Rumors about the A’s-Cisco partnership and the team’s possible move to Fremont took less than 48 hours to be overshadowed by another team’s announcement: The 49ers were giving up on San Francisco and were leaning towards a Santa Clara home near their training facilities and Great America.

49ers owner John York and his staff hastily arranged a press conference for Thursday at the Santa Clara Hilton. During the press conference, York proceeded to bore the media to tears with explanations about why the Niners’ plans for a huge football-retail-housing complex at Candlestick Point wouldn’t work. He even used a slide presentation, which went over like gangbusters as I was listening to his spiel on KNBR. Not surprisingly, many members of the media accepted York’s supposed trials and tribulations as a rationale for heading down the Peninsula. Shortly afterward, the media picked up on the fact that York failed to explain how the stadium was going to be financed.

Now that talks are back on with San Francisco, it’s unclear whether the Santa Clara announcement was real or merely a threat to SF pols. It’s probably a little of both, but elsewhere lies a third way for the Niners. And unlike the first two explanations, this one actually looks smart.

Wednesday also marked the opening of the A’s/Quakes South Bay office on the ground floor of the Fairmont San Jose. Lew Wolff was there to exhort the amassed soccer fans, who so far are ecstatic about having truly local ownership that wants to build a proper home for Earthquakes 4.0. Sites being considered include Diridon South, the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds, and SJSU South Campus near Spartan Stadium.

The dark horse candidate is Santa Clara. That site just happens to be the same one that the 49ers are targeting for their stadium.

• Is it possible for separate football and soccer venues to exist on that land? No. There isn’t enough land for both unless you want people to park in Sunnyvale.
• Is it possible for football and soccer to share a venue? No. A typical NFL stadium seats 60-65,000, has 100-200 luxury suites, and 5-10,000 club seats. A model MLS soccer specific stadium (SSS) holds only 20-25,000 and has a fraction of a NFL stadium’s suites and club seats. Wolff’s three-year option with MLS calls for a SSS to be built for the Quakes. A shared situation with the A’s or 49ers will not work, the Quakes have to be the marquee tenant.

I’ve heard that Wolff has had some pretty fruitful initial discussions with Santa Clara pols. For York, that’s bad news because the Plan B (Candlestick Point is Plan A) is Santa Clara. What happens when Plan B gets eliminated? You lose leverage, that’s what. On the other hand, Wolff has had well scoped Plans A, B, and C (which city you affix to A-C may be dictated by what you believe Wolff’s motives are) and has so far come out looking pretty clean. That just goes to show how despite the similar situations (difficult cities to get a stadium deal done) it’s all about execution. The main things going for York at this point are that his 49ers are a ton more valuable than the Quakes and the Niners (as long time residents) have a good relationship with Santa Clara. By making the announcement, York has effectively taken Santa Clara off the table for the Quakes indefinitely. It doesn’t matter at this point whether or not it can be paid for. As long as attention is focused on the Niners he doesn’t have to do anything else.

Where I come from they call that a cockblock. For once in your tenure as owner, Mr. York, well played. Well played indeed.

Fixation on BART has made it seem like the other transportation solution in the area, good old-fashioned rail, has been ignored. That’s easy to do since the Capitol Corridor and ACE systems are less than twenty years old and neither is as visible as BART in the East Bay. Trains can help fill the gap that not having BART creates, but only if it’s done in a smart way to maintains the convenience that BART riders enjoy.

Capitol Corridor is a commuter service that runs between Auburn/Sacramento and Oakland/San Jose. It was launched in 1991 and has grown impressively ever since. Capital improvements used to reduce congestion on the rails it shares with Union Pacific, Amtrak, and ACE have allowed CC to increase its schedule to 32 trains per weekday and 22 trains per Sat/Sun/Holiday. Despite the fact that CC has to share rails with other passenger and freight services, its on time performance is 85%. Compare that to BART, whose on time performance is 91% with much greater schedule frequency but also a completely separated guideway that it doesn’t (and can’t) share with anyone else.

11 Bay Area stations are along the Capitol Corridor, from Fairfield to San Jose. Union City’s station is being planned, though today’s report of funding problems for the Dumbarton Rail project makes Union City’s development less certain. The original Pacific Commons plan called for a station to be built at the end of Auto Mall Parkway, over one mile from the project development area. Should the “A’s Town” project move forward, formal discussions about the Pacific Commons station will commence. Keith Wolff has reportedly been in contact with Capitol Corridor (among multiple transit agencies) about the possibilities.

