A’s home still should be where the BART is
The A’s look to be headed to the postseason. The team is, at least verbally, committed to being “Rooted in Oakland.” The A’s are, for the moment, the hottest sports story in the Bay Area and maybe in the country.
So now is the time. The perfect moment to announce a real ballpark plan. Not a fairy tale, not smoke and mirrors or wishful thinking. But something that can happen now.
That would mean the team can foresee a move-in date. That it can start committing to these young and productive players, as long promised, so that they will still be in green and gold when a ballpark opens.
And there is only one obvious solution:
The Oakland Coliseum. That beauty of a site between 66th and Hegenberger.
“We could put a shovel in there tomorrow,” an A’s source told me over the weekend.
Maybe not literally. But certainly figuratively. And then we all could get on with it and end the never-ending story.
Why not, on this 50th anniversary of the team’s arrival in
Oakland, make the longtime home site official?
There are so many benefits to this site, aside from the obvious fact that it won’t require years more of negotiation and study and dithering.
It’s historic. This is the Oakland A’s ancestral home. The other night I watched the MLB documentary on the “Swingin’ A’s.” There was the Coliseum in all it’s pre-Mount Davis glory.
The site is the home of only the A’s, with the pending exits of the Raiders and the Warriors. After decades of complaining about a shared site between three teams and a shared-use stadium with the Raiders, the A’s finally have this prime piece of land all to themselves.
Access to transportation. In case you hadn’t noticed, Bay Area traffic is horrific and getting steadily worse. Aside from affordable housing, traffic is the biggest issue in the Bay Area. The Coliseum site has a BART station and two sides of freeway access. It is arguably the friendliest transportation site of any stadium on the West Coast.
Land. The Coliseum is 130 acres of Bay Area real estate, and as we all know, there is no such thing as bad Bay Area real estate. It is a tabula rasa — the A’s can do whatever they want to develop it. Create a village around a new ballpark, with lots and lots of housing (speaking of the need for affordable housing), retail, parks for kids, restaurants, hotels. A throwback “Day on the Green” outdoor amphitheater. If the Athletics don’t do it, someone else is going to snatch up that land and develop it. You know why? See point No. 3: access to transportation.
Shovel in the ground immediately. March will mark the 10-year anniversary of Bud Selig’s Blue Ribbon Committee to study the A’s ballpark conundrum. This year is the 22nd anniversary of Mount Davis, which effectively ruined the Coliseum as a baseball stadium. After Fremont, San Jose and the fiasco with the Peralta site, the fans are beyond exasperated.
But the rumblings are that the A’s are planning to select the Howard Terminal site as their preferred location. This seems so misguided in so many ways, including:
Howard Terminal is not a “downtown” stadium, no matter what way you spin it. It’s 12 long, unattractive blocks from downtown Oakland, including a trip under the freeway and over the railroad tracks. Jack London Square is not downtown Oakland and never has been.
Waterfront ballparks are nice, but there’s no reason to try to copycat AT&T if it simply doesn’t work. Weather studies show that the site could be as windswept as Candlestick Park was and the ballpark would not be able to face the water because that is directly west, which is not allowed by MLB.
Access will be difficult. The nearest BART stops are all about a mile away and an unpleasant, potentially dangerous 20-minute walk dealing with trains and traffic. The A’s have floated the idea of building a gondola to ferry customers from a station to the new stadium. Despite the ridiculous added cost of such a project, the gondola would hold only about 20 people at a time. “What are you going to do, ask people to start lining up at 3 for a 7:30 p.m. game?” one A’s insider asked.
For decades, the A’s have been frustrated with the stadium situation — but much of that frustration was brought upon themselves. Besides deriding the Coliseum to the point that fans didn’t want to come to it, and subtly or not-sosubtly threatening to move, there has been a litany of errors: the assumption that Selig would do a favor for his old friend Lew Wolff, the silly Fremont announcement that was never actually going to happen, the waiting game with San Jose even when it appeared certain that would not work, and now this latest dithering among stadium sites that are problematic.
The answer has been there all along. Right under their feet. Right where they belong.
Get out the shovel and start digging.