Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal just posted their interview with Wolff that appeared in the April 7 print edition. Lots of non-answers to the questions that were posed. At some point these interviews will start to look like the lecture scenes in “Real Genius”.

So my eyes weren’t deceiving me when San Jose mayoral candidate Michael Mulcahy appeared next to Lew Wolff in the first row on Tuesday. The Merc revealed that Mulcahy’s cousins, John and Jason DiNapoli, are in fact part of the A’s ownership group.

(pause to allow this to sink in)

Each adult member of the immediate Wolff family (that’s five if you’re counting) has given $500 to the Mulcahy campaign. You may remember my December post in which I mentioned Wolff selling a portion of downtown San Jose’s Park Center Plaza to a group headed by two other DiNapolis. Naturally, the parking garage that’s part of that block next to Hwy 87 has a Mulcahy banner hanging from the roof.

What’s more interesting is the portion of the block that Wolff kept. In the southwest corner, across the street from the Adobe headquarters, is a rather nondescript, low-slung building with a sizable amount of surface parking. According to the Santa Clara County Registrar, this parcel is owned by a firm fronted by Wolff. Until recently the building held San Jose’s first charter school, Downtown College Prep. In December, DCP moved into a more campus-like facility along the Alameda, west of downtown. The building found a new tenant quickly – another Latino-focused charter school called Escuela Popular. Unless Wolff is interested in allowing nonprofits to keep using an underutilized property in perpetuity, it’s likely that the building will eventually be replaced. One of the biggest concerns San Jose residents have regarding the ballpark concept is the lack of parking, at the very least in relation to the requirements a new ballpark would entail. The 2-acre parcel could be extremely valuable at some point in the future. Wolff could build a 1,000-space parking garage (with Redevelopment’s financial help, of course) there to handle the increased demand should a ballpark be built there. Or he could do a swap with Adobe, who’s gunning for the SJWC property across the river/87. Or if he’s bidding on the SJWC parcel and gets it, the school parcel could be a sort of gateway to the ballpark village. Housing may not be doable because of the SJC flight path overhead, but there probably aren’t too many limitations on what could be done in terms of commercial use.

Going back to the DiNapoli-Mulcahy links, it’s pretty obvious now that any talk of moving the A’s out of state would have to come after all Bay Area opportunities are exhausted. With the combination of San Francisco interests (Fisher) and South Bay interests (Wolff-DiNapoli), it would appear that San Jose will have something to say about the A’s future, whether by bringing the A’s to San Jose or by pledging its support for Fremont.

Today’s Tracy Press has an article on the A’s ongoing talks with Fremont and Cisco. Quotes come from Fremont city manager Fred Diaz, who appears to be up to his eyeballs in negotiation work.

The deal is still very much in the talking stage, and that places Fred Diaz, Fremont’s city manager and Tracy’s former city manager, right in the middle of the conversations.

“Everything is very positive right now,” Diaz told me over the phone this week. “I’ve met with Lew Wolff (the A’s owner) a number of times and more often with his son, Keith. They are very serious about this.”

…

Diaz said negotiations between Wolff and Cisco are nearing the final stages.

“Figuring out naming rights for the stadium is one of the last unresolved issues,” he said.

I had heard that Wolff already had a naming rights sponsor in mind when he entered these talks. Perhaps things have changed now that Cisco is officially in the picture. The San Jose-based networking firm already has a heavy advertising presence in the college basketball TV and pro football markets. The naming rights market has gotten sophisticated enough that much more than just the stadium can be sponsored. Club seating sections, lounges, and other architectural elements can all have a corporate name attached, as seen by Comerica’s recently inked deal with HP Pavilion.

Good links:

• A great technical document describing the noise problem for the University of Minnesota’s planned football stadium is available. It contains an explanation of the impact of concert noise, which the San Jose Draft EIR has basically glossed over. I have yet to find anything that properly explains the impact of the inversion layer on sound, especially in the warm months. For those that wonder why I’m focusing on the noise issue so much – it’s because any Bay Area location will probably have a huge environmental noise impact on surrounding neighborhoods. This is true whether it’s in Oakland, Fremont, or San Jose.
• Marc Normandin’s Beyond the Box Score blog has a nice interview with economist Andrew Zimbalist, who recently penned a book that I have purchased but haven’t had a chance to read: In The Best Interests of Baseball: The Revolutionary Reign of Bud Selig.
• On the heels of the opening of Busch Stadium III is a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article about the Ballpark Village concept that is going up alongside the ballpark. Cleveland State economist Mark Rosentraub, who like Zimbalist has written extensively on the problems with publicly-financed sports venues, extends some hope that a properly planned development can work for St. Louis in a better way than other stadium-based resurgence projects in other cities. Incidentally, I don’t count San Diego and San Francisco as good for comparison, since for both of those cities it’s generally thought that their ballparks are but one factor in causing accelerated development, in conjunction with soaring land costs and other unrelated encroaching development.

