Category Archives: Baseball

02.29.12
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Ballpark fever in February

Last week I felt like getting a glimpse of Mark Appel, the Stanford hurler and East Bay product who may eventually be the #1 pick in the June draft. So off I went on Friday to Stanford’s Sunken Diamond, one of the many immaculately kept athletic facilities at The Farm. My baseball cravings have come early, too early to be sated by spring training. College baseball is an excellent, affordable brand of ball, and I have to admit being more curious than usual thanks to my recent reading of The Art of Fielding, rookie novelist Chad Harbach’s work about baseball at a small, fictional Midwestern private university.

An unusual 70 feet from the plate to the backstop at Sunken Diamond. Nevermind that as Stanford P Mark Appel rarely had to make C Eric Smith do more than reach down to rein in a pitch.

What started with Appel toying around with the Texas Longhorns to the tune of 10 K’s turned into a mad dash all over Northern California to see baseball wherever I could find it. (This is what happens when you’re not married, have no kids, and you’re comfortable seeing your friends only twice a week.) Sunken Diamond is a pleasant, serene environment, with more than ample foul territory and trees beyond the outfield that effectively block out civilization. The Friday night game, with a published attendance of 2,624, was typical for Stanford baseball: a very family friendly environment with kids running up and down hills to grab foul balls.

On Saturday I drove up to Sacramento because I felt like being environmentally irresponsible. On the way to Cowtown I stopped in Stockton, where there was nothing happening at Banner Island Ballpark. Not wanting to stay in Stockton any longer than humanly necessary, I jumped back on I-5 and headed north. I stopped at Raley Field, hoping that someone was there or that a gate was open. Thankfully, as I arrived a college team (JC?) entered the gates and was getting ready to take the field. There was a sign advertising National Anthem singers, though I didn’t see any staff on hand to guide any audition process. I quickly went in and took a few snapshots, which I’ve never had a chance to do with Raley Field empty (I’m sure if I called the River Cats’ media relations they would’ve granted it but I tend to operate by the seat of my pants). The field was in fine form, just waiting for its masters to handle grounders and make great catches on it.

Ready to go in West Sacramento

Three (!) years ago I wrote an article about how difficult it would be to expand Raley Field to MLB size. Rain caused major changes in construction methods, including a change from enormous steel columns to poured-in-place concrete columns and light steel trusses supporting the press box and suite/club level. This is what that structure looks like:

All of this would have to be scrapped to make way for multiple decks and/or suite levels.

This is what a properly sized (overengineered) column at Busch Stadium looks like:

Now that's a knife column.

After the brief stop at Raley, I crossed the river and went to the train station, which as far as I know is the closest the public can get to the Railyards site where the planned arena will sit. I’ve written enough about that so I won’t bother with that subject in this post. Once I got my fill of downtown, I headed east to the CSU-Sacramento campus, where the Hornets were getting ready to play a day game against Seattle University. If Sunken Diamond is one of Northern California’s nicest college ballparks, Sac State is one of the most spartan. The grandstand is all aluminum, with mostly bleachers and a smattering of real seats in the first few rows. There is no press box and no actual restrooms. Tickets cost $5, but I could have easily gotten a good view for free from the parking garage in left field. The PA announcer sounded like an older Rick Tittle. Ambience was provided by a busy rail line across the street and a handful of coeds who cheered on every player on the Hornet squad. Regardless, I enjoyed the experience.

View from the 6th floor of the student/faculty garage just beyond the left field fence.

I got my fill of Hornet baseball after about six innings. The UC Davis baseball team was on the road over the weekend, so I skipped The other Farm and headed back to the Bay Area. My last stop was scheduled to be Albert Park in San Rafael, home of the San Rafael Pacifics of the independent North American Baseball League. That leg of the trip was ruined when I got a hankering to visit Russian River Brewing in Santa Rosa, a half-hour and another county away. By the time I got to Albert Park it was completely dark and a few transients were lingering about. That’s just as well, since only yesterday did a Marin County judge allow the Pacifics to start operating in full with ticket sales and improvements to Albert Park. The old fashioned covered grandstand will be expanded from 800 to 900 seats. Tickets will start at $10 for general admission, though you have to think there will be numerous merchant nights to provide free or heavily discounted ducats. There’s even a tryout on March 17, so if you have a few tools and you aren’t dunk by noon, you may want to drop by for a tryout.

