Category Archives: Athletics

07.25.12
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Hacks don’t understand the competitive window

The Chronicle’s Scott Ostler is signing onto the claim that the A’s recent on-field success serves to foil Lew Wolff’s plans to move to San Jose. He’s not the first. The Trib’s Monte Poole and the Press Democrat’s Lowell Cohn have done the same since the All Star Break. The reasoning is that the way the A’s are playing, it proves with complete certainty that the A’s can, in fact, compete in Oakland.

Anyone who has read most Bay Area sports columnists over the years could see this dime store analysis coming. It’s more than ludicrous, it’s absolutely fallacious. Think about it. These writers are basing the viability of a franchise on 17 games. 17 games! Look, I’m the last person to rain on this parade and I’m loving every minute of this run, but to base any long-term decision-making on 17 games is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard. The sample size is incredibly small. Over the next 1-4 years, it may prove to be the start of a trend. Then again, it could be a blip. If the A’s fade in August-September the same way the Mets and Indians are now, what does it mean for success in Oakland? Nothing, because there’s no real causality there.

If we’re going to look at any trends, it’s the team’s 40-24 (.625) record with Yoenis Cespedes in the lineup. The team was pretty bad in May, largely due to Cespedes not being in the lineup for lengthy stretches. It didn’t help that Josh Donaldson and Daric Barton were black holes regularly manning the corners, while Josh Reddick was left to carry the lineup in the Cuban defector’s absence. Now with better contributions from numerous fringe and platoon players plus continued health (knock on wood) for Cespedes, the A’s are doing just enough offensively to win games.

None of this is very related to the A’s long term success. Cespedes is locked up through 2015 unless Billy Beane flips him for prospects. Yet Beane is keenly aware of the organization’s continued inability to develop quality hitters, so unless rivals offer Billy the moon for either Cespedes or Reddick, the heart of the order isn’t going anywhere. Beyond that, there are questions about Cespedes’s durability. The Cuban baseball season is only 90 games long, and Yoenis has had little nicks already and a tight hamstring halfway through his rookie campaign. If Cespedes runs into a lengthy injury spell like what befell Joe Mauer and Justin Morneau in Minnesota, the A’s will be screwed moving forward unless certain hitters on the farm (Grant Green, the just-injured Michael Choice, other recent draftees) make miraculous Sean Doolittle or Dan Straily-style transformations into solid contributors.

We’ve talked a bit about the competitive window every have-not team faces. Refuse to acknowledge it at your peril. San Diego, Arizona, and Colorado all had brief, 1 or 2-year runs in the past few years. When injuries hit or players didn’t perform up to potential, all three teams sold off key players in order to rebuild for the next competitive window. The same just happened to the Miami Marlins, who nearly doubled their 2011 payroll in hopes of bringing in bigger crowds and revenue. With the team fighting to keep itself out of the NL East cellar, the Marlins are looking to sell off vital pieces. Already Hanley Ramirez has been traded to the Dodgers, and Josh Johnson may be the next one out of town. The aforementioned Twins had a bright future prior to the 2011 season, then Mauer was lost for half the season and Morneau struggled to recover from concussion symptoms. Now they have no choice but to rebuild, starting with a trades of Morneau and Francisco Liriano that many are anticipating in the future. Competitive windows for many mid- and small-market teams all were slammed shut in a hurry.

For the have-not teams, the competitive window means there’s little room for error, practically no room to absorb expensive mistake contracts. The Dodgers had plenty of flexibility to absorb Ramirez’s contract. The Yankees somehow got Seattle to pay for part of Ichiro’s contract even though the Pinstripers sent back a middling starter and a guy who had already been traded or cut six times in his short career. The A’s have a league-low $55 million payroll, which gives them the flexibility to pick up a one-year rental. It doesn’t give them the flexibility to start trading for guys with long, bad contracts, like Ramirez and Jimmy Rollins. Brett Anderson is due for some raises in the coming years. Reddick is sure to become a Super Two thanks to his breakout season – which will give him a hefty raise. He could very well be locked up through his arbitration years this offseason. Cespedes will be paid nearly $30 million over the next three years. Beane and David Forst will have to decide which young pitchers to keep and which ones to use as trade pieces. Kurt Suzuki already has a bad contract and he’s worth pennies on the dollar. By 2014, the A’s could easily be committed to spend $40-50 million on just 4-5 guys. It’ll help that new national TV money is on the way, but it doesn’t mean that fiscal responsibility will go out the window.

