Stadium For Rent: 23. Do You Know the Way to San Jose?

STADIUM FOR RENT:
Tampa Bay's Quest for Major League Baseball
By BOB ANDELMAN

23. Do You Know the
Way to San Jose?

"I'll consider anyplace that wants us."
-- Bob Lurie, Owner, San Francisco Giants

Bob Lurie was a nice guy trapped in a bad stadium.

Candlestick Park had been the abomination of major league stadiums since it opened April 12, 1960. That day, 42,260 fans watched the Giants beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 3-1. Cold, drafty and lacking the charm of other fields from the start, it never won over most fans even during those rare winning seasons.

The stadium joke was on Horace Stoneham, the man who took the Giants from New York to San Francisco at the end of the 1957 season in search of bigger crowds and a better stadium. Stoneham relocated his club to the West Coast simultaneously with Walter O'Malley's move of the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. In taking flight, both team owners declined bids by New York investors to purchase the teams and keep them in New York. They both balked at new stadium proposals, including a modern facility proposed for Flushing Meadow.

In New York, both the Giants and Dodgers suffered from antiquated ballparks. The difference between them, however, was that the Dodgers were consistently near the top of the National League in attendance at Ebbetts Field (1.03-million in 1957) during the 1950s, while the only games the Giants (654,000 in 1957) sold out at the Polo Grounds were against the Dodgers.

Stoneham was a second-generation team owner who hated the idea of leaving New York. But he was prepared to move his team to Minneapolis when O'Malley convinced him it would be more logical for their teams to re-create their rivalry in California, 1,500 miles from the nearest competing team.

When the Giants and Dodgers left New York, "the city became like a smile without its two front teeth," wrote Donald Honig in his 1985 book, Baseball America (MacMillan).

O'Malley -- who acquired the Dodgers in 1950 and was one of the first owners to let fans know baseball was a moneymaking operation, not a gentleman's hobby -- got himself charming and functional Dodger Stadium at Chavez Ravine. Three decades later, it would still draw fans for his son Peter, with or without a winning team. But Stoneham traded in one clunker, the Polo Grounds, for another, Candlestick Park, where not even the combination of Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Bobby Bonds, Orlando Cepeda and Juan Marichal could draw a crowd.

The day $11-million Candlestick Park in 1960, 15 minutes from downtown San Francisco, Vice President Richard Nixon threw out the first pitch. He called it the finest ballpark in America. It was all downhill from there.

The winds swirled and blew every afternoon at Candlestick, wreaking havoc with fly balls, pitchers' arms, and causing Giants fans great discomfort on otherwise beautiful evenings. "The Hawk" is the name San Franciscans gave to the howling winds that whip up on the Pacific Ocean and ruin the ballpark, which juts into the bay on a spit of land. According to Sports Illustrated's Ron Fimrite, Bill Madlock wore aviator goggles in the infield. And Bobby Murcer put his bats in the clubhouse sauna to keep them warm for night games. "Once you can get the peanut shells to stop blowing in your eyes, you can hit," Willie Mays has said. Some nights, games were delayed by fog. Maury Allen, author of After the Miracle (St. Martins), described Candlestick Park as "the most uncomfortable playground for professional players in baseball history."

Here's the way Michael Benson, author of Ballparks of North America (McFarland) described Candlestick Park:

It's cold. Bitter cold. All the time. Sometimes it's both foggy and cold. Giants relief pitcher Stu Miller was blown right off the mound during the 1961 All-Star Game. By the seventh inning of that game the fans were bundled in blankets, drinking hot cocoa -- which was particularly odd, considering that 22 had been treated earlier for heat exhaustion.

Some years, attendance was higher at old Seals Stadium than it was at Candlestick -- until 1989, when the Giants were a championship team again. And it didn't help when Stoneham made another unfortunate business decision, allowing wily Charles O. Finley to freely relocate his Athletics from Kansas City to Oakland in 1968, clearly invading Giants turf and permanently soaking up a huge chunk of the team's fan base.

