Baseball’s most amazing story this season is playing out in the most reviled stadium in Major League Baseball, located at the 66th Avenue exit on Interstate 880 in Oakland.
The A’s and their emerging young stars have opened eyes from coast to coast. Led by baseball’s most underrated manager, Bob Melvin, this team is rooted in resilience, with toughness, fearlessness and the grit that defines Oakland.
The A’s have told their fans that Howard Terminal or the Coliseum will be selected as the site of their new ballpark by the end of this year. Fans will be able to access their seats by 2023, according to the team.
After 13 years under the ownership of John Fisher the A’s have adopted their Bay Area brethren’s successful new sports venue construction strategy: Be magical on the field.
The 49ers under Coach Jim Harbaugh and Colin Kaepernick made three straight playoffs, won the NFC Championship and came oh so close to winning their sixth Super Bowl in 2012. Presto! Levi’s Stadium opens in 2014.
The Golden State Warriors win three NBA titles in four years under Steve Kerr with the magnificence of Steph, Dray, Klay, and KD. Voila! Chase Center opens its billion dollar doors in the fall of 2019.
As for the Oakland Raiders, well, they weren’t exactly magical on the field. They were just lucky, winning a $750 million sleight of hand(out) from the state of Nevada enabling the public financing and construction of their $2 billion domed stadium, scheduled to open in 2020.
Au revoir Oakland. Hello Sin City.
So, what now for the A’s? I have consulted sports soothsayers, my crystal ball, a Bay Bridge Series snow globe and a fortune-telling magic eight ball. Question, where? Answer, Howard Terminal.
The A’s organization has publicly stated that they will privately finance the $600 million construction cost of their new ballpark. They recently hired Danish architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) to plan their new stadium, which they describe as “pragmatic utopian.”
But when they announce Howard Terminal the venue game will become much more complicated. The high hurdles related to building at that site have been well-documented.
They include toxic remediation, environmental challenges relating to the adjacency of a commercial and public waterway, business relocations, legal challenges, bureaucratic roadblocks, I-880 access/egress, track traffic from Amtrak and BART, and possible pushback from neighbors in West Oakland.
Are the A’s going to pay 100 percent of that extra infrastructure cost? I don’t think so.
They will call on their clean-up hitter, the Leverage Play as Oakland’s last team standing. The A’s know the Howard Ballpark site will be time-consuming, costly and as potentially toxic as the dirt they will have to dig up so that the infield doesn’t explode during a long homestand.
When the green and gold can’t access enough infrastructure gold from the city, county and Port of Oakland, they might introduce their Hidden Ball Trick.
It goes something like this: You (public entities) pay for Howard’s infrastructure with this ball over here, and we (the A’s) and a DTBNL (Developer to Be Named Later) will pick up your debt load of $137 million on the Coliseum. Of course, you’ll have to make us the exclusive owner of that site.
Just look at China Basin in San Francisco and its multi-use multibillion dollar value today. It makes $137 million for the Coliseum land seem like an ante in a much-higher-stakes game.
As long as the odds might seem, this could all become a walk in the park for the A’s when they complete their Magical Mystery Tour of a season and claim the World Series trophy.
In the end, winning is what gets ground broken and buildings built.
Andy Dolich is a sports business consultant and a former top executive with the Oakland A’s, San Francisco 49ers and Golden State Warriors. He wrote this for the Bay Area News Group.