Talking Bay Ball

By BILL SHAIKIN

April 2, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

SAN FRANCISCO —

This is a baseball town once again, and not a moment too soon. After two decades of football worship and baseball tolerance, they’re talking baseball here. After two decades of Joe Montana and Steve Young and Jerry Rice, the 49ers are dreadful, just in time for the famously front-running citizens to exclaim, “Hey, how ‘bout them Giants?”

They’re talking baseball here, even investment bankers and dot-com wizards who wouldn’t know Barry Bonds from junk bonds. They’re talking about Pacific Bell Park, the enchanting new home of the Giants, where home runs will splash into San Francisco Bay. After 40 years in the wind tunnel formerly known as Candlestick Park, the Giants finally are blessed with a ballpark worthy of the legacy of Willie Mays and Willie McCovey.

Tickets? Nearly sold out. For the season.

They’re talking baseball here, Giant baseball. Even the Oakland Athletics, who won more games than the Giants last season, are talking Giant baseball. In one ad, the A’s are the equivalent of the little kid in the back of the classroom, frantically jumping up and down and waving his hand in the hope someone--anyone--will notice him.

The ad: “While they built a ballpark, we built a team.”

And a pretty good team it is. Too bad, really, for the more successful the Giants become at Pacific Bell Park, the less likely the A’s can survive in Oakland.

Nod to Knothole Gang

The applause is still rolling in for Camden Yards, the Baltimore park that shook baseball out of its architectural doldrums. For teams planning new stadiums, field trips to Camden Yards--and its most worthy successors, Coors Field in Denver and Jacobs Field in Cleveland--inspire executives to point frantically and cry, “We want that!”

The red brick exteriors, the dark green seats? We want that! The luxury suites, the lavish restaurants? We want that too! The asymmetrical outfields, the giant scoreboards? That too!

The Giants secured the services of Joe Spear, the HOK architect whose blueprints launched the ballparks in Baltimore, Cleveland and Denver. The Giants then challenged Spear to distinguish this retro-style, cash-cow ballpark from the others.

On a 13-acre stadium site filled with dusty old warehouses, Spear envisioned an architectural heaven, a ballpark wedged against the San Francisco Bay, in the shadow of the Bay Bridge, with postcard views of the San Francisco skyline and the passing parade of boats.

“If Walt Disney was reincarnated and could design a view for us, this would be it,” Spear said.

Water would not be ornamental here. This is not Edison Field, where a fake waterfall flows over fake boulders beyond center field. This is Mother Nature providing the signature for the ballpark, the element that instantly identifies this park as San Francisco’s.

“Hitting a home run into the Bay, there’s some power in that,” Spear said. No pun intended, we think. The right-field foul pole is a cozy 307 feet from home plate.

When the city reminded the Giants they could not restrict public access to the waterfront, the Giants did not whine about lost revenue. With a tip of the cap toward the old knothole gang, the Giants built a right-field fence that allows a free peek at the game to fans strolling along a bayside walkway.

While the Giants encourage fans to catch home run balls, the team kindly asks that they refrain from jumping into the water to retrieve them. For that, the Giants present Portuguese water dogs.

Yet the dazzling, death-defying feat here is not a dog diving into the water and fetching a baseball. Rather, the Giants insist that the howling, biting gales of Candlestick Park will not invade Pacific Bell Park, where an all-star team of engineers, architects and aeronautical scientists designed a stadium that can deflect San Francisco’s wicked winds into gentle breezes.

Another death-defying feat here may be getting a ticket. In their 40 seasons at 63,000-seat Candlestick Park, the Giants drew 2 million fans three times, never more than 2.6 million a season. In their first season at 40,800-seat Pacific Bell Park, the Giants will draw more than 3 million. The season is sold out, aside from 500 bleacher seats available only on game days.

Tickets are expensive--$8.50 and $10 for the bleachers, $15 and $18 for the upper deck, $23 to $42 for the lower deck. The Giants do not apologize. In four elections, two in San Francisco and two in San Jose, voters rejected subsidizing the construction of a new ballpark. So the Giants paid the $330-million bill by themselves, for the first privately financed ballpark since Dodger Stadium opened in 1962.

