Over the weekend I bought an $11 Field Level ticket via Tickets.com. A new delivery option this year is the FanPass, which allows fans to either use the electronic kiosks for will call or scan their credit cards at the gate. I showed my credit card after passing through security and a few seconds later I was given this:
Simple, convenient, easy. Good job, ticket services.
We’ve heard this one before. USA Today’s Bob Nightengale was on The Chris Townsend Show with guest host Brodie Brazil on Monday night. He indicated that something will happen in August, when the next owner’s meetings are slated to be held in Denver. Nightengale claims that if a vote isn’t held (Wolff has asked for one as a procedural matter), Bud Selig will rule on the matter. Nightengale noted that he has been wrong about this before (as have I), and at this point – 40 months into the debate – there’s little evidence to indicate that this will be resolved in short order.
The big admission of this apparent deadlock is that when asked about the situation during a press conference prior to the All Star Game, Selig replied that both teams still have numerous questions to answer. Seriously? At 40 months? Surely, the commissioner and his exploratory committee have had ample time to look at every option, look under every rock, comb every bit of the Bay Area landscape. Admittedly, there are plenty of questions for the contingent cities as to how they’ll complete the deals that will be necessary to host a new ballpark. Those issues aren’t under the Giants’ and A’s control, and they can’t see proper resolution until a decision on how to progress is made. Whichever way it goes, one team (and some city) is going to be upset. The longer this gets delayed, the more expensive the eventual solution becomes – whether it’s in Oakland, San Jose, or elsewhere.
Then again, why bother? It’s not as if the A’s matter to baseball. Inertia, thy name is Selig.
I snapped the picture below in the first inning. There was a decent walk-up crowd waiting in line for tickets at the booths and kiosks at the BART Plaza. I knew that the crowd would be less than 20,000, but I was hoping for a figure approaching 20k.
The final tally? 15,115.
Look, we can’t expect a bandwagon to appear when it doesn’t exist. We can hope that more A’s fans will come out of the woodwork. For various reasons legitimate and silly, they don’t come. Or do they?
15,115, as pathetic as that looks, is 20-30% better than Monday or Tuesday night crowds that came in April or May. You can’t say that it’s the weather because tonight much of the game was spent below 60 degrees. Regardless, it’s nothing to crow about. At least it doesn’t look like a crowd of 5,000 with just as many no-shows. The size of the walk-up crowd was encouraging. A bandwagon’s gotta start somewhere.
Here the green-and-gold heroes sit, winners of 9 of the last 10, only 1/2 game from the last playoff spot in the American League. It’s all very impressive for any number of reasons: young pitching, young sluggers becoming professional hitters, nearly every move made by the A’s front office paying off so far. Despite this, there’s a little hesitance going into this week’s six-game homestand, with two games against the West-leading Rangers and four against the East-frontrunning Yankees.
The Yankees series is always good for near-sellouts every game, and the Rangers bandwagon has been filling the Coliseum pretty well lately. But who cares about the other team’s fans? We should be filling up the stadium. Tuesday night’s game is, as usual, a free parking night. The A’s deserve a heroes’ welcome. The pitching is excellent even with Brandon McCarthy out. Numerous guys are hitting homers like it’s batting practice. The team has budding stars who are all young and under control, and the team is flat out fun to watch with no big money egos to ruin a fan’s enjoyment. We should have 20,000 fans showing up on Tuesday. I fear we won’t come close.
There will be people who cite their dislike of Lew Wolff, John Fisher, Billy Beane, or whatever’s convenient to not go. They’ll claim they were the biggest A’s fans during the Moneyball years, the Haas era, during BillyBall, or all the way back to Charlie Finley. Stop with the excuses, put your differences with ownership aside, and go to the games. The tickets are inexpensive. There’s no better weather to watch baseball than at the Coliseum in July/August. The team is pretty damned entertaining. Most importantly, this scrappy group of A’s consistently of mostly young guys and a mix of veterans notices when we show up. En masse. They don’t play in a vacuum, and as much as they appreciate the small-but-loyal crowd that shows up currently, they appreciate it even more when the place is packed. With A’s fans. All of the experts and columnists had this team buried in March. Personally, my expectations were low. This team deserves for us to buy tickets, supporting them, cheering them on with full voices, all of our energy, every breath. Whether the A’s are buyers or sellers or both doesn’t matter. We have a core to build on for years, and they’re not going anywhere for a while. That’s what matters. So enjoy it.
