Category Archives: Athletics

02.25.11
by

Concentrated Cactus

It wasn’t 20 years ago that the Cactus League was hanging on for dear life. With 20 teams in Florida and only 8 in Arizona, there was legitimate concern that the days of playing in dry desert warmth were coming to an end. With the Dodgers finally escaping Vero Beach and both Ohio teams now camping out in the Phoenix suburb of Goodyear, there are now 15 teams in the Cactus League, making for complete parity with the Grapefruit League. And if you ask around, you might get the sense that Arizona is much better. The teams aren’t as spread out as they are on the other coast, which makes travel for teams and fans a veritable picnic.

Even with the addition of teams to the Cactus League, the league has consolidated considerably. Only three years ago, three teams were in Tucson. Now there are none. The Padres called Yuma home for 25 years and the Angels springed in Palm Springs for over 30. All 15 Arizona teams are at worst 40 minutes away from each other, many within only a few minutes of each other.

This concentration of teams is largely due to teams like the Reds and Indians sharing facilities. Right now there are only 10 ballparks among the 15 teams in the league. The five shared ballparks are fairly new, with three of them coming in the last three years for over $100 million each. The five teams who have ballparks to themselves (A’s, Giants, Cubs, Angels, Brewers) are in the oldest parks, though HoHoKam and Maryvale are less than 15 years old and the other three have undergone some amount of renovation in the last decade. In a couple years the Cubs are set to move from the middle of Mesa to the western city limit near Tempe/ASU, which brings them even closer to the other teams.

Developing a ballpark is like building a scaled down version of a normal major league ballpark. A park typically holds 10,000 seats, much of them bleachers. Flanking many of the newer facilities are entire complexes with large indoor training centers and 4-8 baseball diamonds. Being in an old facility situation, the Cubs were dissatisfied with Fitch Park, only a few blocks south of Hohokam. The new plan has the ballpark colocated with the training facilities and a Cubs-themed village of sorts, all next to a lake stocked with catfish and trout. The final price of all of this is guaranteed to be well above $100 million and probably closer to $200 million.

Wrigleyville West rendering (source: East Valley Tribune)

At the other end of the spectrum is the A’s. Despite being wooed by developers to consider a move to the new Salt River Fields at Talking Stick, Lew Wolff chose to stick with the City of Phoenix and the A’s longtime home, Phoenix Municipal Stadium. Wolff has been trying for some time to work with the City and Mayor Phil Gordon on renovations to Muni, going so far as to offer to pay for it upfront as long as the city pays the A’s back over time. Wolff considers the $30 million pricetag on Muni renovations chump change – not the best choice of words but an apt description compared to the other mostly taxpayer-funded facilities.

Like the Cubs and Giants, the A’s have a split facility. Muni is at the south end of Papago Park, while the training facility and practice fields are at the north end more than a mile away. Wolff and the front office apparently like this arrangement, so no need to scope out a new site. There’s no denying that Muni is long in the tooth:

Wolff, though, said he’s hardly looking for a total reconstruction of the A’s current Spring Training site. He’d like to tear down and rebuild the blockhouse of an office and clubhouse building at Papago Park and make significant upgrades to Phoenix Muni, which was opened in 1964. The infrastructure of that yard is crumbling as evidenced by a water pipe break this week that flooded some of the A’s clubhouse offices.

Sounds familiar. At least Phoenix didn’t ruin Muni by sticking a huge triple-decked football stand in the outfield. Next year I expect to head out to Phoenix to catch some games while my brother is still going to school at ASU. By then I hope that Wolff and Gordon have hammered out a deal, because if they haven’t Wolff will have to start all over again with a new mayor. I prefer being able to fly into PHX and take the new light rail line from near the airport to the station near Papago to catch a game before settling in. No other Cactus League park is near transit the way Muni is. If Wolff and Gordon can’t strike a deal, there isn’t anywhere for Wolff to look, so it would be yet another year of staying at a decaying stadium in a nice climate. If the familiarity with obsolescence breeds contempt, Wolff must be feeling like Phil Connors right about now.

02.24.11
by

Revenue sharing rollback?

Fox Sports’ Ken Rosenthal is at it again. This time he’s talking about that horrible, disgusting word that I loathe, the one that makes my skin crawl, the C-word.

That’s right. Contraction.

