Category: San Francisco Giants

There’s started to be some fallout from last weekend’s Bill Madden pronouncement that the Oakland A’s won’t be allowed to move to San Jose, though it’s too soon to say what to make of it yet:

• The A’s released a statement reiterating their case for getting rights to San Jose, which is based on the argument that “MLB-recorded minutes clearly indicate that the Giants were granted Santa Clara, subject to relocating to the city of Santa Clara.” The Giants fired back with their own press release, essentially saying, “Nuh-uh, it wasn’t subject to nuthin’.”
• The Oakland city council unanimously approved spending $3.5 million on developing a plan for a stadium-and-arena-and-other-stuff complex on and around the current site of the Coliseum that would cost, um, something, and be paid for somehow. It would include a stadium, or maybe two stadiums, or maybe an arena and would — you know what, I’m not even going to attempt to summarize it until there’s some indication this is more than just some not-all-that-pretty pictures.
• San Jose councilmember Sam Liccardo says somebody should challenge baseball’s antitrust exemption if MLB doesn’t allow the A’s to move, though he stopped short of actually threatening that the city council would do so itself.

In all likelihood, none of this means much, but it’s at least worth watching the antitrust thing to see if that becomes serious. After all, fear of an antitrust challenge is what drove MLB to create the Tampa Bay Rays — and it’s always possible that this could be the lever that would push MLB owners to lean on the Giants to, if not give up rights to San Jose completely, at least name their price. Not laying odds on that happening just yet, mind you, but possible.

New York Daily News columnist Bill Madden dropped a bombshell on the baseball world this weekend by reporting that MLB commissioner Bud Selig is going to confirm the San Francisco Giants‘ territorial rights to San Jose, leaving the A’s stuck in Oakland. As Madden wrote:

MLB is going to uphold the San Francisco Giants’ territorial rights in San Jose… To strip the Giants of their territorial rights to San Jose would require a three-quarters vote of the clubs, and as one baseball lawyer observed: “Clubs would realize what a terrible ‘there but for the grace of God go us’ precedent that would create in which all of their territorial rights would then be in jeopardy.” As an example of that, one can’t imagine the Yankees, Mets or Phillies voting to take the Giants’ territorial rights to San Jose away when it could conceivably open the doors for a team seeking to re-locate to New Jersey…

With the Giants adamant against making any financial settlement with the A’s on San Jose, Wolff and Fisher would appear to have only two options: Find a suitable site for a new stadium in their own (East Bay) territory, possibly right next door to the Coliseum, or sell the team.

Both Selig’s office and A’s owner Lew Wolff immediately denied the validity of Madden’s report, with the commissioner’s office telling SF Gate’s Henry Schulman (off the record, just like whoever gave Madden his information) that, in Schulman’s words, Madden’s article “does not accurately reflect the current situation.”

So who’s lying? In all likelihood, nobody. After all, it’s always been exceedingly improbable that Selig was just going to strip the Giants of their territorial rights and hand San Jose over to the A’s, for exactly the reason that Madden’s unnamed lawyer says: Other teams would be freaked that they’d be the next to have their monopoly market power undermined. (Just look at what happened last year in the NBA, where territorial rights aren’t even as all-important as in baseball.) The real question is whether Selig (or their fellow owners) will arm-twist the Giants owners into lowering their price, or at least naming one, at which point Wolff can quit staring longingly into the South Bay distance and get down to the business of haggling.

So far, Selig doesn’t seem inclined to force a resolution — but then, we’ve known that for eons. The upshot of Madden’s article and the resulting uproar, then, seems to be that the status quo is holding: The Giants owners won’t talk, Selig won’t make them, and Wolff is still waiting impatiently. Eventually something has to give, but as we’re seeing, “eventually” can take a while.

For anyone hoping that the news of Bill Neukom stepping down as lead owner of the San Francisco Giants would lead to a break in the impasse with the Oakland A’s over territorial rights to San Jose, you can stop hoping:

Larry Baer, who is becoming CEO when Bill Neukom retires at the end of the year, said Thursday that the Giants’ stance on territorial rights in the Bay Area is fixed.

“There is no change on that position,” Baer told reporters Thursday. “It’s a position Bill’s had, a position our board has had, a position I have.”