The high nets at Schott Stadium are a necessity as the field is only steps from traffic.

Sunday was a day of rest and no baseball. With no games scheduled on Monday, I chose to take in a game at Schott Stadium at Santa Clara University on Tuesday afternoon. The park is tightly wedged into a corner  of El Camino Real and Campbell Avenue, surrounded on two sides by university apartment housing and a few industrial buildings. There are a good number of permanent seats, and while there are plenty of bleachers, you can tell that a few corners have been cut there. The bleachers are basically standard aluminum sections that aren’t connected to each other. Even though the park is only seven years old, the bleachers feel rickety. The dugouts are not set much below grade, so the roofs of the dugouts obstruct the views down the line. The PA system is distractingly loud. Other than those niggles, the experience is quite pleasant. Schott Stadium is across the street from the main campus and down the block from the Santa Clara Caltrain station. A small parking lot next to the stadium has a space reserved for namesake and former A’s owner Steve Schott.

The whole trip reminded my of one of my other ballpark trips in the Midwest or East Coast, except that I didn’t have to shell out for hotel rooms. I’ll try to do one of these with the various minor league parks later this year, and perhaps another trip involving more college ballparks.

02.25.12
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San Jose to start Autumn Parkway work + Coliseum sign restrictions

It figures that on a weekend I chose to do a mini ballpark trip, news breaks. More about the trip later.

The Merc’s John Woolfork reports that $500,000 in design work has been approved by the City of San Jose for the Autumn Parkway project. It’s a small procedural step in getting the important roadway finished. For the Shasta/Hanchett and St. Leo’s neighborhoods trying to reach the Target on the other side of the tracks, making their way there currently involves a 1.6 mile drive along the Alameda and Taylor/Coleman or a 2 mile drove along Santa Clara and Market/Coleman. All that for a store that’s only 0.6 miles away using the crow flies method. With Autumn Parkway completed, the trip will only be 1 mile long, while providing an important alternate route for visitors to HP Pavilion and a future Cisco Field.

Apparently that’s not enough for Stand for San Jose and its surely well-paid San Francisco-based consultant/spokesman, Dan Newman. (BTW, does Stand for San Jose have any actual San Jose people running the place who know what’s going on?)

For his part, SJ transportation director walks the political as best he can.

Larsen said the roadwork isn’t required mitigation for the proposed ballpark. But because environmental studies on the project assume the improvements will be done, getting them under way bolsters the city’s case against critics who might seek to stall the project with litigation.

“It’s a little nuanced,” Larsen said. “It’s not technically a mitigation, but an assumed condition, so from that perspective, it’s cleanest to have it done that way.”

Odd. All this time I was under the impression that Autumn Parkway was a necessary mitigation. I suppose that if there’s little-to-no new parking being built along with the ballpark, a direct artery leading to it may not be critical. Let’s be frank about it though, it’s very important. Not just from the standpoint of providing that new artery for both residents and sports fans, but also from the political standpoint that the residents need to be thrown a bone. Autumn Parkway is a basic part of the covenant, whatever for the final mitigation plan takes.

While the Giants’ astroturf group keeps grinding, Larry Baer continues to wear a white hat when asked about territorial rights. From the AP:

“We continue to be respectful of the process, and there is a process,” Baer said from his team’s Scottsdale Stadium spring training site. “The game is bigger than any internal machinations. I think it’s not good for the game to have whatever internal back and forth between teams. That’s not good for the game. We want to be respectful and see the game flourish in our market, in all the markets.”

Who needs internal back-and-forth when you can have an external political group do your dirty work?

Going back to the Autumn Parkway project, the $22 million cost does not have any specific funding attached to it as of yet. The city’s redevelopment agency is dead, which means the project falls back to City. They’re looking for some federal funding, but I don’t believe a grant will cover more than a quarter or third of the project’s cost. Whether the City finds the money in its couch cushions or by asking Uncle Lew, it remains an important step even if it isn’t officially linked to the ballpark. My worry is that due to the money crunch, Autumn Parkway will be delayed for a year or several beyond the opening of Cisco Field, which will make a lot of locals and fans upset.

For their sake I hope the signmakers pick a more technologically competent shop than the one the Knope campaign used. (The shop was named "Signtology".)