Rosenthal notes that some of the big market owners are grousing about having to send money to low revenue franchises such as the Rays and A’s, who conveniently don’t have new ballparks to help their revenue cases. Both teams should be the likeliest candidates because of this. However, all is not as it appears to be! Rosenthal walks back the threat in the context of upcoming CBA negotiations. To wit:

Such a threat would, however, change the tenor of the upcoming labor negotiations, raising the tension considerably. Yes, the owners always could pull back to extract other concessions, but if the A’s can be saved, why risk a work stoppage to eliminate one troubled franchise?

Naturally, he pivots to an A’s move to San Jose, which could (and should) resolve the A’s poor revenue position. In the grand scheme of things, improving the A’s financial stance may bump up total MLB revenue 1% on annual basis. That’s not enough to make Joe Fan notice, but if the game is as also about getting more owners to sign off on the financial model for the next 5-10 years, it’s an important battle to not have to fight.

Right now, MLB and MLBPA are set to go into CBA negotiations with several draft related items such as bonus slotting, a potential international draft, and the possibility of trading draft picks (yes please). Competition matters include increased replay and that extra playoff round. These items are only peripherally related to how the revenue pie is split, so the tension regarding those matters is projected to be minimal at best. That makes the biggest struggle not between players and owners, but rather between owner haves and have-nots. It has building to this ever since revenue sharing was introduced, and the financial document leaks of last summer only added fuel to the fire.

For a while I’ve been talking about how revenue sharing isn’t going to be expanded. It faces a rollback, strange as it seems, and the big market teams are pushing it. Bud Selig is listening, as his response to Hank Steinbrenner’s comments from earlier in the week shows:

“We have more competitive balance than ever before,” Selig said. “We have more competitive balance than any other sport.

“Now, look, is the system perfect? No. I didn’t say it was perfect, but I said that I think what exists today is pretty darn good. In the next labor negotiation, we have to tweak it in some areas, and it’s significant tweaks.”

What kinds of tweaks are we talking about here? There might be a tweak to the luxury tax, but that would only really satisfy the Yankees. Revenue sharing is defined as 31% of revenue minus expenses. Which means that teams keep more than 69% of their gate, local TV and radio money thanks to the ability to deduct stadium costs. Forbes had the Yankees 2009 revenue at $440 million after expenses and revenue sharing. By reducing the required share from 31% to 25%, the Yankees could see their net revenue approach $500 million, half of that excess likely going to yet another free agent pickup.

On the other end of the spectrum, a have-not team like the A’s could see its revenue go south by only a few million. It also means that other have-nots would take similar hits. In practical roster terms, this means not signing some like Grant Balfour. For a team that tends to hoard revenue sharing like the Pirates, it simply means they have less to hoard since they are forever playing the waiting game until their competitive window opens.

(You can stop your laughing now.)

Thankfully, the have-nots and middle class teams outnumber the big markets. They’re not going to take this lying down and they can lobby Selig just as effectively as the Steinbrenner brothers or John Henry (who once owned a have-not team in the Marlins). What to do then? As Rosenthal suggests, getting one team off the dole – namely the A’s – could be a big difference maker. The Twins are already there. The Marlins will be healthier starting next year. The Royals have a greatly renovated ballpark and a fantastic farm system which could literally pay dividends over the next several years. The A’s will be once they have a ballpark built (and they have the revenue streams to pay for it). That leaves the Rays as the only team that can’t lift itself up by its proverbial bootstraps. Knowing that the Rays probably won’t have anything done at least through this next CBA means they are the only team to worry about instead of four or five should the A’s situation be resolved. The sooner the owners make this happen, the sooner they can end this major internal distraction and rally in solidarity against their real enemy: the players union.

.

P.S. One other thing that Rosenthal touches on is debt or legal issues facing certain owners like Fred Wilpon, Frank McCourt, and Tom Hicks. It would seem that owning a team is a license to do some seriously crazy things, like investing with Bernie Madoff or buying a bunch of other franchises that one can’t afford. While Selig may look to enforce debt rules better, his reach doesn’t go as far as telling owners how to run their own personal finances. Is this recent history of individual owner financial troubles simply a remnant of the economic downturn or something else? I don’t know that any additional “screening” of potential owners would help. It’s not like choosing owners is going to become an open, democratic process overnight. They don’t call it The Lodge for nothing.

