Santa Clara Stadium: Another Option Play That Didn’t Work

In the recent elections, sports sustained a serious setback in Arizona when voters refused to recognize Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as a national holiday.

In the Santa Clara Valley of California, King’s birthday, indeed, is recognized. All voters wouldn’t do is recognize the need for a new stadium for the San Francisco Giants.

Community leaders in the area had worked exhaustively to talk the Giants into locating in a spot just outside San Jose.

They even persuaded the owner of the Giants, Bob Lurie, to change the name of his club to Santa Clara Giants.

Everything was in place, except with the voters, who defeated the stadium measure by roughly two percentage points.

Chicago voters recently had approved a stadium for the White Sox. Cleveland voters had approved one for the Indians.

And down in Texas, Arlington voters agreed to build a stadium for the Rangers.

But Santa Clara says no on the ground it doesn’t want new taxes, and the owner of the Giants now sits down to think about his problem.

In 1987, a stadium measure hits the ballot in San Francisco. It loses. It comes up again in ’89 and loses.

And now at the polls, the Giants have stretched their streak to 0-for-3, blowing the decision at Santa Clara.

So what is owner Bob Lurie going to do?

Well, the first thing he says is that he is going to review his options. People in sports are always reviewing their options. Most of us say we are up a creek, hoping to stumble onto something--but in sports, they review options.

While he is reviewing, Lurie will keep the Giants in 1991 at Candlestick Park, from where he has been trying to escape since shortly after buying the team in 1976.

His predecessor, Horace Stoneham, just about went broke at Candlestick Park. Lurie and a partner he rounded up--a Phoenix meat packer--bought the Giants to prevent outsiders from snatching the club and moving it to Toronto.

Eventually, Lurie would buy out the meat packer, arranging to get butchered at the gate all by himself.

But the investment would prove wise, considering how much baseball franchises have escalated the last 15 years.

Lurie has no complaints. All he wants is a stadium more suitable for baseball than Candlestick Park, an atmospheric disaster since its opening in 1960. And he prefers the stadium in the Bay Area, where he was born in 1929 and from which he hasn’t strayed.

The proposed stadium in Santa Clara was modest, designed to accommodate only 45,000. And agreeing to call the team the Santa Clara Giants, Lurie was rejecting the so-called big-time label, so precious to other owners in sports.

Departing Los Angeles, did the pro football team accept the handle of Anaheim Rams? Did another call itself the Pontiac Lions? And another the Irving Cowboys?

The two New York teams fleeing across the river refused to be known, respectively, as the New Jersey Giants and Jets.

And would the basketball and hockey worlds find in their midst the Inglewood Lakers and Inglewood Kings?

Lurie was trying hard to please Santa Clara, but, in the end, the majority asked:

“Should we pay for a stadium for a multimillionaire? Instead of our building the stadium and inviting him, would it not be better if he built the stadium and invited us?”

So the leader of the Giants is now reviewing his options, meaning it is 6-5 and pick it where the team will be residing in 1992.

In behalf of the Giants, it can’t be said they are a burden on society. In return for the stadium, they would have delivered to the Santa Clara region a lot of fun for the populace and they would have stimulated a measure of fringe business.

But reviewing their options, voters concluded they will do without the fun, without the fringe business--and without the tax with which they would have been nailed.

That’s life today: one option review following the next.