It’s Giants vs. A’s : More at Stake Than Baseball in Bay Area

SAN FRANCISCO —  A World Series between the Giants and the A’s may be a dream come true for local baseball fans, but government officials, baseball executives and tourist industry sources say there is far more at stake than baseball in the first-ever Bay Bridge World Series.

Fans began working themselves into a frenzy by packing sports bars on both sides of the bay Monday to watch as the Giants won the National League pennant for the first time in 27 years.

In San Francisco, police officials ordered patrolmen to work overtime for the night of revelry. In Oakland on Sunday, there had been little apparent show of emotion, probably because the Athletics won the American League pennant last year.

Baseball fans savored the idea of “Bay’s Ball” and a BART Series, named after the Bay Area’s rapid transit system. Front pages of the local newspapers were filled with stories on the two winning teams. Even J. Michael Bishop and Harold E. Varmus, the two UC San Francisco researchers who won Nobel prizes in medicine Monday morning, celebrated by going to San Francisco’s Candlestick Park to see the game in the afternoon.

“I think this town will go nuts,” said Josh Elvove, 31, a transplanted native New Yorker who described himself as a converted Giants fan.

Michael Jensen, 22, a native San Franciscan, skipped work at Fisherman’s Wharf after getting his hands an a pair of tickets. “Right now, we’re really spoiling ourselves with Bay Area ball,” he said.

Giants backers broke into chants of “Beat the A’s” at Pat O’Shea’s, a San Francisco sports bar, as the Giants inched ahead and finally beat the Chicago Cubs 3-2 on Monday.

“I’ve cried into many beers,” said Gary York, a former Cubs fan who switched allegiances to the Giants after moving here six years ago. “I’m used to suffering. I lived in Chicago for 19 years. It made it very easy to follow the Giants.”

First Since 1962

The series also had a more serious side. In San Francisco, supporters of a new stadium are counting on emotion generated by the Giants’ first league pennant since 1962 to persuade voters to approve a Nov. 7 ballot measure that would pave the way for a stadium to replace Candlestick Park. Giants owner Bob Lurie has threatened to move the team if he cannot win support for a new stadium in downtown San Francisco.

In Alameda County, where schools and health care suffer from chronic underfunding, boosters are hoping that the World Series will bring needed favorable media coverage.

“Ten solid days of solid media attention on the Bay Area--this is the big, big plus,” said Gary Sterling, director of tourism for the Oakland Convention and Visitors’ Bureau.

“The P.R. value is tremendous, especially in light of a secondary or a smaller city. We coattail very nicely on a championship team, (becoming) a championship city.”

So far, the mayors of rival Oakland and San Francisco have not made the traditional bet on the series outcome. San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos, when asked what he might be willing to accept by way of a wager from Oakland’s Mayor Lionel Wilson, quipped: “There’s nothing in Oakland that I want.”

Wilson was not amused, responding with a sharply worded letter.

“Things like this aren’t forgotten,” said Carol McArthur, spokeswoman for Wilson, adding that San Francisco is “as always a nice amenity to Oakland.”

Agnos mellowed later Monday, calling Oakland a “great city” with a number of assets worth wagering for.

For ABC-TV, the Bay-Area series did not promise the same national interest and ratings as the usual matching of two distant cities. If the World Series were bicoastal, say, the Dodgers and Yankees, the network would at least be assured large audiences of local fans in two places--Southern California and the New York area.

“No one’s gonna watch, it’s almost too local,” said Cubs fan Eric Gilliland. “ . . . They can almost call it a yawn fest because that’s what the series is going to be.”

In the network’s favor, all the Bay Area games can be televised in prime time in the eastern and central time zones, where the majority of TV watchers live. And the Giants and Athletics might be a more enticing match than a series between teams from San Diego and Anaheim.

“San Francisco is a pretty romantic place to a lot of people,” said Jack McQueen, general manager of the FCB/Telecom ad agency. “And they are pretty colorful teams. I don’t think the ratings will suffer too much.”

“Oh, it’ll be great for the Bay Area,” said Cubs fan Jane Voigts, a native Chicagoan who lives in Los Angeles and flew here for the day to see her team. “But I don’t know if the rest of the country is gonna care.

“I think the only thing worse that could’ve happened was Toronto and Montreal in the World Series.”

Ticket Glut

Although scalpers were charging $100 or more for tickets to Monday’s game, ticket brokers were expecting something of a glut during the World Series.

“That hurts,” said Jerry Adelman, part of owner of Murray’s Tickets in San Francisco. “No matter how big of a baseball fan they are, how many are they going to go to? Three, four?”

But while Murray’s planned on selling out its stock to corporate buyers, Adelman noted: “It hurts the hotel business, I’ll tell you that.”

“We expect dollars spent in the city to be lower, naturally,” said Sam Nassif, general manager of the Oakland Airport Hilton, near the Oakland Coliseum. He held out hope that baseball fans commuting from the San Joaquin Valley might stay over, but added, “It’s just too early to tell.

Meanwhile, at Ricky’s, a sports bar in San Leandro, Ricky Ricardo Jr., part owner and bartender, said his biggest-selling souvenir is a green and black baseball cap with the logos of both Bay Area teams.

“The Bay Area wins,” Ricardo said. But, he said, while “there’s no hatred” on the part of the A’s fans toward the Giants, “this could change” as the series nears.

Athletics fans have the reputation of being a quiet group. Certainly, they aren’t nearly as fanatical as Oakland’s die-hard Raiders fans who continue to press their campaign to get the football team back from Los Angeles.

But nine years after the Walter Haas family bought the Athletics, the team has built a strong following extending throughout the Bay Area into the San Joaquin Valley.

“They’re not as crazy as Raiders fans, but give them a little time,” Ricardo said.

“These people (the Haas family) have invested real time and effort to make it work, and it’s working.”

From 1972 to 1974, when the A’s won three straight World Series, the club, then owned by Charles O. Finley, drew more than 1 million fans during only one season. This year, the A’s topped 2.6 million.

Times staff writer Kevin Roderick contributed to this story.

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