Next week I’ll be attending two mayoral debates/forums. San Jose’s next event will be on Monday, April 10, 7 p.m. at the San Jose Stage Company (490 S. First St., San Jose). The forum’s theme is Creativity & The Arts, and it’s sponsored by a number of arts-related organizations including 1stAct. Oakland’s next event is on Thursday, April 13, from 6-8 p.m. at the Oakland Museum’s James Moore Theatre. The forum is sponsored by the Marcus Foster Educational Institute and the League of Women Voters.

China Basin noise data gathering happens on Wednesday.

The measurements made last night will provide a baseline for measurements I’ll make outside the Coliseum, China Basin, and other ballparks. The decibel (dB) scale is logarithmic like the Richter scale, so 70 dB can be interpreted as twice as loud as 60 dB. (There’s a good primer on sound and noise propagation at quietsolution.com.) Last night I measured crowd noise in the bowl at three different points: Section 137 of the LF bleachers, the concourse behind Section 107, and the 4th row of Section 203. I don’t have a very sophisticated sound level meter that has real time logging or analysis capabilities, so take these measurements with a decent margin of error (± 3 dB) and several grains of salt. I used “A-weighting” for the measurements.
The ambient crowd noise in the seating bowl was in the 70-75 dB range when the crowd was idle. Drums and chants brought the noise up 5-8 dB. Between innings, the PA caused the range to be 75-82 dB. Compare that to the interior of a BART train (60 dB stopped/71 dB moving).

Readings from the bleachers (first three innings):

• Giambi intro/BALCO chant: 92 dB
• Giambi groundout to 1B: 99 dB
• Matsui HR to RF: 96 dB spike, 92 dB roar
• “Let Go ___” chant: 90 dB
• First 2-2 pitch to Sheffield: 90 dB
• Sheffield HR: 95 dB

Concourse behind 107, where a group of shrill young girls (A’s fans) were chanting back-and-forth with another group of slightly less shrill young boys (Yankees fans).

• Jeter drop/error: 101 dB
• Bradley single, 2 RBI: 104 dB
• Payton single: 104 dB
• “Let’s Go Oakland” chant: 96 dB
• Kendall beats out DP: 102 dB
• Bradley walks, scoring Ellis: 107 dB
• “Yankees Suck” chant: 95 dB
• Waiting in line for dollar dogs: 82-84 dB

Section 203. After the Scutaro single, many Yankees fans departed. The Thomas double begat a mass exodus. The readings:

• Damon grounds out to Duke: 92 dB
• “Take me out to the ballgame”: 82 dB throughout, 88 dB climax
• A-Rod K’s: 94 dB
• Giambi intro: 83 dB
• Giambi flies out: 93 dB
• Sharks highlight on DiamondVision: 91 dB
• Bradley triple: 99 dB
• Cano error, Payton safe: 104 dB
• Kendall single: 98 dB
• Scutaro RBI single: 101 dB
• Thomas double, 2 RBI: 101 dB

Other readings taken elsewhere in the stadium:

• Concourse behind the bleachers: 82 dB
• Section 103 aisle during Dot Racing climax: 95 dB (proving that Dot Racing isn’t the most cheered event at A’s games)
• BART bridge almost underneath southbound tracks before the game: 88 dB
• BART bridge before game, middle: 75 dB
• Standing platform in RF near flags, end of game: 89 dB
• BART bridge after game near saxophone player but not while he’s playing: 67 dB
• When the sax guy is playing (I really should ask him to play “Take the A Train” more often): 77 dB

It’s important to note that very few of these “events” lasted for more than 2-3 seconds. There was a slight trickle of people leaving as early as 9:00 p.m. Roughly half the crowd was left at the end.

I’ll make the next measurements in the Giants-Astros series next week, on the promenade outside the ballpark and McCovey Point (the little park across Mission Creek from the stadium). These will be important because unlike the current Coliseum, China Basin is an open design that doesn’t trap or absorb noise as well as the Coliseum.

Update: This post just got a mention in the SFGate “A’s Drumbeat” blog. Sweet!

Now that the first three games are in the books, it’s time to do a comparison between the new, smaller Coliseum and last year’s larger model. Having the Yankees series at the beginning of the year creates a disadvantage for the A’s because Opening Day usually brings in 40,000+, so to have a Yankees game on Opening Day effectively eliminates one potentially high attendance date from the schedule. The Coliseum’s stated capacity this year is 34,077 plus 1,000 or so standing room admissions. Last year the capacity was 48,219.