More seats were needed in 1971 at the unaffectionately dubbed "Stick" to accommodate NFL San Francisco '49ers fans. Seating capacity increased to 58,000. As Michael Benson put it, "Now more people could suffer at once."

Not that the stadium needed more seats for baseball. By 1974 and '75, Giants attendance was the worst in the National League, prompting a Toronto syndicate led by John Labatt Limited (brewer of Labatt's beer) to make a 1976 run on the team with the intention of relocating it to Canada. Horace Stoneham reached agreement to sell the team in February to Labatt's for $8-million plus a $5-million fund to handle a settlement over the abandonment of the Giants' Candlestick Park lease.

But at the 11th hour, new San Francisco Mayor George Moscone brought forward San Francisco financier Bob Lurie -- a member of the team's board of directors since it moved to California -- and Minneapolis hotelier and former Washington Senators/Texas Rangers owner Bob Short to bid on the Giants. A San Francisco judge issued a temporary injunction to prevent the Toronto sale and relocation. Within days, NL owners reversed themselves on the sale of the Giants to Labatt's and awarded the team to Lurie and Short.

But before the partnership and deal could be consummated, Lurie and Short had a public falling out over who would be the boss. The NL, in fact, said it should be Lurie, which starched Short's shorts. Baseball's owners were still chafing over Short's abrupt removal of the Senators out of Washington, D.C. and they didn't want any repeat performances. Outraged, Short pulled out of the deal and Lurie closed the $8-million transaction on March 2, 1976, with Arizona cattleman Arthur "Bud" Herseth as his 50-50 partner.

Herseth was diametrically opposed to Lurie in just about every way, from the clothes he wore to his loud, rapid-fire speech pattern. "I told my lawyer that if this Mr. Lurie was some kind of big shot the deal was off," Herseth told Sports Illustrated's Ron Fimrite in April 1976. "But he's just a nice common little fella. His suits even hang on him."

Their partnership didn't last long, though. By the end of 1977, Herseth was negotiating to sell his 50 percent to Washington, D.C., investor Emil Bernard. Bernard hoped to secure Herseth's half of the team, then go after Lurie's and relocate the Giants to the nation's capital.

"If the Bernard group's price was high enough," Lurie told the New York Times, "you'd have to take a look at it. But I'm sure it wouldn't be that high. I met Emil Bernard a year ago at the winter baseball meetings and he told me he had bought the Oakland A's and was moving them to New Orleans. That turned out to be inaccurate."

Lurie exercised an option to buy Herseth's shares in the event he wanted to sell, paying his partner an estimated $5.5-million for complete control of the Giants.

The Giants were truly lousy under Lurie's first decade of steerage. In 1976, the team's record was 74-88; by 1985, it was even worse, 62-100. Roger Craig was hired to manage the team in mid-1985. The Giants topped .500 for the first time in years in 1986 and won the NL West pennant in 1987 and 1989, advancing to the World Series in '89.

Lurie tried wacky promotions such as awarding the "Croix de Candlestick" to brave fans who stuck out extra-innings games in the cold park. He ran ads depicting sunbathers taking in day games. But mostly he complained about the stadium, saying that players on other teams didn't even like coming to San Francisco because the Giants had such an aggravating facility.

Attendance paralleled the team's record through the 1970s and '80s, dipping as low as 519,000 and 522,000 during the last two years Stoneham owned the team. Lurie pushed attendance over 1.7-million in 1978 but it plummeted again during the next three years to just 632,000 in 1981. The NL championship season of '89 drew more than 2-million fans for the first time in the ballpark's history.

It didn't take long for Lurie to recognize the baseball problem in San Francisco was bigger than his ability to solve it. He detested Candlestick and blamed it for the team's inability to draw crowds comparable to those drawn by either the neighboring Oakland A's or rival Dodgers.

Frustrated, Lurie quietly put the team on the block in October 1984. By early 1985, San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein restarted an old debate about doming Candlestick. Lurie wasn't interested.

"I've had it," he told the press. "I'm paranoid about the park."