For their sake I hope the signmakers pick a more technologically competent shop than the one the Knope campaign used. (The shop was named “Signtology”.)

We’re six weeks away from the true home opener, yet one new rule is being laid down at the Coliseum and a lot of people aren’t going to like it. According to the Trib’s Angela Woodall, a new restriction on signs will be in place, in which no sign larger than 3′ x 6′ can be used at the stadium. That’s a big deal, since virtually all of the anti-Lew Wolff signs have been very large in order to be captured on TV. The A’s are instituting the rule because the signs have a “negative aesthetic impact”. Frankly, I’m not sure why the team bothers unless certain fans or sponsors are complaining about the signs. Bringing up signs again only brings attention to the signmakers, while their near-constant presence in past years has practically rendered the signs as background scenery.

The new rule presumably means that the “Keep the A’s in Oakland” and “Lew Lied He Didn’t Try” signs will have to change to be used. I suppose they could use bodypaint or a series of small signs. Oh well.

Finally, Woodall also noted in a tweet that the Coliseum City EIR is expected to go before Oakland CEDA in committee next week. Sometime after that, it would be expected to go before the full City Council for expenditure approval. If it goes to the Council (which it should), I’ll be sure to attend that session. I wonder if it’ll be as raucous as the one for Victory Court?

02.13.12
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Cespedes and a new ballpark

For Billy Beane, 30 is apparently the magic number.

Jason Giambi left the A’s for the Yankees after his 30th birthday as a highly prized free agent.

Miguel Tejada was not offered a potentially “insulting” deal when his arbitration years were up, allowing him to switch coasts to Baltimore. When he took the field in an Orioles uniform for the first time, he was a month shy of 30.

Assuming that Yoenis Cespedes stays with the A’s for all four years of his newly inked $36 million deal, he will be 30 years old when he becomes a free agent after the 2015 season.

With Lew Wolff’s admission that a 2016 Cisco Field opening is more likely than 2015 given the delays and necessary steps remaining, that puts Cespedes quite possibly gone from the A’s when the time comes. Or does it?

It’s really all a matter of value. If Cespedes really is the “Willie Mays of Cuba” then two things are possible. Either he’ll be too expensive to keep and he’ll be signed by a big market team to a huge deal (Pujols, Fielder), or he’ll be a strategic signing by Beane to have a marquee talent on hand for a new ballpark opening. Keep in mind that the San Jose ballpark is practically guaranteed to be more hitter-friendly than the Coliseum.

I figure that if the A’s can sign Cespedes and keep payroll below $100 million in 2016, they’ll do it if he’s performing. By that point Michael Choice should be in his arb years, as will Grant Green and most of the new young pitching talent the team has waiting in the wings. For a guide to how this might play out, look at how the Twins’ and Marlins’ payroll decisions are progressing. Both teams have committed well above $90 million before the low service time guys are signed. As cheap as many fans think the Wolff/Fisher ownership has been, ask yourself this: Are they cheaper than Jeff Loria or the late Carl Pohlad? Or Mike Ilitch during the Tiger Stadium years?

Right now 2015-16 seems so far away that’s it feels silly to project in this manner, especially the way Beane can trade guys at the drop of a hat. But we know that’s what the front office has to do, whether Cisco Field opens in 2015, 2016, or not at all. As long as we’ve stolen a slugger with real potential out from under many far richer teams, I’m taking the little victories whatever way I can get them.

02.05.12
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News for 2/5/12

Lots of got stuff for y’all to digest (along with your Super Bowl feast) today:

  • Two Bay Area sports families are at odds. According to Matier and Ross, the heirs to former Warriors owner Franklin Mieuli are suing the York family over the value of a 5% minority share of the 49ers. The Yorks say the team’s only worth $360 million, making the stake’s value only $18 million. The Mieuli heirs are pointing to Forbes’ recent valuation of the 49ers, $990 million, and want to sell the stake 5% of that valuation, or $49.5 million. Considering how the lowly Jacksonville Jaguars were sold two months ago for $760 million, you have to think the Yorks will come out on the losing end of this or settle before any trial begins.
  • The Detroit News has a new profile of Tigers and Red Wings owner Mike Ilitch. During his tenure as Tigers owner, Ilitch went from miser to saint. What changed? Strategic moves to properly build a team and bring in free agent talent after a new ballpark was built. It’s a clear case of a ballpark not being the panacea, but rather the foundation upon which a competitive team can be built, rebuilt, and sustained.