Here’s the aerial photo from last April showing the BART WSX extension, station, and routes from Warm Springs to Pacific Commons. Note the location of the ACE/Amtrak station.

Even though the station is unencumbered by a freeway or other obstacles, it’s still over a mile away from PC. This is because much of the land is either protected preserve or is earmarked for other uses, such as a public park next to the planned station. From here there are two options:

• Keep the station where it was originally planned. This will incur less capital cost, but the ongoing need for shuttles from the station to PC may cost more in the long run. By shuttle, I mean either buses or some form of rail transit.
• Add a short 3/4 mile, double-tracked rail spur that terminates within the project boundaries. Getting the fans right to the doorstep eliminates the need for a mode switch or transfer. This convenience this provides would go a long way towards convincing fans that rail is a preferable method of travel. Below is a close-up.

Having a separate terminal station has other advantages. It creates queueing areas for special event trains, so special A’s trains coming from either Sacramento or San Jose/Gilroy could end their routes at the station. Existing track can be freed up for use by regular service trains and unrelated uses such as freight. The cost of the station would be $10-25 million depending on how elaborate it is (multiple platforms, station buildout).

Since some of the preserve space would be affected by building the spur, other project land would have to be reclaimed as new preserve area. I’m guessing around 9-10 acres. Here’s another photo of the area that includes a train station overlay and a bus depot.

What about BART? As you can see from the table below, there are two existing stations from which serve both BART and CC. Richmond’s location at the end of a line makes it useless as a transfer station, so only the Coliseum station can function in that manner. Should the Union City station come online that’ll create three. If you’re worried about having BART and CC sync, the two groups should have incentive. As I wrote yesterday, BART faces a sizable loss in ridership without a good solution for A’s fans. This allows them to create a smooth, single transfer solution for many East Bay and San Francisco fans.

It also doesn’t hurt that BART runs Capitol Corridor on behalf of the CCJPA. Even more incentive to get them working together, no? And how’s this for impact: Should Capitol Corridor recover only 10% of those displaced BART riders I wrote about yesterday, CC’s ridership would go up about 10%.

I’d like to see Translink get into the solution, but I’m not holding my breath. CC conductors are going to use bar code scanners at some point in the future, might as well get them to read smart cards as well. Travel times for the BART and CC are comparable (CC slightly slower), and CC fares when applying multiride discounts are also comparable. Times shown include a 6 minute jaunt from an established Fremont BART or Amtrak station to Warm Springs or Pacific Commons, respectively. The key will be to make that transfer as painless as possible, and that’s the challenge. That’s where Translink comes in.

Tri-Valley fans aren’t served by Capitol Corridor. ACE goes to Dublin, Livermore, and out to Tracy and beyond, but let’s see how their service ramps up before we start looking to ACE as a solution. As it is now, ACE only runs 8 trains per day – only on weekdays.

One couple of housekeeping note first: The long dormant “Scoreboard” feature on the sidebar has been redone with a different question, “Does the outlet/media figure support the A’s-Pacific Commons ballpark plan?” The question and the associated reactions may change as details are revealed. I’ve linked the columns by Gwen Knapp, Ray Ratto, Carl Steward, Mark Purdy, and Dave Newhouse so far.

With all of the talk about not having BART to service the Pacific Commons site, I decided to look into this further. We all know that no BART will equate to some indeterminate loss of A’s fans, but their substitutes may end up being South Bay fans. That’s not something I can quantify at this point, but it’s a reasonable assumption.

What about the effect on BART? Unlike the A’s, there’s no easy substitution for BART if A’s fans don’t ride it. Some fans may take BART & MUNI to Giants games, but it’s most likely that BART will suffer a ridership loss. The question is: How big?

Let’s start with actual BART ridership. According to the 2005 Annual Report, BART’s fiscal year ridership was usually under 100 million one-way trips or “exits” as they call them. The average ticket price was around $2.50.

Using the 15-25% BART riders-as-attendees figure cited previously, I produced the table below. It uses a sliding scale in which with larger crowds, a higher percentage of fans use BART. The total attendees using BART was 528,750, which may be overestimating things a bit (it works out to 25% of all A’s fans) but for now we’ll go with it for the sake of argument. The following table shows how much A’s fan trips to the Coliseum factor into total BART ridership.

1% may not sound like much, but it’s actually disproportionately high compared to the actual effect the A’s have on the local economy, which is more in the neighborhood of less than 0.1% of the Bay Area’s Gross Regional Product. Credit goes to A’s fans who utilize BART so well. 1 million rides means that A’s-related BART usage is actually heavier than all of the annual activity on some low usage stations such as Castro Valley or San Bruno.