NFL Washington Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke was rebuffed in early 1985 in his attempt to buy the Giants from Lurie and relocate them to Washington, D.C. He was in good company: Marvin Stone, owner of the Triple-A Phoenix Firebirds, talked to Lurie as well but cut off discussions when he became convinced the Giants were unmovable. Tampa Bay Baseball Group executive director Cedric Tallis and Pinellas Sports Authority consultant Peter Bavasi also approached Lurie, only to be sent home with the message that the Giants weren't going anywhere.

Peter Stocker, owner of the Pacific Union Co., planned to build the Giants a new stadium at Rincon Hill in downtown San Francisco and reached a tentative agreement to buy the team from Lurie in August 1985. The deal fell apart in November when it was learned that Stocker lacked both the downtown property and financing to pay for it.

In 1986, Giants executives Al Rosen and Corey Busch went to Denver to investigate a "temporary" plan for the Giants to play their home games in Colorado.

Over a five-year period, from 1987 to 1992, Bob Lurie watched four new stadium initiatives go down in ignominious defeat before the public. He entertained the notion of a downtown stadium, a suburban stadium, a floating stadium. He even announced plans to move to Oakland and share the highly regarded Coliseum with the A's. (Unfortunately, he forgot to run that idea by the A's.) He also quietly let it be known that anyone willing to keep the team in San Francisco could have it. There were no takers.

In November 1987, San Francisco voters narrowly defeated "Proposition W," which would have built a new downtown stadium at Seventh and Townsend streets. Lurie told reporters he would move the team. He didn't.

Two years later, in November 1989, the city's voters again said no to a ballpark proposal by a narrow margin -- less than 2,000 votes. "Proposition P" would have approved a $115-million stadium in China Basin. But on the same ballot, the electorate did approve "Proposition V," which urged the city to renovate Candlestick Park.

If Proposition P ever had a chance of passing, it evaporated during the 1989 series. That year, baseball fever swept the San Francisco Bay area as the Giants met the Oakland A's in the West Coast's first subway series. But tragedy struck in the form of the Loma Prieta earthquake. It shook Candlestick Park -- and the rest of San Francisco -- on national television during the pre-game ceremonies of the third game. The Stick suffered minor structural damage, but San Francisco was declared a federal disaster area amid the collapse of highways, bridges, buildings and the city's spirit.

Baseball's championship was postponed for two weeks while the bay area regained its composure. World Series fever was seriously dampened; it didn't help that the A's mopped up the Giants in four.

By the time voters went to the polls, two weeks after the quake, building a new baseball stadium for the Giants seemed a lot less desirable use of public money than rebuilding the city's infrastructure. Proposition P lost by a hair, 51 to 49 percent.

Sponsored by neighboring Santa Clara County, 40 miles southeast of San Francisco, the third vote to build a new stadium for the Giants came in 1990. A countywide, 1 percent utility tax would have paid for a $153-million, 42,000-seat stadium on a landfill near Santa Clara's Great America amusement park.

Again, the Giants came up short. Across Santa Clara County, the measure was defeated. Lurie called it "the last hope" for keeping the Giants in the bay area. But there was a quirk in the voting pattern; the measure actually won in the City of San Jose by a couple hundred votes. San Jose's fire for the Giants was presumably warmed by the presence of the team's Class A minor league franchise.

On the same day voters went to the polls in San Jose, they also chose a new mayor -- Susan Hammer, a supporter of the stadium. The night of the vote, Hammer's campaign party was next door to the party that hoped to celebrate the Giants victory. Bob Lurie stopped by to wish Hammer well.

When the Giants ballot failed, Hammer told Lurie that she wanted to bring the Giants to San Jose, 50 miles southeast of San Francisco.

Within 100 days of her January 1991 inauguration, Hammer formed a 29-member commission on Major League Baseball. She charged it with the task of "exploring every feasible option to bring the Giants organization to San Jose," including finding a stadium site within the city and developing a financing plan. The commission was hailed in the editorial pages of the San Jose Mercury News.