“For a while, we were the bad boys of major league baseball,” said Larry Baer, the Giants’ executive vice president.

If your team were begging for city and state money for a new stadium, after all, you wouldn’t want your mayor or governor asking you how the Giants could afford a ballpark without tax dollars. In the last few weeks, though, the Boston Red Sox, New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies all have dispatched executives to San Francisco for ballpark tours and briefings.

“They’re all realizing they’re going to have to do at least a significant part of their project privately,” Baer said. “Maybe it’s 50%, maybe it’s 60%, maybe it’s 40%. But it’s not going to be 5%.”

The Giants tapped into the corporate strength of San Francisco and the enviable wealth of the Bay Area--factors Baer acknowledges cannot be duplicated everywhere--in persuading sponsors to pay $75 million of the construction costs and selling fans and businesses on $70 million worth of what the team called charter seats. The concept bore an eerie resemblance to the personal seat licenses sold, and disastrously so, by the Oakland Raiders, in which the Raiders took your money and, after 10 years, took your rights back too.

“We had to call it something different. We couldn’t dare call it a PSL, because people would compare us with Al Davis,” Baer said.

The Giants sold lifetime rights to the best 16,000 seats and allocated all revenue to construction costs. The Giants did get $15 million in city redevelopment funding but will more than repay that money in property taxes and lease payments, Baer said.

For the majority of the money, $170 million, the Giants simply took out a loan. The Giants must repay the loan at $17 million a year, according to Baer, a burden that virtually demands packed houses.

“If we ended up at 60% or 70% of capacity this year, we’d be in big trouble,” Baer said.

The NFL failed miserably in making this point to Los Angeles: If a community forces a new owner to pay for a stadium, he would be forced to pay off a construction loan with money that could otherwise be used to pay players, a competitive disadvantage.

So how does Baer propose that the Giants can compete with the Dodgers? First, he said, the Giants’ revenue should jump from $65 million last year to $140 million this year, providing more than enough money to pay off the loan and also acquire players. Second, he suggested, the Giants can outsmart the Dodgers, despite spending $35 million less on an opening-day player payroll.

“We can afford to be high enough [in payroll] to be a contender,” Baer said. “We’re never going to be the Yankees or the Dodgers, but we don’t feel we need to be in order to have a very successful franchise. We think we have the right people making the right decisions in [Manager] Dusty Baker and [General Manager] Brian Sabean.”

A’s the ‘Value Alternative’

In Baltimore, Cleveland and Denver, teams and cities sold ballparks as engines for downtown redevelopment. In San Francisco, though, Pacific Bell Park is just the latest impressive addition to a revitalized waterfront.

Multimedia Gulch, the south of Market Street concentration of computer software companies and Web page designers, already was hatched when Chili Davis and Will Clark played for the Giants. E-Trade is moving in across the street from Pacific Bell Park, amid a bustling mix of cafes and shops, brewpubs and clubs, the Museum of Modern Art and the trendy W hotel and its XYZ restaurant.

And the good folk of San Francisco enhanced waterfront development by knocking down the earthquake-damaged Embarcadero Freeway, encouraging the evolution of what Baer calls “an entertainment crescent” along a promenade from Fisherman’s Wharf to Pacific Bell Park.

In the spirit of the old downtown ballparks, the Giants anticipate as many as 40% of fans using mass transit, including the BART subway, bus and light rail service in San Francisco, trains from the San Jose area and ferries from points north and east. The Giants also invite fans to sail or skate to the park, though they request you stow in-line skates beneath your seat.

It’s a 15-minute drive from Pacific Bell Park to the Oakland, er, Network Associates Coliseum, the home of the A’s. The Coliseum and adjacent arena, where the Golden State Warriors play, sits within a nondescript industrial area, surrounded by parking lots and sandwiched between a freeway and the BART tracks.

This is the home of champions. The buzz is all about the Giants and their new ballpark, but the Giants have not won a World Series championship since moving from New York in 1958. The A’s, who arrived from Kansas City in 1968, fly four World Series championship flags and boast of heroes including Catfish Hunter, Reggie Jackson, Rickey Henderson, Dennis Eckersley and the “Bash Brothers” of Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco.