A’s owner Lew Wolff told the San Francisco Chronicle he’d have no comment on his nemesis Neukom’s departure, then opined: “”If I were the Giants, I’d feel more confident the longer it takes. I don’t think they’d be right.” Asked what he thinks about prospects for a resolution overall, he replied: “I have no idea.” Does this count as depression or acceptance?

Great piece at Newballpark.org on the likely options for San Francisco Giants owner Bill Neukom in his never-ending standoff with Oakland A’s owner Lew Wolff over the A’s future home. As site proprietor Marine Layer writes, Neukom can basically go three ways:

• Refuse to bargain over territorial rights to San Jose, and hope the A’s move out of town. He asserts that Neukom would then be forced to compensate Wolff for the territorial rights to the East Bay; I’m less certain that that’s part of MLB bylaws, but I’m sure that Wolff would attempt to work that into any deal to relocate.
• Refuse to bargain, and keep paying revenue sharing to the A’s while the team stays put in Oakland.
• Take a payoff from Wolff to allow the A’s to move to San Jose. Newballpark.org estimates the cost to the Giants as maybe $12.5 million a year in lost revenues, which would mean an up-front payment in the $100-150m range should be enough to make it worth Neukom’s while (caution: extremely back-of-the-envelope math at work here). The question, as I’ve raised here before, is whether that kind of price tag would be worth Wolff’s while — presumably not, or else the A’s wouldn’t be stuck in this holding pattern.

Marine Layer concludes that “No matter what Neukom decides, it looks like he‚Äôll have to pay,” which is a bit harsh: He’d get benefits from each scenario as well, don’t forget (sole rights to the Bay Area, a continued monopoly on all the rich bits of the region, or a pile of territorial rights cash, respectively). But clearly Neukom doesn’t see Door #3 as a preferred option, at least not at the price Wolff is willing to pay. Of such decision matrices is gridlock made.

If you’ve been ignoring the latest iteration of California’s budget crisis — thanks, Prop 13! — you’ve missed what could be big news for the Oakland A’s plans to build a new stadium in San Jose. From today’s San Francisco Chronicle:

Under [Governor Jerry] Brown’s proposal, existing redevelopment agencies – which oversee urban renewal in blighted areas and are funded through property taxes – would cease to exist beginning July 1. Instead, that $1.7 billion in property tax money would be used to help plug a $25.4 billion deficit in the general fund for one year and in future years would be directly distributed to counties, cities and school districts. Backers of redevelopment agencies say they are critical economic drivers, but the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office has been a major critic of them and in a report published this week reiterated the conclusion that “there is no reliable evidence that redevelopment projects attract business to the state or increase overall economic development in California.”

And what, exactly, does this have to do with the A’s? Recall that it was the San Jose RDA that’s supposed to be buying the land for A’s owner Lew Wolff’s stadium project, and there’s still about $20 million worth of parcels to go. While that’s not an insurmountable sum — the RDA is already working on selling some other land to raise cash, with one of the bidders, ironically enough, being Wolff — it’s going to be awfully hard for the RDA to write checks once Gov. Brown waves his hand and makes it go poof. And while it conceivably could rush to beat the July 1 deadline, knowing that they’re on the clock is going to give a lot of pricing leverage to the landowners who have so far reufsed to sell — who, let’s not forget, include the San Francisco Giants‘ ballpark naming rights sponsor, AT&T, who might have a vested interest in not wanting to see a San Jose A’s move go through.

The alternative, obviously, is for Wolff himself to buy the land, though he might not be so eager to throw $20 million at a project that could end up too rich for his blood anyway, unless Bud Selig breaks character and forces Giants owner Bill Neukom to cough up territorial rights for next to nothing. Though given that Oakland’s latest stadium plan would be even more hamstrung by the death of RDAs, Wolff might not have any other options, unless you count sitting tight at the Oakland Coliseum or trying to get stadium talks going in some smaller non-California town (Portland? Las Vegas?) as viable alternatives. If MLB would really let him buy the Dodgers and make the A’s the league’s problem, now might be the time to consider it.