Let’s use the worst case scenario for BART, in which no Warm Springs extension is built. Fans who no longer use BART for A’s games simply wouldn’t use BART at all for baseball, not even for Giants games. That includes a shuttle scenario to Pacific Commons, which I personally don’t think will work when coming from the existing Fremont BART station because of its cost and limited use. If we assign a $3 value for each one-way trip, the lost revenue would come to over $3 million per year. For a public transit agency that has trouble making ends meet, $3 million in lost revenue is nothing to sneeze at. The only thing that helps BART is that they’re pretty heavily subsidized, so the hurt won’t be too bad. Still, it could mean job cuts, higher fares, or other ugly solutions to this market change.

Contrast this with the A’s situation. In the model below, those same BART riding fans would be split into two groups: those who would drive to Fremont, and those who would stay home. The split is an even 50-50. I haven’t done any surveys or seen any numbers to back this assertion, but it’s a reasonable starting point. The “$ per fan” figure comes from two sources: an average ticket price of $25 per game, and $10 of concessions. If that 50% that would still attend drives instead, you get roughly 1000 additional cars per game, whose parking revenue would offset the loss somewhat.

Obviously, the money the A’s would lose on paper dwarfs what BART would lose. However, there’s a big difference between the two in that the A’s have other sources of revenue (besides the parking) to offset this loss. The team’s also expected to perform well at the gate for at least the first two years (numerous sellouts) so the attendance/concessions revenue would be maxed out anyway. That two year stint (perhaps longer) may end up being the waiting period required before BART finally comes to Warm Springs.

As for BART, they’ll take a decent hit. It’s not even close to enough to justify the cost of building WSX by itself, but it could contribute to revised ridership numbers that could boost the cases for both the WSX and San Jose extensions (the current numbers are admittedly dubious). Alameda County Supervisor Scott Haggerty, who has championed the A’s-to-Fremont cause, is also a MTC commissioner who controls much of the regional transit money. He has the power to push funding in the right direction.

Tomorrow I’ll present a scenario in which BART would be used to the ballpark. Implemented correctly, there’s an opportunity to keep many of those lost BART riders and keep the costs low.

Update 11:27 p.m. – Trib reports that the Alameda County Board of Supervisors has approved the Coliseum lease extension, finalizing the A’s stay in Oakland through at least 2010.

Also, according to Chron the 49ers have given up on staying in San Francisco. Santa Clara may be next. I hope that the Yorks aren’t trying to game the city into giving them a big handout, because it’s not happening.

Update 10:07 p.m. – Chron’s Patrick Hoge has more details:

Unlike many stadiums surrounded by parking, this one would be swathed in shopping, Wasserman said. Ballpark patrons would park elsewhere and be shuttled in, he said.

Now that’s an unusual idea. If people coming on transit have to take a shuttle, why not have everyone? It’s baseball with the inconvenience of waiting for a bus to an airport long term parking lot.

Barry Witt has the scoop again: Cisco and the A’s have sealed their part of the deal. Among the highlights:

Wolff, who declined to speak to reporters today, told council members the development would be something like San Jose’s Santana Row — featuring condominiums stacked above street-level retail — with the major addition of a high-tech ballpark filled with Cisco-produced infrastructure.

The Santana Row comparison is a bit ironic since Wolff was a known critic of the plan when it was initially proposed in San Jose several years ago. A downtown advocate, he felt that Santana Row would effectively sink any chance for retail in downtown San Jose (which it did – restaurants and clubs are only half of the retail picture). Once Santana Row showed remarkable success, Wolff acknowledged it. Now it’s Wolff who will attempt to create something along that scale in Fremont.

In a previous comment thread, Bleacher Dave posed the idea that Fremont officials might be upset by having the initial press conference/presentation at Cisco’s San Jose headquarters than in Fremont. I don’t think this is a big deal at all. How else are Wolff and John Chambers going to dazzle the media if not in front of gigantic video screens at Cisco?

Tuesday’s midterm elections didn’t have any issues that directly affected the A’s, but some legislation passed that impacts the market enough to make ownership notice.