Sustaining the competitive window will depend greatly on picking the right guys to commit to (remember the Chavez-Tejada debate from a decade ago?) and those cornerstone guys staying healthy. If not, all bets are off. It won’t prove that the A’s should leave Oakland posthaste. What it would prove is that the A’s again are a big-market team that is forced to operate like a small-market team because of revenues from playing in Oakland. The current CBA calls for the A’s to get off revenue sharing by 2016 as long as the team stays in the Bay Area, however the stadium solution occurs. That’s language from on high saying that having the A’s in the Coliseum is not what MLB has in mind, no matter how good this run is or how many pies are thrown. The Lodge doesn’t care about 17 games. They care about the long view.

07.23.12
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Not every idea is a good one

Over the weekend, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat’s sports columnist Lowell Cohn entertained a concept for privately-financed stadia at the Coliseum for both the A’s and Raiders. Put together by Sacramento developer Rick Tripp, the plan is neither new nor novel. In fact, we’ve heard it here several years ago, when the Lew Wolff trying to build a ballpark first north of the Coliseum and later in Fremont. The venue(s) would be paid for by a combination of surrounding area development entitlements and stadium revenues such as naming rights and concessions. During the housing bubble in 2005, it sounded like a decent plan since it wouldn’t have required a bond issue or  new taxes on Fremont’s or Oakland’s part. Of course, once that bubble burst, such a plan was no longer feasible.

Tripp revives that plan and adds a wrinkle in that “unconventional” sources such as real estate brokerage fees are also used. Tripp admits that he hasn’t lined up all of the necessary money, some of which could come from Middle East financiers. He has also pitched his plan unsuccessfully twice – first in San Diego for the Chargers, then in his hometown, Sacramento, for the Kings’ railyards arena. In both cases, his respective bids were rejected. No explanation is given as to why, but I have a few guesses as to why which I’ll get to in a minute.

Before that analysis, first let me turn your attention to a small article which also surfaced over the weekend. The Arizona Diamondbacks are pushing to have ownership of Chase Field changed from one public entity (Maricopa County) to another (City of Phoenix). The point? To allow the D-backs to exert more control over Chase Field’s revenue streams, which are currently somewhat split between the team and Maricopa County. The team pays $4 million per year in rent and maintenance costs, a decent amount compared to other leases throughout baseball. No new money is being raised by virtue of the D-backs’ proposal, and it might net the team a few more million per year. That’s enough to make the request worthwhile. It’s of utmost importance to team ownership that it gain control over as much of its local revenue stream as possible.

It’s in that light that if you read Tripp Development’s San Diego stadium proposal that you can see why it didn’t pass muster. The plan, which included a $900 million NFL stadium and a $400 million arena, would charge $15 million per year to the Chargers and $10 million per year to a relocated NBA team. Given the somewhat similar cost between a ballpark and an arena, let’s suppose that the A’s would lease a new ballpark from Tripp for $10-12 million a year. That’s three times as much as the D-backs, a team that is at best a mid-market franchise and is trying to scrape up every bit of revenue it can. Worse, the terms have the A’s (or Raiders) with precious little control of stadium revenue except for games. While it sounds nice that the A’s would get a “free stadium”, their inability to control revenue streams would leave them only marginally better than they are now, especially in years when attendance isn’t impressive. It’s a deal that, if presented to either Lew Wolff or Mark Davis, would be politely declined by both. It’s not something that would be approved by either the NFL or MLB. Similar lease terms helped allow the Seattle Supersonics to leave the Emerald City, and they’re making it easy for the Warriors to look across the Bay towards San Francisco – even though the price tage for a new arena will be huge.

Now, that isn’t to say that Tripp’s concept is bad. If you’re an Oakland-only partisan or someone who doesn’t scratch the surface like Cohn, it might sound great. And at least Tripp is being fairly transparent about the substance of the deal, whereas we have few clues about Oakland Mayor Jean Quan’s Coliseum City plan other than federal transit money or the exotic EB-5 visa program (neither of which will provide much money to build any stadia). The problem is that so much revenue has to go towards paying off the project that it severely limits the amount that can go to the tenant teams. That puts the teams at a handicap relative to their division and league competitors. Both owners and the leagues are going to agree to deals that give them the highest levels of revenue and control. A large mortgage for the A’s is somewhat mitigated by the fact that it can be deducted against revenue sharing. Any deal that doesn’t give the team revenue control is inferior, even if a high-revenue/control deal means creating greater risk (see: 49ers).