The A’s showed up this year. How about you?
…
Off the soapbox. The maximum possible attendance for this week is a little over 210,000. It would be unrealistic to predict that they’ll hit that target. But they could pull healthy crowds for the entire week. If the A’s average 22,000 for Texas and 32,000 for the Yankees, the total attendance for the homestand will be 172,000. Should they hit that mark, the team’s attendance in Oakland (not counting the Japan games) will surpass 1 million fans in 48 home dates. That’s five games ahead of last year’s pace and seven better than 2010. Can we hit that figure? I think we can. I’ll be there for the first three games of the homestand, before going on a weekend camping trip. Let’s do this.
Notes coming shortly.
The mayor’s message here is if Oakland or San Jose don’t work out, Sacramento would make a great Plan C.
Additional notes:
More as it comes.
Now word has come in from Lew Wolff via the Chronicle’s Susan Slusser: The A’s aren’t leaving the two-team Bay Area market.
Added 8:46 PM – West Sacramento Mayor Mike McGowan isn’t pleased with how Johnson and Think Big have handled this new exercise. McGowan was only notified Sunday night of the press conference. He also believes that Sacramento can’t support a MLB franchise.
Last night, Brandon Hicks hit what looked to be an opposite-field home run to the 362 mark in right, only to be robbed by the 15-foot high wall. Over the years, many a hitter has been robbed by the high walls in both power alleys. It was merely Hicks’s turn. Until most recently, the A’s have been a power-starved bunch, which when combined with the already pitcher-friendly dimensions of the Coliseum, has had many a fan and media member calling for changes to the field. CSN’s Casey Pratt, in particular, has had issues with the high wall. Last night he brought it up after Hicks’s double, and radio play-by-play guy Vince Cotroneo mentioned it in the postgame wrap. It didn’t matter that the issue was rendered moot once Jemile Weeks singled home Hicks, and Chris Carter’s blast in the 11th left no doubt about what a home run looks like.
Regardless of the outcome, there still remains a sense that the Coliseum’s deck is stacked too much in the direction of pitchers. You won’t find last night’s starter Tommy Milone complaining, that’s for sure. Then again, do you remember any M’s hitters reaching the warning track off Milone?
Pratt has long advocated that the high fence between the 362 and 388 marks in left and right should be taken down to the 8-foot height down the lines and in center. The high wall containing the out-of-town scoreboards could be kept intact, which makes sense since those are the most hitter-friendly parts of the park. I suggest going a step further by getting rid of the contrived “Jagged Edge” outfield fence design altogether, going with a fairly straight fence that lowers the alleys to eight feet and brings in the 367′ dimensions at the stairs in 10-15 feet. The out-of-town scoreboards would stay more-or-less intact.
The field would still play pitcher-friendly to fair, mostly because of the atmospheric conditions. Historically, the Coli hasn’t played as poorly as Petco, Safeco, or even AT&T. It may be Billy Beane’s desire to keep the ballpark geared towards pitching, since that’s been much easier to develop over the last several years. Yet it might make sense to change the dimensions to create a transition to a new ballpark, especially if the new place ends up with much more hitter-driven dimensions like Cisco Field. It’s easy to think that in the A’s current consecutive-games-with-a-HR streak, that power isn’t that hard to come by. Just remember the last two years of A’s squads. Power does come at a premium.
First we had Santa Clara County pulling $30 million in RDA funds back from the 49ers stadium project/Authority. Now we’ve got the flipside, as State Controller John Chiang has ruled that the County went too far in holding back $86.5 million in funds due to the City of San Jose.
The money came from collected property taxes and proceeds from the sale of numerous City-held properties. The money’s needed to service outstanding debt, which had already been downgraded to junk status by Fitch because of the holdup. The bond ratings should be restored to some degree, but the damage is done. The now-defunct SJRA’s successor agency oversight board is having its regular meeting on Thursday. I may attend it.
It’s a bit early to say what kind of effect this will have on either Cisco Field, 49ers Stadium, and City of Oakland (HJKCC) since it’s just one of a series of rulings that will be made in the coming months. A follow-on editorial from the Merc is pushing for the County to surrender the funds so that the bond payments can be made by the end of the month. In addition, a budget trailer bill (AB 1484) in the Legislature is trying to better define the limit and range of the powers of oversight boards and successor agencies.
Update 6/27 3:32 PM – AB 1484 passed and is headed to the governor’s desk. The big takeaway is that the carveout for affordable housing projects is now set. Until now, affordable housing was as much on the chopping block as any other types of redevelopment work.
