COMMENTARY : Giant Move Is Business, as Usual

It’s all but impossible for an outsider to get emotional about a baseball team leaving one town to play in another.

The good baseball fans of San Francisco may weep about their Giants. We can understand their sadness. But baseball has taught us one lesson well: It’s a business first, a game last. And when business is bad, businesses go out of business. That, or they move to a new corner with a sign announcing new management.

The new corner in the Giants’ case is 3,000 miles away. From Coogan’s Bluff 35 years ago, the storied Giants moved 3,000 miles West to a chilly promontory on San Francisco Bay. And now they would move 3,000 miles again, this time to the Southeast, this time near the warming waters of Tampa Bay.

Such is the deal agreed upon two weeks ago when Giant owner Bob Lurie, an honorable man tired of begging for a new stadium, agreed to sell the team to St. Petersburg and Tampa interests. He couldn’t get a ballpark, and without it no one in San Francisco would buy his team.

So, he says he had had enough and would sell to the first legitimate buyer. He accepted the Florida group’s offer of maybe $110 million.

For 15 years, St. Petersburg and Tampa, not always neighborly, have lusted for baseball. St. Petersburg even built a domed stadium in 1988, ignoring Peter Ueberroth’s warning that an empty stadium guaranteed nothing in the expansion race.

First the Chicago White Sox and then the Seattle Mariners teased St. Petersburg. So close were the White Sox to moving in 1988 that St. Petersburg’s assistant city manager, Rick Dodge, says he and club owner Jerry Reinsdorf had agreed on a news release announcing the relocation.

“Then the Illinois Legislature stopped the clock to extend a midnight session,” Dodge says. “And by one vote in both houses, they passed legislation to build the White Sox a new stadium.”

After Seattle’s flirtation, and after losing the expansion race to Miami, St. Petersburg still kept Dodge in touch with any franchise likely to be sold or looking to move.

Only a month ago, Fay Vincent, the beleaguered baseball commissioner, said it didn’t so much bother him that 10 franchises were for sale. What bothered him, he said, was that there were no buyers.

Well. Seattle had just been sold. And later the Houston Astros would be sold. Now the Detroit Tigers have been sold. And the San Francisco Giants have been sold. All for prices in the $100-million range. Someone, if not Vincent, believes baseball is good business.

St. Petersburg believes it. “If what the commissioner says is true, that makes the Giants’ relocation that much more important,” Dodge says. “All indicators say St. Petersburg will be very financially successful, and that will help all baseball. Our presence will do wonders for the Florida Marlins, who’ll be our natural rivals, as will the Atlanta Braves.”

Even as St. Petersburg celebrates, Vincent makes noises suggesting the deal is not done. He says American League owners, who must approve the move with eight of 14 votes, may not like giving up Florida to two National League teams. And maybe the National League, where St. Petersburg needs 11 votes, won’t like losing the Giants to the East Coast.

Dodge believes St. Petersburg has “tremendous support from the owners,” in part because Lurie has lobbied for that support.

As for any chance that a white knight might appear in San Francisco--let’s say the knight offers to build a stadium and buy Lurie’s team for $200 million--Dodge doesn’t believe Lurie would back away from the deal he has struck with St. Petersburg.

“Bob Lurie’s handshake is more binding than most contracts,” Dodge says. “And he is absolutely working for us.”

Four times, voters said no to using tax money to build the Giants a stadium. So certain was Lurie that Candlestick Park’s icebox doomed the Giants to $10 million in annual losses, he offered $37 million of his own money to help build a new place.

Still, the voters said no to a man who in 1976 was himself the city’s white knight. He bought the Giants just before the city of Toronto spirited them across the border.

All of this Giants-to-Florida talk, if we use our imaginations, presents a set of delicious possibilities.

Let’s say baseball’s owners approve the sale and the move. But let’s also say that a powerful argument, from both a purist’s and businessman’s viewpoint, then can be made that the owners did the wrong thing.

Here’s how that argument could go:

The American League suffers financially without a foothold in Florida. The National League suffers financially by giving the San Francisco market to the Oakland Athletics. (The leagues argue about whether a balance in suffering takes place. They can’t agree.)

The National League’s West Coast teams suffer without the Giants as rivals. And as bad as Candlestick is, isn’t it worse to take baseball indoors to another cursed dome?

Now, let’s say, Fay Vincent, a baseball purist with a pragmatic businessman’s sense, is persuaded by such an argument.

Does he then say that moving franchises is an act of indifference to paying customers that in time will destroy baseball’s mass appeal?

Does he say the Giants, by years of whining, produced a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure at Candlestick? Does Vincent say it is in baseball’s best interests to keep the Giants in San Francisco?

Does he say baseball itself should find a white knight?

Does he say baseball should guarantee the building of a stadium?

Does he say baseball owes its fans that much?

Only in his dreams.