In June, the San Jose City Council heard the commission's recommendation to build a stadium near Zanker Road and Highway 237 and gave preliminary approval for financing. The city and the Giants would jointly build a $160-million stadium, with the city doing the heavy construction and the baseball team outfitting the facility. San Jose proposed to pay its share with $40-million in set-aside redevelopment funds and an array of user taxes on entertainment, real estate and utilities. The Giants would receive equity in the stadium and therefore have a stake in its upkeep and attractiveness to fans.

"San Jose could use that kind of community-builder," wrote the San Jose Mercury News. "San Jose could use the image and prestige that comes with a major league franchise." And one more thing, noted the editorial: "If the team wants a shiny new home in San Jose, an occasional win might help stir public enthusiasm."

Hammer held a press conference to praise the speedy work of her baseball committee but was heckled by a group of advocates for the homeless, demanding more money be spent on housing the poor instead of building a palace for rich team owners and pampered ballplayers.

Undaunted, the San Jose mayor pressed on, taking advantage of what she saw as the sloth of her San Francisco counterparts as they too sought a Giants solution. Hammer announced on September 18, 1991, that the team had agreed to work with San Jose to investigate the financing and construction of a stadium in San Jose. This was significant because, until then, everything Hammer had done was based on Bob Lurie's vague willingness to consider all bay area offers. Now the mayor showed off a letter from Lurie acknowledging his interest in San Jose.

"This is an exciting and important day for San Jose," Hammer said. "We are one step -- one critical step -- closer to bringing Major League Baseball to our city."

On the same day Hammer brandished her letter from Bob Lurie, the City of Santa Clara announced it would hire a political analyst to study financing for a stadium of its own. That's about as far as it got.
* * *

Not much of a stir was created in San Francisco, despite Bob Lurie's insistence that his team would not play at Candlestick Park once his lease expired in 1994. The city would not be bullied by San Jose or Santa Clara. That wasn't the way the system worked. And Lurie's credibility for following through on his own threats to leave was very low. What was the hurry?

Only San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos and County Supervisor Angela Alioto were doing anything of note, investigating a stadium proposal for land the city owned in San Mateo near the San Francisco International Airport. (Alioto's father, former Mayor Joseph Alioto, said in 1968 that improving Candlestick would be "perpetuating a mediocrity.") But Agnos was engaged in a heated re-election campaign and Candlestick was not a major issue.

Maybe it should have been.

Agnos lost his bid for a second term, beaten by former police commissioner Frank Jordan.

After the fall mayoral race in San Francisco, Hammer and her advisors began earnest discussions with Bob Lurie to bring the Giants to San Jose. Their final proposal was for a 153-acre site that would support a 48,000-seat baseball stadium and 15,000 parking spaces.

In exchange for her work and support, however, Hammer wanted something Santa Clara lacked in the countywide initiative: a name change. If you come to my city, if you build a stadium with my tax dollars, the mayor emphatically told Lurie, your team will have to be called the San Jose Giants. We won't take hand-me-downs or be San Francisco's stepchild any longer.

Done, Lurie said. He placed a courtesy call to new San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan and alerted him that Giants were going to San Jose. Jordan politely wished Lurie luck, held his breath and crossed his fingers behind his back.

"I felt if I kept a line of communications open to Lurie and his staff I would at least be first in line if they did indeed lose in San Jose," Jordan says.

A press conference was called on January 15, 1992, to announce the deal to the press. Lurie and Hammer took questions with a "San Jose Giants" banner hanging behind them. Hammer compared negotiations between the city and team to a seven-game series between the Giants and Dodgers.

"I can't wait to see the first shovel go into the ground," Lurie said. "I wish it could be today."

If the referendum were approved by voters, the San Jose Giants would take the field for the first time on April 9, 1996.

Hammer stressed that the Giants would assume all risks for cost overruns and program changes over budget. She also maintained that because it would be built by a public/private partnership, the stadium would not put existing city services at risk.

"San Jose is already an extraordinary place to live and do business," Hammer told her city. "But the addition of the Giants will make us even more attractive to new businesses and investments and squarely place us in the forefront of American cities. In the final analysis, our ballpark effort has little to do with our city's self-image and everything to do with our economic vitality as we move into the next century.