In the world of pro sports, $85,000 is not much money. It barely pays for a month of a rookie minimum contract in MLB. It’s the rough equivalent of one decent section’s worth of revenue at a San Francisco Giants game, or the A’s typical daily parking take. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not much. For the City of San Jose, it might be a very important piece of leverage which the City can use against the San Jose SF Giants.
The Merc’s John Woolfork reports that the City wants to get more financial disclosures from the team before it authorizes $85,000 in maintenance funds for Municipal Stadium. The main thrust of the argument against the expenditure comes from a memo (PDF) jointly written by councilmembers Sam Liccardo and Pete Constant.
Finally, as we contemplate whether to continue subsidizing the rent and repair at Municipal Stadium or any other City facility, we should know the extent to which any related entity is financing litigation costing our taxpayers thousands of dollars. Extended delays caused by frivolous CEQA litigation could stall or prevent the most transformative private economic development project – a privately-financed half-billion dollar major league baseball stadium- in anyone’s memory. It would seem minimally sensible to know whether we’re paying for the bullets with which we’re being shot.
Indeed, why subsidize someone else’s antagonism? It’s not exactly neighborly of the Giants to continually come to the trough while suing the city.
Moreover, the memo shed some light on the sweetheart deal the SJ Giants have been getting from San Jose for years. The team is set up as a nonprofit, which is not entirely unique among minor league teams. Thanks to the Giants being a nonprofit, their rent at Muni starts at $1,000 per month. Think about that. The Giants pay less in rent than most apartment renters in San Jose, or the rest Bay Area for that matter. The Giants contribute to upkeep as part of the lease terms, as does the City. But keep in mind that whatever leasehold improvements the team makes can be a tax writeoff (one of many depreciation items), which makes it the costs only slightly more than trivial. And the nature of the improvements is important: the City has paid for structural maintenance and improvements, such as a new scoreboard, electrical equipment, and lockers. The Giants have paid for value-add items like flat screen TVs on the concourse. Next year, the last of the current lease, the Giants will pay $29,000 in rent, which is a tiny improvement.
The memo also compares the Giants’ deal with the Sharks’ lease at Sharks Ice (next door to Muni) and Team San Jose’s arrangement at the San Jose Convention Center. The Sharks paid $5.5 million over the last two years for capital improvements and debt service for Sharks Ice, in addition to $5.3 million in rent just last year alone at HP Pavilion. With the lease due for renegotiation next year, the SJ Giants will be lumped in with the A’s and Raiders, whose respective leases also expire in 2013. Just as you can expect the Oakland leases to reflect additional contributions from the teams, the same should be expected of the SJ Giants.
After all, the Giants definitely don’t need the nonprofit status they’ve had since the beginning of their existence in 1988. That might have made sense back then, when it wasn’t clear how well the community would support the franchise (Lew Wolff knows a little about that). The Giants are routinely one of the best gate performers in A-ball and have their operations almost completely subsidized by their SF parent club/owners. If the Giants want to keep operating as a nonprofit, per the next lease they should comply with the Council Policy 7-1 (PDF), which requires financial disclosures of nonprofits operating city facilities:
…under Council Policy 7-1, non-profit organizations obtaining use of city facilities at a reduced rent must provide a “certified financial statement, including sources of funding and any constraints applied to funds,” and the “City may require, prior to and during the lease/property use agreement, the submission of such additional information as may be needed.”
It would be the neighborly thing to do. If the Giants don’t like it, well, I’m sure there are plenty of other places ready to offer a sweetheart stadium deal. Then we’ll see what kind of blowback the Giants get for being both leeches and antagonists. The irony is delicious. Oh, and if you think this has no teeth, here’s some very interesting language from Council Policy 7.1:
A below market lease/property use agreement may be terminated by the City at any time for any of the reasons established in the lease/property use agreement…
– and –
The City will not enter into leases or property use agreements at below market rates to organizations engaged in political activities or to religious organizations that would use the leased premises to promote sectarian or religious purposes.
Can the Giants’ efforts to derail Cisco Field be called political? Not overtly, but there’s something there.
No statement I have seen better exemplifies Oakland’s strategy than this quote by City Administrator Fred Blackwell from the SF Business Times:
“San Francisco has given the Warriors a waterfront offer that they could not refuse,” said Fred Blackwell, assistant city administrator, in a statement. “And in the end, we will leave a space for the Warriors after they have are exhausted from the CEQA litigation and cost increases required to be on the San Francisco Waterfront.”
