49ers, Athletics set sights on new cities by the Bay

The Santa Clara 49ers? The Fremont A’s?

The Bay Area may be known more for its steep hills, cable cars and expansive bridges than its sports teams, but, proving there’s a lot more than sourdough at stake, the owner of the San Francisco 49ers announced Thursday he intended to move the team to Santa Clara as soon as 2012.

John York said the NFL team, which has played in this city since becoming a charter member of the All-America Football Conference in 1946, is dropping plans for a new stadium at Candlestick Point and intends to build a state-of-the-art facility in the Silicon Valley community of Santa Clara, about 35 miles south.

“We truly wish that the results were different,” said York, co-owner of the team with his wife, Denise DeBartolo York. “We were the last to be convinced. We made this decision as a family, and in the end, we were able to come to this conclusion by thinking about the challenges from the fans’ perspective.”

York said the 49ers would not drop San Francisco from the team name and called it “one of the most storied brands in sports.”

Like other officials here, Mayor Gavin Newsom said he was blindsided by the news. While he stressed that San Francisco still hoped to keep the team, he angrily suggested that if the 49ers are intent on leaving, the city may play hardball next year when renegotiating the team’s lease.

“I don’t know why they’re doing this,” Newsom said. “Why in essence they are turning their backs on a city that has created the value of that franchise, a city that has always stepped up for them.”

A sense of betrayal was pervasive: The city’s chief negotiator, Michael Cohen, said he believed “great progress” was being made on team concerns such as transportation and “day-of-game experience” and thought the parties were meeting late Wednesday for a routine update.

It hasn’t been such a good week, either, for the professional sports town across the bay.

Baseball’s Oakland Athletics have reached an agreement with Cisco Systems to build a new stadium in Fremont, about 25 miles from Oakland in the East Bay. The ballpark, with an estimated price tag of around $400 million, could be ready by 2011.

Lew Wolff, the A’s owner, has not decided whether to drop Oakland from the team’s name, but has hinted that the Fremont A’s or the Silicon Valley A’s are possibilities.

The team’s deal apparently hinges on the city of Fremont giving its approval for developing the 143-acre site, which Cisco controls with a 34-year lease, and building a ballpark as large as 35,000 seats, plus homes and businesses.

A public announcement of the plan for the “Fremont A’s” may be made Tuesday at Cisco’s headquarters. Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig is expected to attend.

The A’s have played in Oakland at the Coliseum since 1968 after 13 years in Kansas City. The franchise began as the Philadelphia Athletics in 1901.

The 49ers franchise has not only wrapped its history, but also invested its entire identity in the city of San Francisco. And now that association seems certain to change.

The first home for the 49ers was Kezar Stadium in Golden Gate Park, not far from the Haight-Ashbury section of the city that earned fame in the 1960s, long after the football team had already made a name for itself in the NFL.

The 49ers played at Kezar for 25 years, then moved to Candlestick Park, the baseball home of the Giants, starting with the 1971 NFL season.

With such legendary players as Frankie Albert, Y.A. Tittle, Hugh McElhenny, Joe Perry, R.C. Owens, Bill Kilmer, John Brodie, Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, Ronnie Lott, Roger Craig and Steve Young, the 49ers grew to become one of the NFL’s most respected and successful franchises, winning the Super Bowl in 1982, 1985, 1989, 1990 and 1995.

But while the 49ers made headlines, their home field had trouble keeping up. Candlestick Park became 3Com Park in 1995 and Monster Park in 2004, but no matter what it was called, the stadium aged, and not gracefully. Built in 1960, it is easily the oldest unimproved stadium of the 31 in the NFL, a built-for-baseball facility past its prime, and the increasingly dingy facility prompted York to begin looking for a replacement soon after he assumed control of the franchise from brother-in-law Eddie DeBartolo.

With York pushing the deal, the 49ers intended to build a new, 80,500-seat stadium next to Monster Park as part of a mixed-use development that also was to include retail, residential, entertainment, commercial and recreational space.

The team’s first developer partner in the new stadium venture, Mills Corp., came on in 1997, after city voters authorized a $100-million bond to help pay for the deal, but nothing came of the project.

Last December the team chose Lennar Corp. to devise another plan. Estimates of the project put the cost of a new stadium between $600 million and $800 million.

The team said in July that it would consider moving to Santa Clara if plans for the stadium fell through. Larry MacNeil, team vice president and chief financial officer, met twice with Santa Clara officials to talk about building a stadium in the parking lot of the Great America amusement park. The 49ers’ training complex and offices are near the amusement park.

York indicated that there were too many problems involved with negotiations with the city to make the site work at Candlestick Point.

“We think it is best not to continue the approval process at Candlestick Point and move to where many of those hurdles have already been resolved,” York said.

The 49ers said the Candlestick Point proposal was flawed because it would have created massive new infrastructure and public transit needs. Also, the size of the development would have used up the spaces for tailgate parties and parking and required the construction of a too-large parking structure.

Santa Clara Mayor Patricia Mahan said in a statement that the 49ers did not wish to impact the city’s general fund, or increase taxes. York said if the Santa Clara option doesn’t work out, the 49ers would look for another site in the Bay Area.

Times staff writer Lee Romney contributed to this report.

thomas.bonk@latimes.com

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Where you from?

What some NFL teams would be called if their names were consistent with their stadium locations, and how far away they are from the city of their actual names:

*--* Fictional name Real Name Stadium Distance East Rutherford (N.J.) New York Giants Giants Stadium 13 miles Giants East Rutherford (N.J.) New York Jets Giants Stadium 13 miles Jets Irving Cowboys Dallas Cowboys Texas Stadium 12 miles Landover Redskins Washington Redskins FedEx Field 11 miles Orchard Park Bills Buffalo Bills Ralph Wilson Stadium 15 miles Santa Clara 49ers San Francisco 49ers To be built 35 miles (planned)

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Sources: stadiumsofnfl.com, stadiumguide.com