Moreover, while the plan doesn’t say redevelopment explicitly, it’s effectively a redevelopment plan when it talks about entitlements. That may be the most risky thing of all. Tripp and his investors probably have a target in terms of real estate sales and fees associated with those sales that will help pay back the debt ($90-100 million per year if separate football and baseball stadia are built). If they don’t hit those targets because of an Oakland real estate market that trails the rest of the Bay Area, what does it mean for the teams? Investors want to counterbalance risk with return and protection if possible. With limited government help, the risk may be excessive. Remember that former New Jersey Nets owner Bruce Ratner faced several delays in trying to move the team to Brooklyn, which eventually forced him to sell the team and the development to Russian billionaire tycoon Mikhail Prokhorov. Bailout guys like Prokhorov don’t grow on trees.

Tripp’s plan is the first of many such proposals for Coliseum City, and he admits that he’ll know if it’s workable in 18 months, around the time several studies regarding Coliseum City are due. If nothing else, his proposal should stimulate discussion within Oakland about how Coliseum City can get accomplished – not just to keep the teams in place, but to allow them to thrive. For any team to stay in Oakland the financial terms need to make the teams more than merely competitive. As long as the teams face revenue limitations from any proposal, they’ll keep looking for better deals elsewhere. That said, if Tripp is able to successfully get commitments from one or both teams, he’ll deserve extreme kudos. Third time would be the charm, I guess.

07.18.12
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Lather, Rinse, Repeat

We’ve heard this one before. USA Today’s Bob Nightengale was on The Chris Townsend Show with guest host Brodie Brazil on Monday night. He indicated that something will happen in August, when the next owner’s meetings are slated to be held in Denver. Nightengale claims that if a vote isn’t held (Wolff has asked for one as a procedural matter), Bud Selig will rule on the matter. Nightengale noted that he has been wrong about this before (as have I), and at this point – 40 months into the debate – there’s little evidence to indicate that this will be resolved in short order.

The big admission of this apparent deadlock is that when asked about the situation during a press conference prior to the All Star Game, Selig replied that both teams still have numerous questions to answer. Seriously? At 40 months? Surely, the commissioner and his exploratory committee have had ample time to look at every option, look under every rock, comb every bit of the Bay Area landscape. Admittedly, there are plenty of questions for the contingent cities as to how they’ll complete the deals that will be necessary to host a new ballpark. Those issues aren’t under the Giants’ and A’s control, and they can’t see proper resolution until a decision on how to progress is made. Whichever way it goes, one team (and some city) is going to be upset. The longer this gets delayed, the more expensive the eventual solution becomes – whether it’s in Oakland, San Jose, or elsewhere.

Then again, why bother? It’s not as if the A’s matter to baseball. Inertia, thy name is Selig.

07.17.12
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15,115

I snapped the picture below in the first inning. There was a decent walk-up crowd waiting in line for tickets at the booths and kiosks at the BART Plaza. I knew that the crowd would be less than 20,000, but I was hoping for a figure approaching 20k.

The final tally? 15,115.

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Look, we can’t expect a bandwagon to appear when it doesn’t exist. We can hope that more A’s fans will come out of the woodwork. For various reasons legitimate and silly, they don’t come. Or do they?

15,115, as pathetic as that looks, is 20-30% better than Monday or Tuesday night crowds that came in April or May. You can’t say that it’s the weather because tonight much of the game was spent below 60 degrees. Regardless, it’s nothing to crow about. At least it doesn’t look like a crowd of 5,000 with just as many no-shows. The size of the walk-up crowd was encouraging. A bandwagon’s gotta start somewhere.

07.15.12
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The A’s showed up. How about you?

Here the green-and-gold heroes sit, winners of 9 of the last 10, only 1/2 game from the last playoff spot in the American League. It’s all very impressive for any number of reasons: young pitching, young sluggers becoming professional hitters, nearly every move made by the A’s front office paying off so far. Despite this, there’s a little hesitance going into this week’s six-game homestand, with two games against the West-leading Rangers and four against the East-frontrunning Yankees.