Replace “Warriors” with “Athletics”, “San Francisco” with “San Jose”, and CEQA litigation/cost increases with territorial rights, and you have Oakland’s attitude towards the A’s in a nutshell. Oakland has had counsel from the Giants to fight the A’s efforts to move. It wouldn’t be surprising if they went back to that well again just to make things more difficult for the W’s. The difference is that the W’s don’t have a Byzantine league statute to fight.
It’s as if the City of Oakland has no choice. Almost 50 years ago a group of civic, business, and government leaders had the foresight to build what was then a state-of-the-art sports complex for a reasonable cost. It had parking and a future transit link in the plans. The stadium was built initially for football but was designed to accommodate baseball as well, better than any other multipurpose stadium ever. With the Coliseum complex, Oakland and Alameda County built up a 30-year lead over the rest of the Bay Area. Over time that lead was diminished as other cities struggled and eventually succeeded to build new venues. If the Warriors and A’s get their new digs, that 30-year lead will have vanished with only one team, the Raiders, struggling to hold on.
All this posturing makes it appear that Oakland has no choice but this strategy. That’s entirely wrong. They do have a choice. But it starts with making the toughest choice. Instead of this “fake it ’till you make it” strategy of sounding like they’re committed to all three teams, commit to one first and make that team a positive example that the other teams will be attracted to. The resources definitely aren’t there to make Coliseum City fly as a redone, three-team complex. Why would a private developer commit to the W’s part of Coliseum City if they know that a more lucrative play is available across the bay? Even a two-team plan is sketchy due to the logistical complications (phase-in, what to do with the old venues). For now it looks as though Oakland’s putting its arrows behind the Raiders, since there is some prep work being undertaken. Until either Oakland decides or has the decision made for them, they’ll continue with the “fake it” strategy of saying they have several ballpark sites when in actuality there’s zero consensus on one. That’s a shame because it leads to false hope. That’s what organizations like Save Oakland Sports and Let’s Go Oakland are hanging their hats on. Rooting for someone else to fail works from a schadenfreude standpoint, but it doesn’t get anything built. Longtime East Bay fans are about to find that out.
Piping hot updates from Fox Sports’ Ken Rosenthal and Sports Business Journal’s Eric Fisher. First Rosenthal:
No meaningful update from Selig on #Athletics‘ situation. Still trying to figure it out. Again called it “complex.” — Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) May 17, 2012
;
When asked if #Athletics would consider relocation options besides San Jose, Selig said that is a question for A’s owner Wolff to answer. — Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) May 17, 2012
Now Fisher:
#Giants, #A‘s made presentations test before MLB exec council yesterday, but no additional news beyond that on long-running saga. — Eric Fisher (@EricFisherSBJ) May 17, 2012
Selig on A’s: “It’s a complex, complicated situation. People think it’s taken a long time but if you knew what what’s gone into it.” — Eric Fisher (@EricFisherSBJ) May 17, 2012
Selig declined to answer on whether league would approve A’s pursuing relocation out to the Bay Area. — Eric Fisher (@EricFisherSBJ) May 17, 2012
More Selig on A’s: “The idea is to get it right, even if it takes a little longer.” — Eric Fisher (@EricFisherSBJ) May 17, 2012
In sum, no news, they’re still working on it and it may take longer to get right.
Selig deserves a lot of criticism for not being more decisive on this matter, but he is absolutely right about the issue being very complicated. Then again, he gets paid $18 million a year to run baseball. It’s his job to deal with complicated issues.
Update 11:26 AM – The media AP is running with the “move out of Oakland” story.
Update 11:47 AM – For added context, a Jon Heyman article yesterday had Bill Neukom at the meetings this week. The fact that he’s still representing the Giants indicates that he’s still the lead for the team on the T-rights issue. Like it or not, he casts a shadow.
Update 2:44 PM – As predicted in the comments, Lew Wolff had to clean up Bud Selig’s mess.
“Number one, my only objective is to remain in the Bay Area,” A’s owner Lew Wolff said Thursday. “And based on all our studies, plus receiving no indication from the blue-ribbon committee that we missed anything, the only location we can find to build a ballpark that’s do-able is in downtown San Jose. I intend to do that. And we intend to invest half a billion dollars in private funds to do so.”
Cleaning up Selig’s mess. That’s what a fraternity brother is for.
newballpark.org 