A Wind of Change to Blow

I am not a big fan of domed stadiums. Artificial surfaces tend to annoy me. I have come to terms with night baseball; my only disgust with it is what it has done to our deadlines.

On the other hand, I kind of like Candlestick Park. Of course, I don’t have to put up with it 81 games a year, but I tend to like it because it is kind of like a U.S. Open for ballplayers.

You know how an Open is? Knee-high rough, narrow landing areas for players who are used to felt-table fairways wide enough to berth a battleship. It has tricky pin placements, artful doglegs and, if it’s Pebble, gale-force winds. Players get to play in conditions they are unfamiliar with most of their careers. It builds character, I always say.

The same way with Candlestick. It’s baseball’s version of an Open. The guys get to know what it’s like to bat with their hats flying off, to try to track down a fly ball that takes off unexpectedly like a rocket and to swing a bat that feels like an icicle in their hands.

But, having said that, I am mystified as to how major league baseball can keep a franchise in San Francisco, which it is illogically trying to do.

The San Francisco Giants are not owned by the city of San Francisco or by major league baseball. They are owned by an individual, they are the property of a multimillionaire named Bob Lurie and, under our capitalistic economy, he can do exactly with them what he can do with any other wholly owned subsidiary, namely, sell it, move it, give it away or turn it into a flowerpot, for all of that.

What he wants to do with the Giants is to turn them over to a group from St. Petersburg, Fla., that has come up with an offer he can’t refuse--$115 million.

Now, that’s a lot of money for a lot of .230 hitters, but there’s more. You see, the league expands by two teams next year, and existing owners each get $12.3 million out of the $190 million it costs the two teams to buy into this no-limit game.

St. Petersburg says Lurie can keep that $12.3 million.

Now, it so happens, baseball wants to keep a team in San Francisco. It is encouraging local investors to come up with the money to block the Giants’ exodus.

Only trouble is, a group originally offered $95 million. And, they wanted to get the $12.3 million expansion money. So, Lurie would have been exchanging, in effect, $127.3 million for $82.7 million.

He didn’t get rich that way. The stay-put group later softened its demands. Lurie could keep the expansion money. But there was still a $20-million difference between the kitties in this pot.

Now, the Giants did not come west with the 49ers (the real ones, not the football team named after them). They are already carpetbaggers. They came west with Walter O’Malley in 1958 in the caboose of the deal that brought the Dodgers to Los Angeles.

Baseball took up the nomadic life in 1953 when the contractor, Lou Perini, moved the Boston Braves from Massachusetts to Milwaukee. No one really cared because the Braves had drawn only 281,278 fans the year before. That’s not even a good week nowadays for Toronto or the Dodgers.

There’s no record whether Perini bothered to ask the game’s permission to move his team. There’s no record whether the Philadelphia Athletics asked anyone’s OK when they moved first to Kansas City and then to Oakland. And, as soon as they had milked Milwaukee dry, the Braves took Coca-Cola’s money and put the show on the road again to Atlanta.

There’s no record whether the game put up much of a fight when Walter O’Malley took the Giants and the Dodgers out of New York. They thought he was bluffing. What he was doing was simply following the rest of the country. To do business, you chase your customers.

Much has been made of the fact that the city of San Francisco twice voted down a proposition to build the Giants a new ballpark.

The notion that municipalities have to erect gaudy new playing fields for private enterprises like ballclubs is a comparatively new one. Let the record show Walter O’Malley never wanted a community, here or in Brooklyn, to build his ballpark. He would do it himself.

But the idea persisted this was somehow a betrayal on San Francisco’s part.

Now, it so happened that St. Petersburg built its own domed ballpark on, as they say in Las Vegas, the come. They put it up--and then went aggressively pursuing existing franchises, first the White Sox, now the Giants.

The rationale of the St. Petersburg group is interesting. A couple of hundred miles to the south, the city of Miami is to get an expansion franchise--at a cost of $95 million just for the license. Then, they have to buy players out of an existing pool. This means they won’t even get .230 hitters.

St. Pete gets a fully stocked franchise for $20 million more. And with recognizable silhouettes in the batter’s box.

This gambit hasn’t escaped the notice of the new owners of the Miami franchise. They are, understandably, furious that they will have to share the Florida television market and with an established franchise at that. They work for 10 years to get in the game, then get upstaged overnight.

They, however, hold the hammer. It takes only five votes to withhold league approval of the move. New rules provide three-fourths, or 10 out of 14 clubs, have to approve it. Miami makes the fifth nay vote--the others are the Dodgers, Padres, Mets and Astros.

It’s hard to see how anyone can stop it. The move makes geographical sense. Whatever part of the country that isn’t moving to California is moving to Florida.

The game is moving to the great indoors anyway. The last two World Series--and three of the last six--have been played in domes. The teams in the domed stadiums have won all three of them.

Now San Francisco has upped the ante by $5 million. It’s not enough.

There are several solutions: They could dome Candlestick or let the Oakland Athletics add San Francisco to their logo.

But I have to think the Giants are gone. Look at it this way: They’ll be the first tourists who ever went to Florida for the summer. But if you’ve ever been to Candlestick, you’ll know summer was just a rumor.