The Yankees series is always good for near-sellouts every game, and the Rangers bandwagon has been filling the Coliseum pretty well lately. But who cares about the other team’s fans? We should be filling up the stadium. Tuesday night’s game is, as usual, a free parking night. The A’s deserve a heroes’ welcome. The pitching is excellent even with Brandon McCarthy out. Numerous guys are hitting homers like it’s batting practice. The team has budding stars who are all young and under control, and the team is flat out fun to watch with no big money egos to ruin a fan’s enjoyment. We should have 20,000 fans showing up on Tuesday. I fear we won’t come close.

There will be people who cite their dislike of Lew Wolff, John Fisher, Billy Beane, or whatever’s convenient to not go. They’ll claim they were the biggest A’s fans during the Moneyball years, the Haas era, during BillyBall, or all the way back to Charlie Finley. Stop with the excuses, put your differences with ownership aside, and go to the games. The tickets are inexpensive. There’s no better weather to watch baseball than at the Coliseum in July/August. The team is pretty damned entertaining. Most importantly, this scrappy group of A’s consistently of mostly young guys and a mix of veterans notices when we show up. En masse. They don’t play in a vacuum, and as much as they appreciate the small-but-loyal crowd that shows up currently, they appreciate it even more when the place is packed. With A’s fans. All of the experts and columnists had this team buried in March. Personally, my expectations were low. This team deserves for us to buy tickets, supporting them, cheering them on with full voices, all of our energy, every breath. Whether the A’s are buyers or sellers or both doesn’t matter. We have a core to build on for years, and they’re not going anywhere for a while. That’s what matters. So enjoy it.

The A’s showed up this year. How about you?

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Off the soapbox. The maximum possible attendance for this week is a little over 210,000. It would be unrealistic to predict that they’ll hit that target. But they could pull healthy crowds for the entire week. If the A’s average 22,000 for Texas and 32,000 for the Yankees, the total attendance for the homestand will be 172,000. Should they hit that mark, the team’s attendance in Oakland (not counting the Japan games) will surpass 1 million fans in 48 home dates. That’s five games ahead of last year’s pace and seven better than 2010. Can we hit that figure? I think we can. I’ll be there for the first three games of the homestand, before going on a weekend camping trip. Let’s do this.

07.14.12
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New National TV deals are the tide that lifts all boats

Come 2014, the A’s will be a much richer team, a team capable of fielding a $100 million payroll. And they won’t have to build a ballpark, negotiate any new local media deals, or raise ticket prices to do it. That’s because new national television deals will be in place for the 2014 season, and they promise to make every team a good deal richer.

A flurry of stories have come out in the last week to trumpet the coming broadcast rights war. All of the current national broadcast deals expire at the end of next season, making this next set of TV rights negotiations a total free-for-all. I’ve assembled some of the articles for your perusal.

Currently every team gets around $24 million per year in national TV money via three contracts (Fox, ESPN, TBS) plus international and digital media revenue. All told, it’s at least $33 million per team per year from baseball’s central revenue, or $1 billion for MLB total annually. According to many industry observers, the new TV rights deals should net MLB around $2 billion per year by themselves, at least doubling if not tripling the amount each team will get. That won’t mean all that much to the Yankees or Red Sox, since they’re often up against the luxury tax threshold. For a team like the A’s, however, it’s manna from heaven. A bump to $2.1 billion (a reasonable guess at this point) will put $70 million in every owner’s pockets, every year.

Let’s look at this at the micro level. Estimates have the A’s 2011 revenue at $160 million, though Lew Wolff will argue that it’s less. With greater ticket sales this year and other incrementally growing revenues, I’d wager that $160 million is a realistic number for this year (Forbes might say that it’s $165 million or more). Now add $42 million in fresh national TV money, and suddenly every team in baseball, including the A’s, is a $200 million revenue franchise. Use the typical 50/50 ratio of payroll to revenue, and the A’s payroll is $100 million. Simple, right? ($230 million doesn’t seem so far away anymore.)

Ah, but there’s more to it than that. Chances are the digital media and international broadcast money will also grow. Several teams will approach $300 million in revenue, which means that $150 million payrolls will become more commonplace. Again, all without raising the price of a single ticket. The A’s will continue to be a have-not relatively speaking, but that extra money should make it easier for ownership to sign a young slugger past arb years, or more than one. While we currently think of $75-80 million as the practical upper limit for payroll when Billy Beane feels the team is in contention, that amount should be the lower limit for payroll in the coming years. Giants ownership grumbled loudly about keeping this year’s payroll to $130 million. That figure should be their lower limit in 2014.

