as their primary allegiance will still go to plenty of San Jose A’s games because it’s convenient. For Navigator, this is a religion. For most people, it’s entertainment.
The work location is a HUGE thing; maybe the most important thing for this demographic. These are busy executives, and time is money – especially toward the end of the work day. The difference between having to leave at 5pm to get to Oakland or being able to leave at 6:30pm and get to San Jose is a big, big deal. Plus, if they’re entertaining clients, they’re not going to drag those clients through ninety minutes to two hours of traffic to get to Oakland. They’re just not.
The drive home is a much smaller factor. With no traffic, even getting back from Oakland isn’t so bad; I can get home in less than an hour. But this in no way makes up for the pain of getting there.
People do like to bring their spouses and children to games, but mainly on weekends. If this were a sport where nearly all the games were played on weekends, like the NFL, I would agree with you that location would be less of an issue.
But it’s not. Most of the games are played on weeknights. The customers for premium seats on weeknights are largely companies or their execs entertaining clients or rewarding employees. Not a lot of South Bay families are dragging their kids all the way up to Oakland on a school night.
My company held club seats at AT&T Park for many years, and I was on the distribution list. Since these seats are sold on a season ticket basis, one of the problems companies face is actually making use of them all, especially for weeknight games. There’s a reason why so many of the best seats are empty when you watch games on TV in the modern era.
I can tell you categorically, from personal experience, that trying to sell premium seat season ticket packages for a ballpark in Oakland to South Bay companies is going to be next to impossible. Those interested enough will buy from the Giants, for all the reasons previously stated. A new yard in Oakland does not give South Bay companies who are not currently buying such packages a reason to do so, and it doesn’t give those buying from the Giants a reason to switch.
There’s a reason why only 13% of South Bay companies are buying from the Giants. But a yard in San Jose offers an opportunity to expand this market for MLB overall. Yes, the Giants will lose some of this business, which is why they’re so up in arms about it. But it also presents an opportunity to expand MLB penetration in this market segment overall.
bartleby,
You’re making the assumption that those people who commute to San Jose from, let’s say, the Tri-Valley or Fremont area, will to go to the ballgame without coming home first to pick up their kids, have dinner, etc. Your theory counts on a great percentage of the East Bay commuters you mention being in the vicinity of downtown San Jose from about 8:00 AM to about 10:00 PM without making it home until possibly well after 11:00 PM. That’s a very long day to spend away from home. You’re putting way to much emphasis on where possible fans work, instead of where they live. The office crowd isn’t that big a demographic on a consistent basis anyway. Certainly not enough to put that much emphasis on it. It’s only a part of the equation. Unfortunately, counting on East Bay commuters to spend that much time in downtown San Jose, and then face a horrible commute home, isn’t realistic or practical.
It actually makes much more sense for those East Bay commuters who work in San Jose but live in the Tri-Valley or Fremont, to get out their San Jose offices by 4:00 PM, rush home, have dinner, pick up their kids, and head to the nearest BART station and on their way to Oakland to watch the A’s in their new waterfront park. This scenario makes much more sense and is more logical.
That was a long time ago, and in a totally different economic climate. There is a prevailing attitude amongst voters that private entities that want baseball stadiums should doitheirdamnselves.
‘you’re dead wrong in saying they’re primarily limited to the “SM-SC boundary.” ‘
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I didn’t mean to imply “primarily limited”. The point I was trying to make is that if you subtract this tiny area, the remainder of the South Bay has no significant overall economic advantage over the East Bay. And I chose to look it at it that way because this tiny area is going to be more closely aligned to the Giants right now, and probably the most difficult South Bay area for the A’s to convert. Ignoring the west side of the valley for a moment, San Jose proper does not even stack up well against Contra Costa County. Each has around a million residents, and here are the median household, median family, and per capita incomes for each:
Contra Costa 79k / 92k / 38k
San Jose 80k / 89k / 33k
And here is the census count of homes valued at a million dollars or higher:
Contra Costa 38,226
San Jose 20,077
I’m not trying to pull one over on anyone with cherry picked data, just trying to demonstrate some of what’s being lopped off here in the effort to “expand” the market. The fact that Contra Costa is already firmly behind the A’s, served by two BART lines that converge in Oakland, is home to the 3rd largest corporation in America, and is even further away from San Jose than Oakland, has me concerned.