P.P.S. Ray Ratto also dismisses contraction.

02.23.11
by

News and Interviews for 2/23/11

Carl Guardino’s interview with Lew Wolff and Michael Crowley is now available (MP3). Nothing really new, other than one particular quote from Wolff that I took note of. When asked by a caller about whether it’s San Jose or out of the area to Sacramento or Vegas because Oakland’s not possible, Wolff replied:

I don’t agree with you that the Oakland situation is quite that bad. It’s a fanbase, but the problem is that implementing a privately financed ballpark is difficult.

So what it comes down to, as I’ve been hammering home for the last year or so, is being able to pay for the stadium. Oakland is simply behind the eight ball when it comes to corporate interests and it’s a nonstarter for seat licenses if those ever become necessary. I don’t have specific numbers to back this up, but I suspect that the club seat market is also poor. Even for fairly well-attended A’s and Raiders games, club sections are frequently empty compared to others. If building in Oakland or Fremont was based on an economic model that collapsed (real estate), what is to take its place? It brings to mind comments made by official Yankees blowhard Hank Steinbrenner regarding revenue sharing and markets (via ESPN):

“At some point, if you don’t want to worry about teams in minor markets, don’t put teams in minor markets, or don’t leave teams in minor markets if they’re truly minor,” Steinbrenner said. “Socialism, communism, whatever you want to call it, is never the answer.”

Say what you will about the Yankees, but there’s a reason their ticket prices are so astonishingly high: they’re privately financing $1.1 Billion of the new stadium. Which means that they’re privately financing a stadium, paying luxury tax, and contributing the lion’s share of revenue sharing into the pool. Yet they still can’t fill out a rotation. Hank probably has a nice ulcer over all of that.

Shortly after the market question, the subject matter changed to Wolff’s communications (or lack thereof) with Oakland Mayor Jean Quan. Quan, who was misidentified as the first Asian American mayor of a major US city in Baseball Oakland’s otherwise good interview (Norm Mineta was San Jose’s mayor 40 years ago), has mentioned that she hasn’t spoken to Wolff since his aborted Coliseum North plan, which Wolff himself confirmed. Now, they can both play political points with each of their respective bases by continuing to point this out, or they can actually choose to have a real conversation. Not like anyone’s stopping either of them. And for those of you who say, “so-and-so should act first,” grow up. It doesn’t matter.

Further on in the Quan interview, she suggests that redevelopment is in a much more secure position than portrayed by others who may be signaling alarms (including me), simply due to the legal trouble the state would face in dismantling it. That may be the case, but it isn’t stopping cities and counties which have real, ready-to-go projects from taking the necessary measures to protect their plans. In Oakland’s case, Victory Court isn’t anywhere near ready-to-go, so committing resources to it with so much up in the air is certainly premature. I just have a hard time believing that any city in this era can act on a hair trigger. The process is long and arduous, and if you’ve been reading this blog more than a year you need no further reminders of that.

One thing that puzzles me is that Bud Selig’s committee is working in a silo with Oakland. It is doing the same with San Jose. It is apparently not communicating any of this to Wolff. Why not? Shouldn’t there be some sharing of information to get the best ideas to the forefront? It’s not like we’re dealing with multiple teams competing for the same stadium. It’s the same team regardless of which city is picked. It doesn’t make much sense.

In other news, Santa Clara unanimously approved a resolution to create a stadium authority for the 49ers.

According to BoSox president Larry Lucchino, Fenway Park is expected to stand another 40-50 years. (Well, as long as the climactic scene in some recent movie set in Boston doesn’t happen frequently.)

Over the weekend there was some hubbub about a rough rendering of the Quakes stadium, previously discarded and sent to the City of San Jose for code verification as part of its permits process, showing up on the interwebs. To which I say, Wow. Just wow.

Going back to the Wolff interview for a second, I noticed that the show was sponsored in part by construction firm Webcor Builders. Could they be trying to get in good on the stadium construction tip? They are handling the work at Cal’s Memorial Stadium. Devcon has been involved with the 49ers’ plans and the expansion of Buck Shaw Stadium at SCU.

More on Wolff regarding the A’s future regular season and spring training homes from MLB.com writer Barry M. Bloom.

Also, Ken Rosenthal’s argument against contraction seems familiar.