Exploding TV money will have one other important effect on teams: franchise valuations and sale prices should continue to grow. The Padres sold for $600 million plus $200 million for their share of the new Fox Sports San Diego network. I figure that puts the A’s at $500 million now, and that’s without the benefit of the new TV money. In 2014, the A’s should be worth $600 million easy. Knowing the gravy train that’s coming, Wolff/Fisher would be crazy to sell the franchise anytime soon, regardless of what happens to their San Jose ballpark pursuit in the near term. On the flip side, the growing franchise value will only make it that much more difficult for an outside group (Don Knauss & Co.) to buy the franchise and finance a stadium, soon to be a combined $1.1 billion price tag. If we’re looking for an event to burst the valuation bubble or dissuade Wolff/Fisher from continuing to own the team, the new TV contracts definitely aren’t it.

The most fascinating part of this will undoubtedly be the negotiations. When the last rights were negotiated, baseball was considered a sport on the decline among the networks, best relegated to regional sports networks and ESPN. Since then, NBC and CBS have launched their own sports network competitors to ESPN. Fox may convert Speed to all sports instead of just motorsports, the same way NBC converted OLN and CBS did CSTV. All three would want baseball as a tentpole for their fledgling networks and for their cable bundling efforts, the better to wring ever higher subscriber fees from consumers.

  • Today’s youth probably have no idea that NBC was once the network that carried baseball, with Vin Scully and Joe Garagiola announcing Saturday’s Game of the Week. The peacock has now gone over a decade without baseball, and their desire now is hot and heavy. Baseball is just what NBCSN needs to gain traction among viewers, in addition to the Game of the Week. Keep in mind that because NBC’s big tentpoles are Sunday Night Football, the Olympics, Notre Dame football, and the NHL, there are huge swaths of weekend daytime programming for NBC that have no pro sports at all. That might lead people to think that when it comes to sports, NBC is out of sight, out of mind. Is NBC/Universal/Comcast will to spend money on MLB the way the company never would under Jeff Zucker? We’ll see. Pros: Better integration with Comcast Sportsnet properties. Cons: An even larger Bob Costas soapbox.
  • CBS has rarely had MLB on TV over the last few decades, the exception being a financially disastrous gig in the early 90’s (thanks, Toronto Blue Jays). The Tiffany Network also owned the Yankees during the 60’s. That was about as far as they went. CBS likely has the same motivations as NBC. Under Les Moonves, the network has tended to stay away from baseball, so either they saw the light if they’re interested or it’s purely a carriage play. Pros: The unlikely yet possible resurrection of the MLB on CBS theme, which had a “The Natural” 80’s-style majesty. Cons: Potential re-teaming of Sean McDonough and Tim McCarver, one of the worst announcing tandems in broadcast history.
  • Fox is the incumbent, and frankly, they’ve been shit the entire time. At the outset, Fox declared war on ESPN, claiming that its “tribal” approach to sports by grabbing RSNs would allow it to integrate well with the national broadcast. That never happened, and Fox has only retreated ever since. Not that I liked the now-discarded theme song, but to replace it unceremoniously two years ago with the NFL on Fox theme clearly showed where the network’s thinking is. The move to 4 PM broadcasts this season is a good one because it opens the afternoon slots for teams, but I can’t help but think Fox just did it because they didn’t have any primetime programming on Saturday nights for the East Coast. Pros: Can’t think of any except maybe Ken Rosenthal. Cons: Fox may get even lazier in its handling of MLB.
  • ESPN may have the most to lose. They absorbed the hit that came with the launch of the MLB Network (not part of the conversation BTW), and focused on making sure their web and news coverage stayed solid in the face of new competition, though they let go of quite a few talents along the way. They still have Sunday and Wednesday night games and little good to replace them if they lost those properties. Try as it might to jam as much NFL news into its summer programming, ESPN can only go so far with football. The network has reduced the number of games per week it broadcasts. It may be forced to bid to broadcast more games per week if the other cable sports networks are willing to do the same. Pros: Webgems. Cons: Chris Berman.
  • TBS will probably get outbid on its little property, Saturday Night Baseball. They tried to transition from the Braves to all teams using all of their Atlanta-based talent and production and have generally done poorly or have been ignored in the process. Handling of the playoffs, which Turner tried to do similarly to the way it handles NBA games, was confusing and  generally abysmal. Clearly, national baseball broadcasts weren’t in Turner’s wheelhouse. Pros: Eck in studio. Cons: Dick Stockton.