"Can you imagine what this place will be like with the Giants in our own back yard? Can you imagine our first All-Star Game? And can you imagine our first World Series in San Jose?"

The vote on the stadium was set for June 2, 1992.
* * *

San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan, pressed by his constituents, vowed to explore every option to keep the Giants in San Francisco.

To which New York Times reporter Robert McG. Thomas Jr. wrote: "Jordan's best hope might be history: the knowledge that nothing the Giants have done since betraying New York has been able to free them from Candlestick Park."br>* * *

How much does it cost to build a baseball stadium?

Nobody really knows. In St. Petersburg, the price tag on the Florida Suncoast Dome ratcheted upwards for years, from initial estimates of $85-million to $110-million. Add the $30-million that would be spent on dugouts and scoreboards when a team was secured and the cost jumped to $140-million. The Tampa Tribune once figured that with interest added in, the real price of the Dome mushroomed in excess of $300-million.

San Jose already knew how deceiving the numbers could be, from the 1988 vote to build a $100-million coliseum for the NHL San Jose Sharks (it turned out to be a $130-million coliseum) to the failed 1991 bid to approve a stadium for the Giants in Santa Clara.

Now the numbers game began anew in San Jose. The stadium that the Mercury News told its readers would cost $155-million was described in the San Francisco Chronicle the same day at $185-million. The difference was the Giants' $30-million contribution to interior design.

But Hammer muddled the plan a week later when she proposed to finance the stadium with an additional 2 percent tax on utilities. In so doing, she promised to also generate $130-million for schools and public safety. Her package deal -- naively meant to misdirect the blow of new taxes and deflect stadium criticism -- caused reports of the stadium's cost to run amok. Was it a $235-million stadium or a $250-million stadium? One day, the San Jose Mercury News, which used both preceding figures, hazarded a guess that the public cost alone might be $299-million.

Less than 30 days after Hammer and Lurie stood before the "San Jose Giants" banner, the mayor's enhanced proposal was already losing favor. Voters barraged the mayor's office and the local media with calls and letters. Let's call a stadium a stadium and not cover it up in the charitable arms of education, said the voters, who appeared insulted by the stadium and books plan. IBM, San Jose's largest private employer, joined the chorus of boos and announced its opposition to the stadium plan. The computer company objected to paying an additional $780,000 a year in utility taxes. IBM already paid $2-million annually.

One of the complaints baseball boosters registered after the failure of the 1990 stadium ballot in Santa Clara County was that despite donating $100,000 to rally support, the team itself kept a low profile during the campaign. As the 1992 vote came around, that changed. Legendary players such as Willie Mays, Orlando Cepeda, Willie McCovey, Vida Blue and Tito Fuentes raised the flag of Giants history at many rallies and fund-raisers, while the team's present and future was represented by Will Clark, Dave Righetti, Roger Craig, Al Rosen and Bob Brenly. The players even signed off on a direct-mail campaign.

Voter registration drives enlisted 16,000 new voters, of which 15,000 were signed up by pro-stadium forces and only 1,000 by anti-stadium forces.

Other pro-stadium campaign efforts included the mailing of a 40-page "Voter Information Guide" to 120,000 mailboxes. The $100,000 booklet was devoted to the explanation and advocacy of the stadium proposal.

More than $1.1-million was collected by pro-stadium forces, including the largest single contribution, $240,000, from the Giants themselves. The City of San Jose spent another $1-million on consultants studying stadium plans.

Even Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent appeared in San Jose to rally support and confirm that he would allow the Giants to move from San Francisco to San Jose if the stadium referendum passed.

But it was all for naught.

When San Jose voters went to the polls on June 2, 1992, they roundly rejected the stadium proposal by a vote of 78,809 for, 94,466 against. "Measure G," as it was listed on the ballot, failed in every one of the city's 10 council districts. Opponents, led by a group called Citizens Against the Stadium, spent a mere $13,000 to defeat Measure G.

Shortly before midnight, San Jose Mayor Susan Hammer and Giants owner Bob Lurie emerged to concede defeat. As Lurie spoke, Hammer quietly wept.

Four strikes. Were the Giants finally being called out at home?