“Experts: Giants‘ World Series success could boost chances for A’s move to San Jose” was the headline in yesterday’s San Jose Mercury News. It’s certainly a provocative premise: How, exactly, would the Giants’ on-field success affect the long-running off-field soap opera around A’s owner Lew Wolff’s attempts to relocate, and Giants’ ownership’s insistance that they won’t give up the South Bay rights they got from the A’s two decades ago without a fight, or at least a substantial cash settlement?

Unfortunately, the promised “experts” turn out to be a single expert who actually espouses the promised point of view. And who is that masked man?

“To the extent that the commissioner’s office would be concerned about the Giants’ financial well-being if the A’s were allowed to move to San Jose,” said Andrew Zimbalist, a Smith College economist and baseball expert, “that concern would by allayed given the success the Giants have had.”

Zimbalist estimates the Giants will net from $13 million to $16 million from their share of ticket sales and concessions for the postseason and World Series.

“The owners want (a team) to be as economically successful as it can be,” said Zimbalist of the A’s proposed move.

“And I think fundamentally that is what Selig is looking at — if he thinks it’s a plus economically.”

Zimbalist actually has some props in this department — he wrote a whole book about Selig, after all — so I’d be inclined to think he knows what he’s talking about. That said, it’s a fairly bizarre argument: The issue in the San Jose move is over what marginal revenue loss there would be to the Giants as the result of an A’s move, and that doesn’t change regardless of whether the Giants are filthy rich or desperately poor — if the A’s relocation would cost the Giants (pulling a number out of the air) $5 million a year, that’s still $5 million a year. Moreover, it would be weird for MLB to make a long-term decision based on a one-year income bump from the Series win, unless Selig thinks that Edgar Renteria is going to do this every year.

The article also notes that the A’s relocation committee report that Selig commissioned 20 months ago is likely to be performing “an analysis of what kind of fan base shift might occur should the A’s move to San Jose.” Actually, it’s pretty likely that that analysis is long since done — Zimbalist himself did one for the New Jersey Nets‘ move to Brooklyn in a third the time, though admittedly he took some shortcuts — but it won’t be released until the Giants and A’s owners have negotiated an acceptable settlement behind closed doors. Maybe it’d help if Wolff agrees to start wearing bowties.

Apparently Bud Selig really doesn’t want San Jose jumping the gun and holding an Oakland A’s stadium vote before MLB has decided if the team can move there. Yesterday league officials told San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed that they’d pay the $1 million-plus cost of holding a special election next spring, if the city agrees to put it off until after MLB’s relocation task force has finished its report.

Reed hinted yesterday that he’d be amenable to such a plan, saying, “I want to think about it, and talk to [A’s owner] Lew Wolff, and he and I and [MLB president] Bob DuPuy will talk again.” The San Francisco Chronicle’s political gossipmongers Matier and Ross say they expect an announcement today that San Jose is putting off the stadium vote.

So, it seems like this whole kerfuffle will likely go down as a bit of gamesmanship to push the A’s situation to a conclusion, though from here it’s hard to say exactly who’s behind the game: Reed, who was apparently frustrated that an August 3 deadline for putting a stadium on the November ballot was nearing, and DuPuy was on vacation and not returning his phone calls? Maybe Wolff, who yesterday again expressed frustration with the slow pace of MLB’s decision-making process, saying, “It’s been 16 months, and I have 130 employees who need to know where they are headed”? We probably won’t know the full story until DuPuy writes his tell-all book about what’s really going on inside those meetings (or email exchanges, or Farmville chat sessions or however they’re exchanging ultimatums these days) between Wolff and San Francisco Giants owner Bill Neukom.

Okay, so much for my theory that Bud Selig secretly gave San Jose the go-ahead to move ahead with a stadium vote in order to pressure the Oakland A’s and San Francisco Giants into reaching a territorial rights settlement. Selig responded to the news of the potential San Jose referendum today by saying he was “surprised and disappointed” that Mayor Chuck Reed wants to set a November vote on a stadium plan, stating, “We were not part of the process and had no knowledge that a decision to proceed with the election had been made. A ballot referendum is premature.”

Unless, of course, Selig just wants everyone to think he doesn’t want San Jose to have a vote. But then, the Giants owners would probably know he knows they know he knows…