Anyway, I can’t argue against your anecdotal claims about drive times, undesirability of an East Bay location even for it’s large population of affluent residents, extreme interest from wealthy southern peninsula execs in the A’s coming to San Jose, etc. I’ll just leave you with your opinions.
That makes no sense whatsoever. Leave work several hours early in order to brave the worst of the rush hour traffic, deal with a family dinner, then a 30 minute BART ride up to downtown Oakland, a three hour ball game, and another 30 minute BART ride home, all on a school night? In what way is that easier than seeing a game in San Jose? Sounds like a hideous ordeal, and irresponsible parenting. And it doesn’t sound like premium seat customers. Even for the affluent, club seats for a family of four is a stretch. And parents of young children aren’t bringing them to weeknight games.
The more likely scenario is, work ’til 5:30, a quick drive downtown with clients or colleagues, a pleasant dinner at one of San Jose’s many great restaurants, enjoy the game, then take a short drive home. Then bring the kids again later on a weekend, at which point Oakland or San Jose are a push from Fremont.
So you’re saying if you lop off the wealthiest part of Santa Clara county, Santa Clara and Contra Costa counties are a push?
Sorry, not a valid comparison.
Why is it when we have these discussions, we always get two county (CC and Alameda) vs one county (SC) comparisons? Or “lop off the most desirable part of Santa Clara county then compare to CC” comparisons? Or “throw in San Francisco’s corporate base as though it were part of the East Bay, ignoring it already has an entrenched team of its own” type-comparisons?
Your basic point seems to boil back down to “the A’s are going to have trouble drawing from the wealthy part of Santa Clara county, because that’s Giants country.” Yet, somehow the A’s would have an easy time drawing from Napa, Sonoma, Marin, and San Francisco, because those places are not Giants’ country.
This, of course, is absurd.
I understand that Chevron is in CC. They are a big company, and have enough money to buy as many suites as they want. But how many suites they want is going to depend on how big a presence they have here. Do you know how many employees they have in San Ramon? I honestly don’t, but I’m willing to bet it’s a lot less than Apple, Intel, Adobe, Microsoft, Lockheed, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Redback and Applied Materials collectively have, plus all the big law firms in San Jose and Palo Alto, plus all the VC firms in Sand Hill Road. And that’s just off the top of my head.
(Also, from San Ramon it’s not a big difference getting to San Jose vs. downtown Oakland, because of the route you have to take and the traffic patterns).
Corporate base is important. Corporations are your primary suite and club seat buyers. By the measure you have cited (Fortune 1000), SC has more than SF and East Bay combined. I believe other indicators make the difference bigger than that. How does it make sense to locate two teams to squabble directly over the smaller half of the pie?
I never said Contra Costa county was an undesirable market “even for its large population of affluent residents I’m just saying, if the A’s can trade Contra Costa for Santa Clara, it’s a good trade for them. Clearly the A’s think so. And clearly the Giants think it’s a bad trade for them.
You’re right, my comments regarding attitudes of South Bay execs are anecdotal, and my opinions are just that, opinions. But they are informed opinions. It makes me bristle anytime I read “Oakland is convenient to the entire Bay Area” (because I know, from painful experience, it’s not) or “Santa Clara county is an unshakable stronghold of Giants fans who will never go to A’s games in San Jose” (because it’s not, and they will). The people who write these things clearly haven’t spent much time down here and don’t know what they’re talking about.
As far as drive times, those are factual and verifiable. Just come down here for a test drive and see for yourself.
“… if the A’s can trade Contra Costa for Santa Clara, it’s a good trade for them. Clearly the A’s think so. And clearly the Giants think it’s a bad trade for them.” This is an absolutely correct statement –i.e–no one can dispute it based upon publically available comments and actions by both the A’s and the gints. At the end of the day the debate can rage and statistics can be used to paint whatever point someone wants but the bottom line is that those who have the most to gain/lose financially from the A’s move to San Jose are placing their money on SCC. Why would LW and the rest of the A’s ownership group reduce the value of their investment by moving the team if it didn’t make financial sense to them, all of their consultants and to the gints who are trying to stop it?