02.15.11
by

Could Beane leave if San Jose is not approved?

After Ken Rosenthal (and Scott Boras) took a whack at the A’s murky future, Fox Sports colleague Bob Klapisch took his turn today. In his piece, Klapisch claims that unless things turn around from a revenue standpoint, Billy Beane may not be with the organization much longer:

In fact, Beane’s friends say this is his last go-round — if the A’s aren’t allowed to move to San Jose, he’ll officially pass the baton to assistant David Forst and look for a Plan B for the rest of his professional life. It’s anyone’s guess what would be next for Beane; remember, this is the same executive who turned down what should’ve been a dream job, controlling the Red Sox.

Beane’s record isn’t spotless. Like any GM not named Ruben Amaro, Jr., he’s made plenty of mistakes over the years regarding personnel. Yet he’s still among the top GMs in the game, and along with David Forst they once again have the A’s back on an upswing. That said, frequent talk of the A’s being small market – or more appropriately low revenue – sounds like whining after a while, and constantly bemoaning one’s station while being the only GM to own part of a team is not going to engender sympathy.

Thing is, Beane can only play Sisyphus for so long. Other GMs have a much larger margin of error when it comes to putting together teams and payrolls. We all know that pinning the franchise’s hopes on Eric Chavez set the team back for years. High revenue teams can have two or three Chavez contracts without suffering too much. Even the Giants got away with Barry Zito being a parasite last year, and his contract alone is worth two Chavys. It’s not hard to see how Beane could see that proverbial rock rolling back downhill and choose to walk away.

One of the things I think we’re seeing from the national media who’ve chimed in on this (Klapisch, Rosenthal, Gammons) is that they, like us, want to see what Billy can do when he has all of the tools the other GMs do. We all want to see a culmination to Billy’s story, because frankly, even with Moneyball, the story isn’t finished. So while some of the pro-Oakland crowd might look at the national media as ganging up on Oakland, it’s losing sight of the big picture. In the end the A’s need to be able to compete and the best economic chance to do so comes in San Jose, not Oakland. That observation comes in contrast to much of the local media (Newhouse, Ratto, Cohn, Killion), who have often been against ownership’s stadium wranglings, holding up the legacy of the team over all else – a valid argument but not one firmly planted in reality.

At 48, Billy Beane is still a reasonably young man for a GM. Even if he stays with the A’s, it’s not hard to see him being booted upstairs to a CEO/President type of position where he no longer does any day-to-day work with the ballclub. Whether he leaves or not, he’s not going to be a GM for the next 20 years. If he leaves before he and we feel his work his done, it’ll be a huge blow psychologically since it’ll be an admission that the A’s, as they currently stand in financial limbo, cannot compete long term. It won’t be easy to be a fan if that day comes.

02.14.11
by

This cup doth not runneth over

Update 2/17 16:00 – The Consumerist checked in with Aramark on the cup size controversy and received this response:

For a short time early last baseball season, we used an incorrect cup size for the $4.99 beer. The cup was larger than it should have been. When we discovered this, we began using the correct cup size.


That would mean that the GC12S (12/14 oz.) cup may be used instead. If so, I hope people enjoyed getting the extra suds on the mistakenly larger cup while it lasted.

Today at AN, a fanpost contained the following video comparing the “small” $5 domestic beer with the “large” $8 domestic.

I normally don’t drink one of the big domestic brews (BTW it’s SF Beer Week if you’re interested) and there’s no chance I’d pay $8 for a large one. A $3 upcharge for that tiny difference in cup volume is embarrassing. The same phenomenon has been seen at Seattle’s Qwest Field.

You may remember that the Coliseum complex changed to compostable cups (PDF) several years ago. The cups are manufactured by Fabri-Kal as part of their Greenware line. Greenware comes in a multitude of sizes, and the problem appears to be the specific sizes of cups used.

  • GC16S – The company lists this as one of their “squat” models. It’s listed with dual volumes, 16 oz./18 oz. and its “flush fill capacity” is 18.3 ounces. This is the cup used for the “small” beer size and for the various craft beers served all over the Coliseum.
  • GC20 – The taller “large” cup’s “flush fill capacity” is 20 ounces.