“They had an old ballpark in Tiger Stadium that was self-limiting in terms of attendance and revenue. There would be a Catch-22 to Ilitch’s early years: Until he got a new ballpark, he could not subsidize big contracts. Once he got a new ballpark, he was stuck with a bad team and heavy debt.

The combination punch was a haymaker, at least in the early years after Comerica Park opened in 2000.

But by late 2003, after the team had bottomed out, Ilitch made a series of Red Wings-caliber moves.

He expanded payroll at the same time a new front office was about to chart an upward plan in strategies that, coupled with investments in Rodriguez, Ordonez, etc., fueled a baseball revival in Detroit.

Once the stimulus package was in place, team fortunes — and revenues — soared.”

  • The Marlins are laying down grass at their 97%-complete ballpark, and they plan to grow it long to support an aggressive running team.
  • A San Francisco-based hedge fund manager, Christopher Hansen, is aiming to buy the Sacramento Kings and move them to his hometown, Seattle, where he and city leaders are working on a new arena deal. Two reports are in from the Sacramento Bee and the Seattle Times.
  • Yet another plan to replace the Metrodome is being “fast-tracked” through the Minnesota legislature. The plan would require playing as few as two games at the University of Minnesota’s TCF Bank Stadium after the Metrodome was torn down and while the new stadium was being built.
  • Did you know that Reno-Tahoe is putting together a bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics? A group has formed to explore a possible bid. Reno-Tahoe may be competing with Denver for the honor of representing the US for the 2022 games. Denver would seem to have the advantage in terms of facilities, though the distance between Denver and the region’s best ski resorts in Vail/Beaver Creek and Breckenridge is pretty long (though that didn’t stop Vancouver, whose 2-hour trip to Whistler was even longer). Preliminary cost estimates for the bids are around $1.5 billion, which would be less than Vancouver’s 2010 effort.
  • For some unknown reason, secondary ticket prices for today’s Super Bowl are down 50% compared to last year, even though the game is being played in a smaller venue.
  • The Nats are trying out a “Take Back the Park” campaign, in which they are pre-selling tickets to a single April series between the Nats and Phillies. The catch? They’re only selling to buyers with DC/VA/MD addresses, verified via credit card records. The Phillies, whose own ballpark is frequently sold out, often have fans take the 2.5-hour trip down I-95 or Amtrak to the District to catch their team drub (maybe not for much longer) the Nats.

That’s all I got. Enjoy the game.

02.01.12
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Nothing from nothing

First, a hat tip to two great legends who left the world much too soon.

If you haven’t done it already, read Nina Thorsen’s KQED interview with the Trib’s Oakland reporter Angela Woodall. Then read Ray Ratto quick opinion piece at CSN Bay Area.

Then sit back and consider what happened. If you’re struggling to come up with anything to describe it, you’re not alone. Because nothing actually happened. No forward progress, all spin, posturing, and gesticulation. Oakland fakes like it’s doing something, then shrugs its shoulders when nothing happens. MLB says nothing and does roughly the same. San Jose tries to do something and is blocked by MLB and the Giants.

I’m going to follow the Coliseum City project because it’s my duty. As long as the City of Oakland and Alameda County make plans for it to any degree, it’s worth covering. I don’t think it has legs. I’ll explain why:

  • Unless there’s a public financing component, a Coliseum ballpark will have a very difficult time paying for itself.
  • MLB wanted a downtown, waterfront site for an A’s ballpark. The Coliseum fits neither criteria.
  • The “City” part of Coliseum City will require its own large public investment. It is by design its own redevelopment district. Oakland will try to leverage existing and future TOD (transit oriented development) grants to help developers, but it’s a pittance compared to the overal cost (<5%). For instance, a 4-star, 800-room, full service hotel would cost $160 million to build, based on a $200k per room construction cost. That leaves out the other retail and commercial development costs. How much of that will the city/county have to subsidize to lure a developer?
  • The Raiders appear to be entirely site-agnostic in their search for a new stadium.
  • The chance that the NFL will award two $150 million G-4 loans to the Bay Area teams instead of spreading the love around to LA, Buffalo, and Minnesota is slim at best.
  • The Warriors are going to play Oakland and San Francisco off each other to get the best possible deal.