There’s a decent chance that MLB will structure bidding so that a network can bid on a specific league, the way the NFL splits broadcasts for its two conferences. That would be an interesting twist, though it would create an inherently unequal situation due to the popularity of the Yankees and Red Sox. I’m certainly not digging the idea of AL nights and NL nights. Digital carriage also has to enter the picture. Streaming of national games may be part of every deal, though you can bet that they’d still be subject to those frustrating blackout rules.

How do think this new windfall will affect the A’s in the future? How should broadcast rights be distributed? Do you have a favorite channels on which you’d like to see national broadcasts?

07.11.12
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Revised interleague play coming

During yesterday’s press conference, Bud Selig was asked about what shape interleague play would take, now that realignment into two 15-team leagues has been locked in. Perhaps the most experimental notion was to reverse the advantage the two leagues currently have, by having pitchers hit in AL parks while deploying the DH in NL parks. For some of you it may seem blasphemous. I’m not partial to that change or the status quo. I can see some grumbling among fans in one-team markets, since as a fan you might pay to see a DH in your home park and he may be relegated to the bench in this scenario.

2013 MLB divisional realignment

For me, the bigger news is the change to scheduling. Under the new CBA, teams can play up to 20 interleague games per year. For most AL teams it’s 18, for NL teams it’s either 18 or 15. Now with fully balanced divisions and leagues, all teams can be expected to play 18-20 interleague contests per season. If MLB wants each division to play a scheduled interleague division straight up, that translates to 15 games per team, plus a certain number against the crosstown rival (if applicable). Since 15 games is not an even number, and because a team like the Mets is stuck getting hammered by the Yankees every year, the crosstown rival series may be trimmed to 3 games in one park or a 2+2 home-and-home set. In the latter scenario it’s still not an even number (19 total interleague games), so that odd number would have to be accounted for somehow.

Naturally, this means that for the A’s, they’d only play the Giants in Oakland every other year, a sure revenue hit. The A’s are the team that benefits most from the current 3+3 crosstown rival scheduling format, far more than the Chicago, LA, NY, or Beltway teams, all of whose attendance figures are less impacted by the crosstown series than the A’s.

Then again, it might be nice to have invading Giants fans only once every other year. They’re like in-laws, I guess.

I have a number of other questions about how the format will work:

  • When the AL West is playing the NL West with the established crosstown rivalries, will MLB hold to the reduced games? If it does, will it schedule another three-game series between teams in other divisions to get the total up to 18? (Math: 4 or 5 series x 3 games + 3, 4, or 6 vs. crosstown rival)
  • Since the crosstown rivalry series makes for efficient travel (the A’s played in SF at the end of a road trip this season, for instance), how much will MLB explore the 2+2 format?
  • Will some teams push for the opening and closing series as part of their interleague schedule? Or will they run away from it?
  • Will MLB try to force teams without natural rivals to lock in rivalries?

Selig has admitted that this is the kind of stuff that he geeks out about, and I’m kind of in the same boat with him there. Whatever your feeling on the changes, the result should be more equitable to all teams than the current format. Interleague play is no longer an annual aberration to be endured, it’s here all season long and it’s here for good.

07.10.12
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39 months and counting

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MLB Commissioner Bud Selig just had his midseason “state of baseball” presser prior to tonight’s All Star Game. He fielded numerous questions about expanded instant replay (not yet), the Mitchell Report (feel good about it), and TV blackouts (working on it). As for the A’s:

There’s a bottle of Balvenie DoubleWood sitting across from me as I write this, and even though it’s early it’s looking really good right about now.

07.09.12
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Mayor Johnson press conference (updated with reactions)

Notes coming shortly.

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The mayor’s message here is if Oakland or San Jose don’t work out, Sacramento would make a great Plan C.