• In Sacramento, voters soundly defeated Measures Q & R, which would have raised and allocated money for a new Downtown Sac arena for the Kings. Over the last month, both items became doomed when the Kings pulled their support of the measures due to disagreements over deal terms, particularly parking agreements.
• Propositions 1A and 1B passed by their necessary margins, paving the way for needed transportation infrastructure improvements all over the state. The Bay Area could receive up to $4.5 billion of Prop 1B’s $19.9 billion total. $1.3 billion of the regional money will go towards mass transit, but let’s be realistic about what that means – $1.3 billion doesn’t go that far when considering the number of large projects out there. Some small but not insignificant amount will help with the BART Warm Springs extension and maybe even with planning for the San Jose extension, but the money can’t pay for everything.
• San Jose’s new mayor will be Democrat Chuck Reed. A fiscal conservative, Reed is not the go-to guy if anyone’s looking to facilitate a sweetheart deal for the A’s in downtown San Jose. Reed did vote for the ballpark EIR study and I came away from several meetings thinking the Reed would go with the downtown site if that’s all the A’s wanted, but as we now know from the larger scope of the A’s plans, the site itself won’t be enough.
• Proposition 90, the eminent domain compensation measure, was defeated. A similar measure passed in Oregon two years ago and resulted in billions of dollars of compensation claims against local and state governments. Prop 90 wouldn’t have been relevant in the Fremont Pacific Commons situation, but should that fail and the A’s look elsewhere, it could come to the forefront.

More on transportation later today.

Update (3:05 PM) – Paul T. Rosynsky and Chris De Benedetti report that the press conference could take place at Cisco headquarters in San Jose. And MLB spokesman Richard Levin chimed in on the city name issue:

“There are no rules on the books (regarding names),” said Richard Levin, spokesman for Major League Baseball. “It is something the commissioner would have to deal with.”

Cue the commish.

Update (2:48 PM) – Barry Witt reports that Lew Wolff will meet with Fremont City Council members this week to give them a sneak peek at the Pacific Commons development plans.

KCBS sports reporter and one-time fill-in radio play-by-play man Steve Bitker has learned that “the Oakland Athletics will soon announce plans to move the club to Fremont, and build a new stadium complex there.” In addition, MLB commish Bud Selig will fly in next week, probably to give it his blessing. Selig and the MLB office have been uncharacteristically quiet regarding the A’s efforts. That’s a sharp contrast from the Marlins’ situation, which appears to have MLB instead of the team negotiating directly with the pols.

With the expectation that Cisco officials will also be present, Fremont may be the place for the announcement. The forecast for November 14: Scattered showers. Apropos?

Bitker’s scoop is an interesting one. As a tenured Bay Area media guy and former A’s employee he’s got tons of access to local sports franchises, but he has “inside baseball” going the other way too. His wife, Alice Lai-Bitker, just happens to be Alameda County District 3 Supervisor.

In other news, the San Jose Earthquakes/Oakland A’s South Bay office will officially open this Wednesday, November 6. Check out Soccer Silicon Valley for more details.

Not much has been heard from the Vegas camp for several months. In SI writer Ian Thomsen’s Inside the NBA column, flamboyant mayor Oscar Goodman talks about Sin City’s prospects for a pro sports franchise, namely a NBA team such as the Kings. While commissioner David Stern’s stance on not allowing a team in Vegas until the city’s casinos take NBA games off the books hasn’t changed, Goodman will keep trying, starting with selling the experience of the sure-hit 2007 All Star Weekend.

What about baseball? I’ll let the following blurb speak for itself (quotes attributed to Goodman):

On Major League Baseball, which two years ago appeared to be the frontrunner to move a team to Las Vegas:

“It died. I spoke to (baseball commissioner Bud) Selig because the Marlins had come out to see me and I wanted to pursue that. They called me and they said that Selig didn’t want them talking to me. I called (the commissioner’s office) up and verified that, and I wasn’t about to make an enemy. I’ve had (NFL commissioner Paul) Tagliabue that I’ve had to contend with, so I didn’t want to make an enemy out of Selig too.”

So much for the Vegas conspiracy. Oooh, here’s one: Selig was really saying that in not allowing the Marlins to talk to Goodman, he’s reserving the A’s to pursue Vegas. R-i-i-i-ght.

Oakland’s City Council unanimously approved the A’s lease extension at the Coliseum. The Alameda County Board of Supervisors is next.

The Federal Transit Administration approved the Warm Springs BART extension’s environmental impact statement. According to the article, the project is $145 million short of its funding target. Rising costs may push that figure above $200 million. WSX is still not considered viable unless the San Jose extension is also approved. The approval will allow for right-of-way acquisition and power line rerouting.