First, let’s look at the first series this year vs. the first series last year:

• 2006 (vs. NYY): 35,077 / 31,284 / 30,165. Total: 96,526. Average: 32,175 (94.4% of capacity)
• 2005 (vs. TOR): 44,815 / 10,106 / 15,860. Total: 70,781. Average: 23,594 (48.9% of capacity)

The drop-off in 2005, as noted by local media at the time, was precipitous to say the least. A small dropoff has occurred this year, though it really amounts to 6-7%. That should at least get the press off the A’s backs for now. The next homestand against Texas and Detroit will paint a more realistic picture. Since the first series was against the Yankees, let’s look at how May 2005’s Yankees series stacks up against the last three days:

• 2006 (vs. NYY): 35,077 / 31,284 / 30,165. Total: 96,526. Average: 32,175 (94.4% of capacity)
• 2005 (vs. NYY): 38,636 / 41,180 / 37,237. Total: 117,053. Average: 39,018 (80.9% of capacity)

This puts the A’s over 8,000 ahead of last year’s pace but almost 7,000 behind last season’s Yankees series. Those that decried the third deck closure referred to reduced capacity as reduced revenue opportunity. However, the new pricing tier structure appears to be meant to establish two things: a greater amount of revenue per ticket sold, and a less elastic demand curve for A’s tickets. The first goal will be reached by default simply through the removal of 10,000 $9 seats per game, many of which turned into $1 seats on Wednesdays. There’s too small a sample size at this point to know if the second goal has been reached, but I would expect that the last year’s game-over-game standard deviation, 10,511, could be cut in half with these changes.

I didn’t attend Tuesday’s game, but Wednesday’s game showed how effective the structure has been so far. Most of the empty seats were in the furthest reaches of the Plaza and Field levels, along with hundreds of Plaza Bleacher seats. That’s exactly what the team wants on a regular basis. The removal of the third deck from inventory was not about staffing or security concerns. Excess inventory was a factor in creating the perception of reduced value – not just of any A’s ticket, but of all pricing tiers as well. Once pricing tiers and their value are well-established, demand should rise and that terrible standard deviation figure should drop, perhaps as much as 50%. That should, in turn, create a stable fanbase to which the A’s and their sponsors can market.

Of course, this completely ignores on-field performance. That’s what it’s supposed to do, because records can vary from year to year. Some years teams make the playoffs. Then again, they could lose 100 games. Whatever the case, this fanbase stability is supposed to provide a built-in insulation against record fluctuations. Premium seats are often sold in 5-7 year increments with the promise of controlled price hikes. The same could be said for luxury suites. The hope is that should the A’s leave the Coliseum in the next 3-4 years, much of the fanbase will be precommitted to the new ballpark, wherever it is in the Bay Area.

When looking at the model from a distance, it bears a kinship with the “Moneyball” philosophy. It’s about identifying market inefficiencies and exploiting them whenever possible. If basic microeconomic ideas can be applied successfully to the running of the baseball side of a franchise, it only makes sense that they also be properly applied to the place they were developed in the first place: the business side.

Coming tomorrow: Crowd noise measurements

The drama over Kansas City pro sports futures may have finally ended peacefully as voters approved a sales tax hike to fund $575 million of upgrades to Kauffman Stadium (Royals) and Arrowhead Stadium (Chiefs). The Royals and Chiefs had different problems. Middling attendance and small market size hurt the Royals. The Chiefs, on the other hand, have had 14 consecutive years of sellouts and a much more rabid fanbase, yet are limited by their lack of premium seating and facilities. After the talk over a Downtown KC ballpark finally died down last year, the two teams (and leagues) put together a large package of improvements that was broken down into two separate ballot items: the stadium upgrades (approved), and a huge rolling roof that could cover either stadium (rejected).

Pro-stadium groups clearly followed the “new digs” playbook to get the deal done. It’s equal parts hope, fear, and subterfuge. Here’s a recap of how it got done:

1. Promote fear over the team(s) leaving. Not that Chiefs would ever leave, but fear motivates. A most telling quote came from Steve Glorioso, one of the campaign’s strategists: “I think the campaign struck the right balance between keeping the teams and the subtle threat that they might leave.” It also doesn’t hurt to point out the economic impact losing one or more teams would have on the local economy.
2. Get media support. The Kansas City Star (a Knight-Ridder publication) came out in favor of the project two days prior to the election.
3. Break out the celebs and memories. Royals great George Brett and some current Chiefs players were out in public hawking the paper – the same paper that supported the initiative. The campaign didn’t hesitate to evoke memories of past Royals/Chiefs glory days.
4. If you have to have a vote, don’t have it in November. Putting ballot measures like these on a spring or primary ballot tends to make for better results since supportive fans may be more likely to vote than those who simply look at the ballot as limited and otherwise not worthy of their time. This time the stadium package brought more voters than expected out of the woodwork.
5. Outspend the opposition. The pro-stadium group spent $1.55 million on their campaign. The anti-stadium group spent $501. That’s well over a 3,000-to-1 ratio.