I broke out my abacus to determine the minuscule disparity of 1.7 ounces. That’s less than the capacity of a shot glass. If the A’s want to be fair to the swill-buying public they should up that large to 24 ounces. Then again, this immediately brought to mind a conversation I had yesterday with a bartender. His establishment is a noted beer bar, though they also keep swill on hand for those who ask. A customer with a large party had no interest in any of the great craft beer they had on tap and kept requesting bottled Coors. At the end of the night the party went through nearly two cases of the stuff. They were charged the same for the Coors as they would if they had requested Pliny the Elder.

Lesson for the consumer: If you must get a Bud or Bud Light, get the smaller size. Better yet, if you’re going to spend a couple extra bucks, get a craft beer. It won’t taste like piss.

P.S.: At the Coliseum the vendors don’t usually fill the small cup to the brim. They stop at a fill line on the cup – probably 16 oz.

02.11.11
by

Nuggets from the Tittle-Wolff interview

Thanks to David for alerting me and others to the Wolff interview on Rick Tittle’s second hour today.

On Lew’s opinion of Victory Court as a site:

I’d like to answer that a little obtuse… With the same kind of detail the committee is going into, we don’t think we have any options available there. It has nothing to do with the fanbase or the City of Oakland. It’s just that our exploration is perhaps deeper than soundbites in the newspaper.

If the A’s can’t move to San Jose, would they move or threaten to move out of state?

I think what we’ve tried to do is to be one of the few teams in the history of baseball not to leverage by “you know we’re gonna move if you don’t do this for us”… So we have not sat around and thought about what our options are. We want to stay in the Bay Area. Our ownership doesn’t want to own a team in Omaha or someplace. We’re gonna make every effort to stay in the Bay Area and truthfully do not measure these other options.

On Oakland Mayor Jean Quan’s suggestion that Lew’s in it for an ancillary real estate deal in San Jose:

I haven’t spoken to her – if I have it’s been once in seven years, so I don’t know what she’s thinking – but as far as the San Jose parcel there is no ancillary development right for us. My ownerships in San Jose are a small piece of the Fairmont and one lot where we have a racquetball club. I’m hoping if we go down there it’ll stimulate development but it won’t be our development.

Any updates on the status of XTRA Sports 860 (KTRB)?

We may be – I don’t have the details – the party selected for further negotiations so I think that’s happening right now.

Do you find the tarps have/have not been a success?

I think they’ve worked out fine. Maybe it’s my fault – we still don’t fill out the ballpark… I think the tarps was a plus in terms of obscuring a lot of empty seats. Is it a great thing? No. Is it a terrible thing? I don’t think so.

What are you and Billy referring to when calling the A’s a small market team?

I think we’re referring to revenue. In other words, if we had a new ballpark – I don’t want to use that as the only reason – when you have huge revenues even though you share them as the Yankees and Red Sox do – it takes revenue to pay and retain players. I don’t like the term small market. I just want to be able to have revenues close to the Giants, for example. When you trace the change in the teams from 2000, every statistic we have from advertising sales, sponsorships and so on, we started to fall way behind. Some of it has to do with revenue, some of it has to do with Barry Bonds.

Is it impossible to find that revenue in Oakland as opposed to San Jose?

Nothing’s absolutely impossible, but the answer is that demographics have changed tremendously, the corporation bases. We’re in a region here. It’s not like we’re not moving to another country or another state. If you landed tomorrow from Mars and said, “I’m looking to locate a ball team, where should I put it?” You might opt for the South Bay in the current economic and demographic environment.

On the Quakes stadium and the A’s ballpark being separate or related:

They would both be in separate venues. We don’t think we should combine them. Baseball, which is more dominant (in the US), needs to be in a baseball-only facility.

A very good interview by Tittle in which he asked numerous clarifying questions without antagonizing Wolff (it might help that Wolff may be Tittle’s boss’s boss’s boss in the near future). In any case, it covers a lot of ground that we frequently cover here at the blog, and other than the rather pat answer about Victory Court the answers were reasonably genuine. Discuss amongst yourselves.

02.07.11
by

Quan talks tough as cities race

The Merc’s Tracy Seipel has the pulse on race to the keep/land the A’s. It appears that Oakland Mayor Jean Quan and Doug Boxer have their talking points in order.

“The reality is that even though you have land,” Quan said of San Jose, “you still have not gotten permission” from Major League Baseball to relocate the A’s to San Jose. “My timeline is less urgent than your timeline,” said Quan.