Hennepin County (MN) is proceeding with eminent domain proceedings against existing landowners at the projected downtown Minneapolis ballpark site.

St. Louis and the Cards unveiled its vision of the Ballpark Village to be built next to the new Busch Stadium.

The A’s announced that CBS station KIFR-106.9 (Free FM) will be the FM flagship starting next season. Many had been rooting for this move for a while, especially because around this time last year KIFR boosted its signal from a paltry 3 kW to 80 kW. Before you start running around claiming the A’s are torching the blowtorch, keep in mind that AM signal properties are better for night coverage and KNBR’s status as a clear channel station puts it in an enviable position regardless of signal strength.

Still, this is a huge improvement since KIFR’s North Bay reach will be much better than what was coming out of the two Peninsula-based stations, KYCY-1550 and KNTS-1220. It remains to be seen how much CBS will stick with the youth-oriented format. Does this set the stage for a change to sports talk? Or youth-geared sports talk? Hopefully KIFR will be a better promotional vehicle than the A’s have had on radio the last few years.

There’s one nice little side benefit to having an FM station – Comcast digital cable carries it. Except, inexplicably, KIFR. At least that’s the case in the South Bay.

Last week I drove by Pacific Commons and went to Brandin Court, where a front company for Maritz-Wolff bought much of the cul-de-sac. I noticed that one of the buildings was vacant, so I decided to do a little research. The building’s address is 5070 Brandin Ct. (assessor’s map in PDF), and according to this listing it has over 53,000 square feet of space.

According to the listing the building is “Under New Ownership” and has “Exterior and Interior Renovations in Progress” even though I didn’t see any cars out front. It has an anonymously blah exterior, as would be expected of most Silicon Valley office parks. As a structure designed to hold both office and light industrial/manufacturing operations, much of the building does not have windows.

The Fremont office market is not hurting too badly at this point, so the owners should be able to find a tenant at some point if they haven’t already. If/when the land deal for the rest of Pacific Commons is done, there’s a particularly novel application just waiting if no tenant comes:

Use the building as a tentative site for a baseball museum.

Why not? Yes, ownership would undoubtedly lose money at first, but it’s an extremely good way to build a rapport with existing and future fans. I went to the Baseball as America exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California last year, and as impressed as I was with the collection, I also came away asking myself, “Why isn’t there a local baseball museum?” Sure, the A’s have been criminal for not adequately touting their history, but the Giants don’t have a museum either even though they’re constantly talking about their own history. In fact, not only is there no baseball museum in California, there’s nothing west of the Rockies. The Hispanic Heritage Baseball Museum had been trying to get a home in San Francisco since 2002 but little has come of their efforts (Citgo is working with the HoF on a Latin American traveling show). Are you as surprised as I am that no baseball museum exists nearby? The Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame is well-intentioned but its plaques and monuments are spread out all over the Bay Area.

In March it was reported that a baseball museum would be part of the A’s Pacific Commons development. That little heralded nugget may be the best part of the package because it would present the A’s a unique opportunity to finally acknowledge the franchise’s rich, 106-year history (38 years in Oakland) with something tactile and permanent. 5070 Brandin Court would of course be a temporary home until a proper museum could be built closer to the ballpark. In the meantime, the intervening years could be used for fundraising efforts, to gather collections, and to focus the scope of the museum properly. Consider the possible categories:

• A’s franchise history
• The old Pacific Coast League
• Bay Area baseball legends and notables
• WWII and its effect on baseball
• Broadcasting wing with nods to Bill King, Lon Simmons, Bill Rigney, et al
• How technology has changed baseball and how we experience baseball
• Sabremetrics
• The usual kids exhibit – “Physics of a curveball” and other topics
• Existing Cooperstown exhibits

If you visited Baseball as America you’ll see that some of these ideas were covered by the collection shown, so I’m not exactly covering new ground. But wouldn’t it be nice to have something permanent and at the same time more expansive? The only limitation is the amount of depth that the A’s want covered. Some intriguing issues:

• How is the steroids era treated?
• Is the museum A’s-only?
• Do the A’s attempt to work with the Giants?

The Rangers operate their “Legends of the Game” museum as an all-encompassing collection rather than one that trumpets the team’s history (admittedly, the Rangers/Senators history is not that rich). Having a museum open well before anything else would be a fantastic way to get people into the Pacific Commons area early. Not only would they see A’s tradition on display, but ownership could have a development sales office next door (if anyone’s interested in buying a condo). I’d be willing to help out (with the museum, that is).