San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
New ballpark for the A’s? Should be any decade now
As Year 15 of the Oakland A’s hostage crisis staggered along last week, I drove past Howard Terminal to see if I could see any signs of a new ballpark.
Nope. Just a sea of asphalt and shipping containers. When John Fisher bought the A’s in 2005, with minority partner Lew Wolff, there was plenty of bluster about a new ballpark.
How long does it take to build one of those suckers, anyway?
Isn’t it about time for Fisher to build that ballpark?
Howard Terminal is earning the name I gave it a couple of years ago: Fantasy Island. In the old TV show by that name, a little person named Tattoo greeted the arrival of new guests each week by pointing to the sky and shouting, “Da plane, boss, da plane!”
Maybe one day, A’s President Dave Kaval will shout to Fisher, “The gondola, boss, the gondola!”
But not soon. The team’s promise to open a ballpark for the 2023 season is pretty much up in smoke. The A’s can blame the pandemic, but their ballpark timeline was leaking oil long before the coronavirus.
Too bad. As Billy Beane keeps telling us, the A’s can’t compete salarywise with top MLB teams until they get a new ballpark. The current A’s, a dynamic and promising group, in spite of the loss to the Astros, surely will be broken up by Fisher’s disinclination to pay the going price for success.
Whatever progress Kaval and the A’s are making is not noticeable. The convoluted real estate deals the A’s say are necessary for their new ballpark are now further complicated by a group hoping to build a football stadium at the Coliseum site and lure an NFL team.
There was no sign of life at Howard Terminal when I stopped by, but nextdoor neighbor Schnitzer Steel was agrindin’ and aroarin’. That’s a major hurdle, and the A’s are suing Schnitzer for polluting the town. Schnitzer has not returned my phone calls for more than a year. Smells like an impasse.
Oakland, you deserve a ballpark. In the meantime, enjoy Fantasy Island.