We Believe?

Oakland fans like Mark Davis, if for no other reason than that he’s Al’s son. Feelings toward Warriors owner Joe Lacob are more complicated. Yes, he wants to move the team to San Francisco, but the Warriors have always felt like they belonged to the entire Bay Area as much as to Oakland. Besides, fans think, at least the team is finally winning.

There is no ambivalence toward Wolff. Quan sums up her constituents’ feelings: “I don’t think he even loves the game,” she says. “He doesn’t care.” Wolff has been open for years about his lust for San Jose. Financially, his motives make sense. “Oakland is very clearly an inadequate market,” says Andrew Zimbalist, a sports economist at Smith College. Money flows to teams from corporations, Zimbalist explains, whether through stadium ads or box suites or corporate season-ticket packages. San Jose has Facebook and Google. Oakland has Clorox and Ask.com. “From a corporate standpoint,” says Zimbalist, “Oakland is one of the weakest markets in baseball.”

Save Oakland Sports is organizing an East Bay business summit, scheduled for November 7, with invitations sent to business leaders around the area. The idea is to show the teams that corporate money is available in Oakland — there just needs to be more dialogue between companies and teams. They’ve invited Mark Davis to be the keynote speaker. So far, he has yet to respond.

It’s difficult to isolate Oakland as a market unto itself. For television, Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose are grouped together, combining to make the sixth-largest market in the country.1 “Historically, Oakland was thought of as just a piece of the Bay Area marketplace,” says Zimbalist. “But the dynamics there are changing.” San Jose has boomed, while Oakland’s population and economy have stagnated. And the Giants and 49ers have a broader footprint regionally. “San Francisco is just a more familiar city,” says Dobbins. “If you live in some random Northern California town, you’re probably a Giants fan.”

But Dobbins counters Zimbalist’s thinking. “It’s probably true that in San Jose they could get more corporate money, and there would be a state-of-the-art stadium, and that place would probably be packed,” he says. “But if there’s an ownership group that is committed to Oakland, the same thing can happen here. The same thing has happened here.”

For now, A’s fans can thank their cross-bay rival for keeping the team from moving to San Jose. MLB rules give each team a local monopoly. As a franchise, you’re granted geographic territory, and once that has been established, no other team can move in. The Giants control the rights to the San Jose market.2 They don’t want the A’s infringing on their territory. So, for now, the A’s will remain in Oakland. But the city of San Jose has filed a lawsuit against MLB that could pave the way for a move and forever change the league’s exemption from antitrust laws.

Meanwhile, Oakland is offering its own plans for potential ballparks. There’s the Coliseum City option, which would keep the A’s at their current site but in a new stadium. And then there’s the possibility of following baseball’s recent trend by building a stadium downtown. The city owns land at Howard Terminal, a site that sits on the bay near a number of restaurants and bars. Quan wants to build there. “You put it right there and it changes downtown,” she says. “The Asian Americans will go to Chinatown for dinner before the game. The white guys will go straight from the game to the music clubs. The whole downtown is going to be energized.” Yet logistical and environmental issues remain. For his part, Wolff has expressed doubt that a stadium can be built in downtown Oakland with only private money.

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