Apparently Oakland’s timeline is urgent enough that the Victory Court EIR is being fast-tracked for completion in less than 12 months. When was the last time in the Bay Area anything this large got its EIR completed in less than 12 months? Beyond that, there’s still the issue of issuing bonds for the project – which may not be possible after this summer, at least not without a vote.

Despite the numerous questions about Oakland’s ability to compress 2-4 years of work into 12 months, Quan is pushing forward and that is a good thing. It’s best for Oakland and A’s fans to see if anything can come out of this, because the last thing we want right now is one less option.

Experts quoted for the story, namely CSUEB’s Paul Staudohar and Smith College’s Andrew Zimbalist, aren’t so sanguine about Oakland’s chances. In explaining how San Jose is well ahead in the process, Staudohar said:

“So unless Oakland pulls a rabbit out of a hat very soon, it appears they will lose the A’s by default.”

For his part, Lew Wolff relates that Bud Selig wants to look at every angle, which would indicate that Oakland should and will have time to complete the process. Unfortunately for Oakland, this redevelopment crisis may provide the most cruel, unkind cuts to both the schedule and funding. Here’s to Oakland finishing the work, with as few legal and procedural issues as possible.

02.07.11
by

Could San Jose A’s and Giants coexist?

The cover story in this week’s San Jose/Silicon Valley Business Journal discusses multiple scenarios in which the A’s (subscription required, written by Eli Segall), should they move to San Jose, would have to indemnify the San Jose Giants, the High-A affiliate of the San Francisco ballclub. The parent club bought controlling interest in the team last year, which could lead into a handsome payoff just for the minor league team in addition to whatever is agreed upon for the SF team. In the article, Roger Noll estimates that the A’s would have to pay the SJ Giants $4 million, which would be in addition to $20-30 million for the parent club Noll estimated a year ago.

The worry for the “little” Giants is that the A’s will siphon away sponsorship dollars, which in a large city such as San Jose is a goldmine for a mere Class-A club. The rest of the California League cities can’t hold a candle to San Jose in terms of corporate sponsorship potential. Despite the looming A’s threat, SJ Giants CEO Jim Weyermann isn’t worried much about losing attendance since the fan demographics are different, and there’s a chance that sponsors could be retained.

A sidebar mentions the fact that $14.5 million in renovations to San Jose Municipal Stadium are on hold pending the fate of the SJ Giants, which is of course tied to the A’s. Should the A’s move to SJ it’s likely that the SJ Giants would be forced to move. But that isn’t a given as Lew Wolff signaled that he’d be fine with the Giants staying there. Going this route would change the eventual terms of compensation, since Wolff and his partners wouldn’t have to go out-of-pocket for relocation costs. Instead they might have to foot part of the bill for compensation and for renovations to Muni – still not cheap but definitely cheaper.

Last month, Pacific Baseball Partners head Chris Lee made news when he admitted that the SF Giants’ refusal to do anything regarding T-rights has put his ballpark project in jeopardy. After I made my post I got this clarification from Lee:

“…note that the request to the (SF Giants) is not to move their affiliate to Sonoma County, but to relocate some other team, whatever its affiliation may be.”

It is possible that one of the other Cal League teams, perhaps Bakersfield, could relocate to Windsor, though given the circumstances, the frontrunner would still be the San Jose Giants. For that change to happen, the A’s move would have to be the first domino to fall.

If the San Jose Giants can stay in town, great. The parent Giants could choose to keep the team there in order to keep its foothold, though that would work against any idea that they bought into the little Giants to raise potential compensation. Keeping the SJ Giants in town would undoubtedly be the cheapest option for the A’s from a bottom line standpoint. From a strategic standpoint, it would make much more sense for the Giants to take advantage of an opening in the North Bay if the A’s go south. The SF Giants aren’t exactly greatly accessible from Sonoma County, with an hour drive from Santa Rosa to Larkspur just to catch the ferry. Still, it’s not as if common sense has prevailed in these matters so far. Why think it would happen now?

02.02.11
by

Quan speaks out in defense of redevelopment

We’ve been waiting for comments from Oakland Mayor Jean Quan about redevelopment, and now we have them courtesy of KGO-TV’s Alan Wong.