With so much uncertainty and so many variables, who is going to take the lead and make that heavy first investment? Private developers won’t do it unless the teams are committed first as the anchors. Teams won’t do it unless they can get something to help them pay for their new venues or give them revenue down the line. That’s the very least they should get considering the amount of construction upheaval that the project would create. The city and county can only act as facilitators. They don’t have the money to shoulder much of the development cost.

Ratto indicates that Oakland is actually playing for the Warriors and Raiders at this point, with the A’s practically out the door. That’s pretty much what I’ve been saying for years. Sadly, Oakland would be best served trying to make the best play possible for only one of its tenants. Otherwise, it might half-ass the efforts for both. Based on what we’ve seen coming out of Oakland so far, it’s quite good at half-assing. Or in the A’s case, no-assing.

01.30.12
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Wolff: 2016 more realistic

In a session with the print/broadcast media yesterday (before the blogger session), Lew Wolff suggested that 2016 would be a more realistic date for Cisco Field to open due to the permitting process. To understand why this might be the case, it’s best to look at what’s happening with the Earthquakes stadium project, only two miles northwest of downtown San Jose.

Nearly a year ago the Quakes got a demolition permit for the Airport West/FMC plant site. A large industrial building had to be torn down and the ground had to be graded for the eventual construction. A soft groundbreaking ceremony was held, after which the demo took three months. Now it’s the end of a January 2012 and the actual building permit has yet to be granted, thanks in large part to objections by a neighborhood group near the stadium site. San Jose’s Planning Commission will have a hearing on February 22, at which point all grievances and objections should be aired in public. If you read this list of items to discuss regarding the project, you’ll see that it is on par with what has been (and would continue to be) discussed for Cisco Field.

If slipping to 2016 is real it brings up one critical issue for the franchise in that the “2014 situation” stretches out to 2014-15. Either a two year lease  (maybe with an option year just in case) would have to be negotiated with the Coliseum Authority or a two-year temporary home would have to be found, the latter seeming less likely. There may also be an inside baseball reason to slip a year: if MLB and Commissioner Bud Selig (thanks for waiting) has a compensation plan worked out that is too costly for the A’s and/or the other owners to swallow, allowing one less overlap year between the remaining mortgage on AT&T Park and the opening of Cisco Field may be more palatable. To me this is one of the more frustrating aspects of making such a deal. As I was pointing out to Lone Stranger yesterday, high eight figures or more in compensation is a big deal for anyone, including a billionaire who owns a franchise. I get that. Big picture, $75 million is only 1% of MLB’s annual revenue. Stretched out over three years, it becomes 0.3%. That amount shouldn’t cause extended bellyaching. It should be manageable.

01.23.12
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News for 1/23/12

As usual, we’re in a quiet period leaving the January winter meetings and a month before pitchers and catchers report. At least we have FanFest coming up this weekend. Speaking of FanFest, if folks would like to meetup at FanFest, I think we can meet just inside whichever entrance they use, probably the Plaza Club entrance (lower) or East entrance (upper). I’d love to meet at a great restaurant or bar within walking distance, but… you know the problem there.

Now the news:

  • The Merc’s Tracy Seipel has a roundup of effect the shuttering of redevelopment will have on numerous South Bay redevelopment agencies, including San Jose’s. As has been written previously, SJRA has been winding down over the last year or so, making the shutdown less painful and abrupt than it is for other cities, many of whom are trying to extend the deadline from February 1 to April 15. While San Jose remains in an good position with regard to getting its planning and preparation together on a ballpark, its ability to acquire additional land for the ballpark is gone, leaving A’s ownership to take care of the rest.
  • Also in the Merc, columnist Scott Herhold makes the political calculation that if San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed continues to be aggressive if pushing for a pension reform referendum, he may find a lot of enemies of the ballpark in the form of public employee unions. Personally I know a few who are already opposed and are blaming the ballpark effort, so this is no joke. The simple fact of the matter is that with the unions providing givebacks and lower projected costs leading to a smaller budget deficit, the City is not in the kind of fiscal state of emergency that requires such drastic action on the Mayor’s part. Cooler heads should prevail.
  • St. Petersburg pols think a light rail system connecting their city with Tampa could help jumpstart attendance.
  • Apparently there is a Florida law which dictates that any stadia built with some amount of public funds requires those facilities to be used as homeless shelters when games aren’t being played. This includes huge football stadia, domes like Tropicana Field, even spring training ballparks. Now two legislators are trying to enforce that provision, which until now has remained dormant.
  • Chron’s Leah Garchik has an entertaining account of 49er fans being stuck on a bus in gridlock for three hours even though it was only going within city limits.
  • Added 12:07 PM – Lawrence Berkeley Lab has picked the site for its second campus: Richmond. The land was already owned by UC, so LBL needed to be bowled over to pick a different site in Oakland, Alameda, or Emeryville. In the end, that apparently didn’t happen. Sites proposed by Oakland included the Zhone property across 880 from the Coliseum, and the Oak-to-Ninth site east of Jack London Square.
  • Added 8:30 PM – The City of Oakland released a proposal that would layoff only 105 full-time employees as part of the redevelopment shutdown. That figure would be slightly more than half of the 200 layoffs that were expected.
  • Added 11:35 PM – The Santa Clara County Registrar confirmed that the 4,500 signatures gathered in a petition effort for a new referendum were good. This sets up a situation where the City Council, which has been firmly pro-stadium, will probably reject the petition effort, setting up a court battle. The interesting new twist to this saga is that the current Mayor is Jamie Matthews, a staunch opponent of the stadium plan. Matthews, who replaced Pat Mahan (proponent) last year, was merely a dissenting vote on the Council when the original vote passed in June 2010. Matthews seems emboldened enough now to turn the stadium effort into a real war. Correction 1/25 9:00 PM – Councilmember Jamie McLeod is a dissenter, not Jamie Matthews, who has been a longtime supporter of the stadium plan.

More if/as it comes.

01.17.12
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News for 1/17/12

Today I did an TV interview on Get Real with Brian Stuckey, a show produced out of CreaTV San Jose. CreaTV is a non-profit to whom Comcast has farmed out all of their public access programming for much of the South Bay. The segment will air January 30 on Comcast channel 15 with a web stream simulcast, so my ugly mug won’t show up until then. I doubt anything will have fundamentally changed by then, but you never know.

On to the news.

  • Matier and Ross report that nothing official happened on the A’s-to-San Jose front. That’s true at least when it comes to making a decision or coming to a compromise plan. We set those expectations going into the owners meetings. Yet background work did occur, including the presentation to the executive committee and Selig’s statement that the A’s are now on the front burner. Write that off all you want, it’s movement that wasn’t happening six, nine, twelve months ago. Remember that as incalcitrant the Giants are, there’s always the threat of binding arbitration to force the Giants’ hand. Commissioner Selig won’t give San Jose a greenlight for a vote (for either MLB owners or the city referendum) unless the Giants drop their lawsuit, making the legal action the last real weapon in the Giants’ arsenal to block the A’s efforts.
  • While the Giants are doing everything possible to stop A’s ownership, they’re actively encouraging new arena deals. We all know about their overtures towards the Warriors. Yesterday, Larry Baer gave a pep talk to Sacramento civic leaders pushing for a new downtown Kings arena. Baer said that after four defeats at the ballot box, the effort to get a ballpark going was “worth the fight.” I imagine that Lew Wolff feels the exact same way, Larry.

“It can be done, don’t give up,” Baer said. “You must persevere, you must exercise patience, you must have strong leadership in the private and public sector.”

When a man’s right, he’s right.

  • While the Oakland-only crowd was eager to jump on a graf in the M&R report, they buried the lead: Thanks to the death of redevelopment, the City of Oakland will have to cut 200 jobs and hand out 1,500 pink slips. The Mayor and City Council may also have to take huge cuts in pay on top of cuts already taken last year. How does this affect San Jose? Not that much, since as of the end of 2011 there were only about 10-12 people left in SJRA, with budget cuts and changes already enacted. Not that San Jose actually anticipated the change. SJRA’s fiscal issues forced it shut down early.
  • Less than three months from the opening of the Marlins Ballpark in Miami, and there’s no solution for funding transit options that can bring fans from downtown or the nearest Metrorail (BART-like) station.
  • The Cubs are replacing their right field bleacher section with a Green Monster Seats-style party deck, fronted by one of those new-fangled LED scoreboards.
  • Santa Clara’s City Attorney declared a petition effort by 49er stadium opponents illegal. That doesn’t mean the opponents can’t sue. We’ll see if they have the resources to sue for the right. We’ve seen this happen before.