Additional notes:

  • This is the start of a 10-12 week exploratory process. No public dollars will be spent on any studies. It is assumed that Think Big Sacramento would pick up the tab. The process could end sooner than the 10-12 weeks if MLB says it’s not interested. This exploratory study would not include an EIR.
  • There may be discussions about bringing in other sports (NHL, MLS) but baseball’s considered the clearest path at this point due to the A’s situation.
  • West Sacramento and Raley Field are being considered, though the financial and political calculation there is unknown. The $255 million “pledged” for the Kings arena was brought up but not addressed directly. Per Think Big’s mission, this is very much a regional effort.
  • The last year negotiating with the NBA and the Kings has left the public and the media very jaded and skeptical. There were one or two questions about whether the public can go through this process again.
  • Kevin McClatchy, who is on board as an informal advisor, is not interested in owning the A’s. He’s there as a resident with unique insight as a former owner.
  • No formal requests or meetings have been requested with MLB or A’s ownership. There has been a long history of trying to bring a team to town, mostly dating back to Gregg Lukenbill’s efforts in the late 80’s.
  • Mayor Johnson was very respectful of what Oakland and San Jose are doing currently and clearly didn’t want to denounce or belittle their efforts.
  • There was a question about whether or not this move was gamesmanship targeted at he Kings and the NBA. Johnson denied that.

More as it comes.

Now word has come in from Lew Wolff via the Chronicle’s Susan Slusser: The A’s aren’t leaving the two-team Bay Area market.

Added 8:46 PM – West Sacramento Mayor Mike McGowan isn’t pleased with how Johnson and Think Big have handled this new exercise. McGowan was only notified Sunday night of the press conference. He also believes that Sacramento can’t support a MLB franchise.

07.09.12
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Sacramento switches focus from Kings to A’s

With hope fading to keep the Kings in town in spite of an uncooperative Maloof family, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson and civic booster group Think Big Sacramento will officially start the process of luring MLB, and particularly the A’s, to the Capitol. The Bee has a report with quotes from the mayor and sports industry experts from Andy Dolich to former Pirates owner Kevin McClatchy, who is acting as an informal advisor to the effort. KFBK’s Rob McAllister tweeted that an announcement will be made tomorrow at 11 AM.

View from the northeast has rail platforms to the right and original train station on the other side of the arena.

The now-dead arena plan always had a stadium or other commercial component as a backup just in case the arena was derailed. The key component remains the same: $250 million in public funds from the sale of future parking revenues. $200k in EIR and other studies were approved by the City Council in April with this in mind. Johnson wants an anchor for the railyards, the 240-acre brownfield north of the train station and downtown proper. The ballpark will cost $500 million, leaving some question as to where the rest would come from. Even if the Kings leaving Sacramento is entirely ownership’s fault, it simply won’t look good that a city with a lone major sports franchise lost said team. MLB isn’t going to provide the money, leaving the rest of the financing on the shoulders of the team – a dicey proposition for a small market. The River Cats have historically been top attendance performers at Raley Field. The revenue demands for the A’s could be 4-6 times what the River Cats are pulling down at Raley, in keeping with higher attendance and premium seating requirements.

Lew Wolff has expressed zero interest in moving the A’s to Sacramento, having noted that he was friends with late River Cats owner Art Savage. They probably shared notes on the viability of Sacramento in the past, and Wolff, knowing that an invasion by the A’s would force Savage’s team to move in kind, probably considered such an effort out of bounds. McClatchy’s an interesting choice as a sounding board in that he’s sort of the perfect guy to be a consigliere here. Sacramento’s a small market with less corporate support than Pittsburgh, and McClatchy notoriously ran the Pirates on the cheap during his entire tenure, despite a brand new, publicly-financed stadium in PNC Park.

The timing of the announcement, just prior to the All Star Game in Kansas City, is designed to get the attention of MLB owners, all of whom are expected to be assembled for the festivities this week.

View of the Sacramento Railyards from the existing Amtrak platform

There’s a bit of a technical issue with the ballpark concept. The rendering near the top of the post shows the arena snugly fitting between the existing rail terminal and the new passenger platforms, which are under construction. The wedge-shaped lot where the arena/ballpark would sit is only around six acres in size. While that’s fine for an arena, it’s too small and compromised for a ballpark. The only way to make a ballpark work might be to build part of it over the new rail platforms, though that could prove costly. The pro-arena/ballpark group obviously prefers a new ballpark to a refurbishment of Raley Field due to the nature of the public financing aspect: Sacramento isn’t going to foot the bill for something happening in West Sacramento. Besides, as I’ve explained before, Raley Field may have been conceived to be easily expandable, but it wasn’t built that way.

It’ll be interesting to see how far this gets and whether this idea gets any traction. There will be many fans and citizens who are interested. Others may want to stick with the Kings until the end and consider the baseball interest a distraction. Whatever the reception, the effort adds yet another wrinkle to the ongoing saga of the A’s quest for a new ballpark.