ORA apparently has $52 million in cash on hand, $20 million for Victory Court’s development area. Quan was quick to talk up the benefits of redevelopment, specifically pointing to the renovation of the Fox Theater as a glittering example done under Jerry Brown’s watch.

Updated: More from Oakland North’s Laura Hautala:

Currently, the city council is the governing body of Oakland’s redevelopment agency and directs its actions, but (CEDA director Walter) Cohen said the successor agencies might turn out to be cities themselves. If so, the council might continue overseeing the projects normally carried out by Oakland’s redevelopment agency, but with less funding.

Quan told the council that she and the nine mayors from California’s 10 biggest cities will meet with Brown’s finance director next week to discuss details of how the proposal would work. “The scary thing is that folks in Sacramento have not a clue what redevelopment is,” Quan said, adding that even Brown, formerly Oakland’s mayor, seems to have forgotten the extent to which the redevelopment agency provides funding for the city. “We have a special responsibility to make this real,” Quan said.

When the subject shifted to the A’s, things got a little more uncertain. Let’s Go Oakland head Doug Boxer took the question.

When asked if this was the nail in the coffin for the Oakland A’s, Doug Boxer — Co-found of Let’s Go Oakland — says, “I don’t like to think of it like that. It’s very difficult to move a franchise. The Giants were on their way out, quite frankly, including Canada.”

Not exactly confidence inspiring. And there’s an important distinction to make here. In nearly every case of the A’s or Giants wanting to move, the owner was looking to sell the franchise.

  • 1976 – Horace Stoneham looked to sell Giants to brewing giant Labatt’s, who would move the team to Toronto. A court injunction stopped the sale and the team was sold to Bob Lurie.
  • 1978-79 – Charlie Finley tries to move the A’s to New Orleans but is bound to his lease by the Coliseum Commission.
  • 1980 – Finley tries to sell to Marvin Davis, who would move the team to Denver. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn struck down the move. Finley was held to his lease again. (Thanks, MB) Finley would sell the following year to Wally Haas.
  • 1992 – Lurie tries to sell the Giants to Tampa Bay interests after striking out several times in his efforts to get a new stadium built in SF or the South Bay. NL President Bill White intervenes and allows time for Walter Shorenstein to assemble the saving ownership group.

Legal obstacles (ironclad lease, sale acting as a gating mechanism) prevented the moves in all cases. Talk of a lawsuit against the A’s emanating from a clause in the lease has been all but debunked. That leaves Wolff/Fisher with the thing we already know as the last true obstacle: T-rights enforced via the commissioner. We can debate all day and night about how sacrosanct T-rights actually are, but let’s be clear – they’re the only real obstacle left.

02.01.11
by

It’s a buyer’s market: SJRA land bidding short of target

The Merc’s Tracy Seipel has the scoop on the six downtown property sales, and it’s not as good as expected. SJRA had the cumulative appraisal of the properties at $26 million, whereas the combined bids submitted (deadline 4 PM Monday) was $19.6 million. The lower sum may be enough to acquire the remaining ballpark site, but it won’t cover the Autumn Parkway project or mitigations, which are just as important to the execution of the project.

Lew Wolff did not have any of the winning bids:

One bidder who won’t be considered: A’s owner Lew Wolff, a prominent developer, who made an offer for the annex and parking garage at the Fairmont hotel, which he already owns. But instead of bidding on each property separately — as required — Wolff made a combined offer for an undisclosed price that the agency won’t consider, agency chief Harry Mavrogenes said.

Was Wolff only in there to get the bidding up? In any case, SJRA reserves the right to pull any of the parcels off the market if it feels the highest bid isn’t high enough, which may be the case for the Fairmont garage. Hopefully they won’t have to dip into existing cash reserves to get everything done.

Among the highest bidders are the biggest builders in the South Bay, specifically Barry Swenson and Sobrato. The good news is that they have proven track records of delivering on big projects in and around downtown San Jose. And it wouldn’t be surprising if they were pulling for the ballpark effort since the ballpark’s success could have an indirect effect on their ability to further develop and sell in the area.

There’s some question as to whether or not SJRA should hold off completely until the market improves, but there’s no telling when that will happen. Besides, does anyone remember how much the land was supposed to cost when the agency started acquiring land? There’s a fair price and then there’s a fair price.