On a lighter note – since Jeffrey and I will both be at FanFest, would any readers like to do a meetup? Not exactly sure of where we could do it, we can talk through the details.

01.15.12
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Somebody needs to fix the LGO website

Update 8:54 PM – Doug Boxer sent me a note saying that the Let’s Go Oakland website is now back up properly with the graphics and style sheets in tow. Apparently some servers were moved recently and… you know what can happen when you move servers.

Friday while I was doing some site maintenance, I did my occasional check of the links in the sidebar. When I clicked on the Let’s Go Oakland website I saw this:

Something's missing here.

What happened to the colorful background graphic? The Facebook link? The petition form still seems to work, so it’s not as if the site is broken. I don’t get it. Can someone explain what happened?

01.14.12
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The San Diego problem

I frequently look to San Diego for inspiration, whether for the weather, the beer, my brother’s wonderful Rottweiler, Jojo, or major league baseball. No, I’m not saying that the Padres are baseball’s model franchise. Instead, San Diego – the market – is a good comparison to the way the A’s are situated in the Bay Area. Consider the following:

  • With a population of 3 million, San Diego is slightly larger than the East Bay’s population.
  • The gross metropolitan product (GMP) of San Diego is slightly larger than that of the South Bay. (The East Bay is considered part of the San Francisco region from a Census perspective).
  • San Diego has a broad economy, from the military and government services to healthcare to technology.

San Diego will never be able to have a large share of the Southern California television and radio market because of the presence of the two Los Angeles teams. That hasn’t stopped the team from inking a 20-year TV deal with Fox Sports, worth $25-30 million per year. It pales in comparison to the Angels’ new deal and the upcoming Dodgers’ deal, but it’s still a major improvement over the $15 million per year the Padres were getting from broadcast station Cox-4. The deal starts in April.

Of course, this is MLB, where any snag that can be hit will be hit. Commissioner Bud Selig tabled the sale of the Pads from John Moores to Jeff Moorad as other owners raised numerous questions about financing that weren’t satisfactorily answered. Both Selig and Moorad say the snag won’t jeopardize the sale. It sounds like Moorad will take Jim Crane’s recently vacated hot seat, as the sale gets dragged on for several more weeks or months while outgoing majority owner John Moores stews.

According to this summary from Gaslamp Ball, Moorad has all of his money lined up, including the last $100 million of cash in escrow. That’s somewhat impressive, given that Moorad was given an unusual five-year phase-in plan to acquire all of the team. Moorad sold his minority stake in the Diamondbacks, got Bob Piccinini and others (many of whom are Modesto based) in a 12-member investor group, and seemingly got the money three years ahead of schedule. Yet there remain questions about what debt instruments Moorad used to raise the capital, and perhaps additional questions about where some of that TV money is going to go when the Padres start getting paid (some of it may go to pay down debt instead of the team). All of this harkens back to the McCourt debacle, where Frank kept borrowing against the team and related properties to fund an extravagant lifestyle for him and his ex-wife. With new debt rules in places thanks to the new CBA, Moorad’s group may be Exhibit A in ensuring that teams, especially mid-markets, stay true.

A decade ago, Piccinini-Dolich group experienced similar troubles when trying to buy the A’s. They brought in numerous new partners over several months, trying to appease Selig and the owners. Whether you believe they were shafted or there were lingering unanswered questions about how the group would finance and run the team, their bid was denied. Though it’s interesting to consider for a moment that with the makeup of the Padres’ investor group and Moorad’s place as the managing partner, it’s not hard to see that had things turned out differently, Moorad might be the A’s owner now, perhaps phasing out Dolich over time. Would the group have been so steadfast to stay in Oakland, or would Piccinini have become a Ken Hofmann-like weak supporter of the East Bay? Would Moorad, smelling the money in the South Bay, have gotten his agent juices flowing again and pushed for San Jose? We’ll never know. If you want to see how the Piccinini group would’ve operated the A’s with limited resources (like those in San Diego), all you need to do is see what Moorad does in the future with the Padres.