The current crop of boppers is young and plentiful, featuring Ben Grieve, Matt Stairs, Miguel Tejada, Eric Chavez and the biological bash brothers of Jason and Jeremy Giambi. And, as Baseball America’s 1999 organization of the year, the A’s have more quality pitching prospects than any team should have a right to have, including Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, Barry Zito and Jesus Colome.

The A’s will be happy to entertain your family, charging $29 for four upper-deck tickets--two adults and two children--and a parking space. At Pacific Bell Park, four upper-deck seats and parking cost $75.

“We’re certainly the value alternative,” A’s President Mike Crowley said.

Is that enough? The Giants capped season-ticket sales at 29,500. The A’s have sold about 6,000 season tickets, Crowley said.

Although the A’s attracted 2.9 million in 1990, when they played in their third consecutive World Series, they have not drawn more than 1.4 million since 1993. The Coliseum, once a delightful sun-splashed stadium with flower beds in team colors, was enclosed into a hideous monstrosity to accommodate the return of the Raiders. Imagine the old Anaheim Stadium, many times worse.

Crowley won’t bash the Coliseum, since he wants fans to show up there. He will point out that keeping a young and talented team together requires millions from somewhere.

“Right now, we’re marketing the team,” Crowley said. “There will come a point in time where we will need the revenue to pay the players. A new ballpark would be part of that equation.”

The A’s pared their payroll to $25 million last season. They pay no rent and keep all revenues from tickets, concessions and parking, so there is no more blood to squeeze from the Coliseum turnip. And still, Crowley said, the A’s would have lost money last season without an assist from baseball’s revenue sharing fund.

“Obviously, given the economics of our sport, the proper stadium venue is critical,” Commissioner Bud Selig said. “Somewhere along the line, they’re going to need a change of stadium venue.”

But where? The city of Oakland--and Alameda County--have gotten nothing but grief and court dates for their hundreds of millions of dollars spent to rebuild the Coliseum for the Raiders and the arena for the Warriors. And, with Pacific Bell Park shining across the Bay, politicians would struggle to explain to Alameda County residents why they should pay for a stadium for the A’s when the Giants paid for one themselves.

San Jose appears a demographic nirvana, with its high-income mix of Silicon Valley and booming suburbs. However, Selig confirmed, major league baseball considers San Jose part of the Giants’ territory. Should the A’s wish to pursue a San Jose stadium, they would choose between two unappetizing and expensive options: pay off the Giants or challenge major league baseball in court.

The A’s lease at the Coliseum expires next year. Co-owners Ken Hofmann and Steve Schott agreed last year to sell the team to a group led by supermarket baron Bob Piccinini and former A’s executive Andy Dolich, who promised to keep the team at the Coliseum. Major league owners refused to vote on the sale.

Hofmann and Schott, previously restricted by their lease to selling to local buyers, can now sell to anyone, including buyers who would move the team. For now, Crowley said, the owners are not considering that option.

“It’s their intention to keep the team in the Bay Area for a long time,” Crowley said.

Dolich suspects major league owners want to keep Oakland in limbo as a “potential bargaining chip” with the players’ union. With baseball’s labor agreement subject to expiration in 2001, Dolich argues owners might find it handy to threaten to fold the A’s and other teams with lagging revenue. Selig denies that scenario.

The Giants’ media guide describes Baer as “the driving force behind every phase of the ballpark project.” Ironic, then, that Pacific Bell Park might send the A’s packing, since the A’s gave Baer his first job in baseball. In 1978, with the A’s expected to move to Denver, no Bay Area radio station would pay to broadcast their games. So owner Charles O. Finley awarded the broadcasts to KALX, the 10-watt student station at the University of California at Berkeley.

The play-by-play announcer? An ambitious undergraduate named Larry Baer, but only because everyone figured the A’s were leaving town. Now, thanks to him and his ballpark, they might be.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

OPEN HOUSE--BASEBALL’S THREE NEW STADIUMS

FACTS

STADIUM

Comerica Park, Detroit Tigers

LOCATION

Downtown, east of Woodward Avenue

DIMENSIONS

Left field: 345

Center field: 420

Right field: 330

CAPACITY