Now you know. And knowing is half the battle. You may see some portion of this strategy used for an A’s, 49ers, or Raiders stadium in the next year or two.

Just after Rich Harden got out of a first inning jam by blowing away Jason Giambi with a 98 mph heater, a shot was shown of the seats behind the A’s dugout. Lew Wolff was there, as would be expected. But who was that young guy seated next to Wolff? It was none other than San Jose mayoral candidate Michael Mulcahy. Mulcahy also happens to be part of Baseball San Jose and is a scion of the influential DiNapoli family – the same DiNapoli family that has done business with Wolff for years. I wonder what they were talking about…

One of the first steps on a long road to a Fremont ballpark was made on Monday as Lew Wolff, presumably coming from his daughter’s residence in Los Gatos, stopped in Fremont to meet with members of the city council and city manager Fred Diaz. Diaz has been responsible for much of the policy-related work that has gotten Fremont to this point.

I didn’t notice any significant changes at the Coliseum last night, but there were a few minor things that popped out:

• There are now signs that separate the gate/security line and the traffic headed towards the will call booth.
• Some plasma screens were scattered around the field concourse. The panels only showed ads. Anyone who wanted replays or game video needed to look at an older tube TV.
• One of the souls in the always lively left field bleachers posted a sign that said “IF U BUILD IN FREMONT WE WILL NOT COME”. Or at least that’s what I think it said. It was impossible to see from section 123, where I was sitting. I had to walk halfway to the BBQ Terrace to see it clearly, and I have pretty good vision. Guys, I know that the purpose is to get the sign on TV, but you’re trying to sell the idea to fans in the stands too. Make a bigger sign.
• I loved the Bill King tribute. If they could only make the sign above the broadcast booth permanent.

Tomorrow I do noise measurements at the Coliseum.

Good pictures from the one day with decent weather in a while.

First up is a wide shot from the northwest corner of the site. Mission Peak is the mountain on the left covered in shadow.

Then we have a closeup that’s more representative of how close and tall the mountains are to human eyes.

This next photo was taken from the southeast corner of the site away towards the mountain range. The fence in the foreground represents the boundary between the buildable land and the protected marsh.

Here’s a view of the fence running the opposite direction towards the west/Bay.

The protected area, with the causeway that runs over the land, allowing for uninterrupted tidal flow.

This picture was taken on the causeway section of Cushing Parkway, looking northwest on the way to Pacific Commons. The road is four lanes wide with ample space for bike lanes and sidewalks on both sides. Parking is not allowed anywhere on Cushing Parkway. South of the causeway, it becomes a six-lane road. The road conveniently terminates at its south end at an intersection with Fremont Boulevard, where Cushing Parkway becomes an on-ramp for I-880 South. Northbound drivers can make a left at the intersection and drive an extra 1/4 mile before reaching the on-ramp for I-880 North.

The ecosystem in the area continues to thrive despite encroaching development. The last shot I got was the next one. If you can guess what that is in the middle of the picture, you may be able to pick up on the irony of it.

And now for the most speculative article yet:

At the same time, Wolff held out little hope of the team remaining in Oakland.

“It’s a built-up area, and I can’t ask them to do the impossible,” Wolff said, adding that even “if they came up with a $400 million check, we still don’t have a place to play.”

Then comes the obligatory Las Vegas reference:

Others, however, think the Fremont play is just another step toward the team leaving the area.

“He has to show he’s tried to make a ‘go’ in Oakland. Then he makes an effort to make a ‘go’ in Fremont,” said one Major League Baseball insider. “Then Wolff can go to the commissioner and say, ‘OK — now let me go.’ ”

The inside betting is that Las Vegas is high on the A’s list. But Wolff says his old fraternity brother, Commissioner Bud Selig, isn’t keen on putting a team in a city that allows sports book betting.

No one can ever deny that Vegas will be a player as long as they don’t have a team. It’s also in Wolff’s best interests to have as many open options as possible. That includes Vegas, which MLB supposedly has taken off the table for the Florida Marlins. Has Sin City been set aside specifically for the A’s should it get to that point?

In January I wrote a treatise on Vegas and the challenges it faces. What do you think is more likely? That the gaming industry will accede to MLB’s desire to take baseball out of the sports books? Or that MLB will let a team operate in Vegas with the sports books intact? Or that Fremont will be able to get an efficient mass transit solution for its site? Or that somehow San Jose will magically open up for the A’s due to a MLB in-house negotiation?

That’s why I can’t handicap any city’s chances. Those questions are hard enough to answer. They’re even harder to quantify.