Lew Wolff Had a Plan All Along
By Tony Frye
Much has been written, discussed, blogged, tweeted, podcasted and speculated about the Oakland Athletics and their desire for a new stadium. Oakland fans who follow the soap opera that has become of this process are divided into two camps. There are those who want the team to stay in the bay area and don’t mind a move to San Jose (or Fremont or Dublin for that matter) and there are those that demand the Athletics remain in Oakland where they have played for nearly 50 years.
While the “stay in the bay” supporters are labeled as Lew Wolff shills by the stAy crowd, the stAy crowd have been labeled as fans of the city over the team. Neither side is right. Neither side is wrong.
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What is interesting is that it all comes down to Lew Wolff. I have written recently about Lew Wolff “not being the devil” and discussed how his actions make good business sense even if they don’t jibe with what we as fans necessarily desire. The critics of Lew Wolff, of which I am frequently one, were eager to jump on Twitter and in the comments to talk to me about how Lew Wolff was eager to leave Oakland from the day he took over the team but I am here, in an effort to get more comments calling me an idiot, to tell you that it’s just not true.
When Lew Wolff was hired by the Schott ownership group as the Vice President of Venue Development in 2003 he was tasked with finding the Oakland Athletics a new home. His recommendation then was that a new coliseum be built in the parking lot of the current site and when he applied to MLB to become owner of the Athletics he famously said,
"“We’re totally focused on seeing the Oakland situation through…We’re strictly adhering to Major League Baseball’s district (rules), which we would expect people would do for us. We understand the rules. The rules are fair. We’re following the rules.”"
That was good enough to get his application for ownership approved by the major league owners.
The fact remains, Lew Wolff is only a 10% share holder in the team. John Fisher is the majority owner and there’s at least one other man in the mix, civil rights lawyer Guy Saperstein. In 2009 there was quite a bit of back in forth, in the media of course, between the Athletics, Oakland city council, the JPA (the board that manages the stadium site) and major league baseball. Even state senator, and Oakland resident, Barbara Boxer got involved by writing a letter to Commissioner Bud Selig urging him to force the Athletics to stay in Oakland. That sparked Guy Saperstein, also an east bay resident, to write a strongly worded letter to Mrs. Boxer refuting her claims and criticizing her involvement altogether. You can read the full text of that letter HERE but I’m going to hit a few of the big points in a bit.
SFGate writer Zennie Abraham refuted much of Saperstein’s letter but it is my experience that people rarely get worked up and write a letter and fill it with easy to refute lies when they’re trying to make the point that the original (Boxer) letter was filled with bad information. In fact, all of Abraham’s problems with the Saperstein letter are personal and not based on any facts. Saperstein was making a case that Oakland was not supporting the Athletics to counter Boxer’s claims that Oakland has always supported the Athletics.
Here’s where it gets interesting in relation to the current issues. It has long been argued by the “stay in Oakland” crowd that Lew Wolff has never pursued an Oakland site despite him urging Schott to do so in 2003. Saperstein points out that the JPA spent $140 million to build Mount Davis, entered into a contract with the Raiders that was shorter than the length of time needed to pay back that $140 million and, in the process of paying that back, were subsidizing the Raiders to the tune of $20 million a year while also giving the Warriors $100 million but refused to split the costs of a $500,000 feasibility study on building a baseball-only stadium on the current location.
"“The Coliseum Authority couldn’t even scrape together $250,000 to try to keep its biggest asset! The Authority has allowed the Raiders and Warriors to bankrupt it and there is nothing left for the A’s, despite the fact that the A’s, unlike the Raiders, Warriors and 49′ers, always have been willing to pay for building their own stadium.”"
The last part of the quote is pretty telling and flies in the face of claims that the Athletics don’t have the financing to build a stadium any more than the Raiders do. From the get-go, though, A’s ownership have stood firm that they were going to build a stadium with their own money so that, and this is a pretty smart business move, they could recoup their costs and make money on the building as well as the team. Where was this money going to come from? Wolff had a plan for that, too.
"I recall specifically Lew proposing to build a 3,000+ unit housing project and several hundred thousand feet of retail space near the Coliseum and taking the profits from this development to finance a stadium at little or no cost to the taxpayers of Oakland."
Now, that plan may not have worked out the way Lew intended if the completion of that project coincided with the start of the recession but that is true of any long term development investment. Regardless of the immediate return on that investment, it would have been a great economic boost to the city of Oakland and set up the surrounding area exactly how Wolff had envisioned it for Fremont and San Jose. According to the letter, councilman Larry Reid was the lone supporter of this project.
"…when Lew first asked me to become part of the ownership, I said I would love to do it, but I didn’t want to be part of an ownership which just bought and moved the team. Lew assured me that he would make a full effort to stay in Oakland and I don’t think he and his son, Keith, have left a single stone unturned in their efforts to make Oakland work for the A’s."
The letter also mentioned the drastically different population growth between San Jose and Oakland and the fact that only 19% of A’s fans come from Oakland. While that may be true, I’m sure if you start factoring in Berkeley, Emeryville, San Leandro, San Lorenzo, and Hayward, all with close proximity, the number goes up much higher.
I’m sure the people who will be most critical of this article haven’t read this far down but for those of you who have, please remember that I am not the biggest Lew Wolff fan. The fact that A’s ownership constantly have these boxing matches in the media drives me crazy. Further, I’m not a fan of the A’s moving to San Jose, where I live, strictly because of the traffic and congestion issues that it simply can’t handle (drive near Levi on game day if you think I’m wrong). It would be wildly more convenient for me if the 30 or so home games I attend were within five miles of my home but I’d rather make the drive. All I’m saying is that efforts have been made in regards to Oakland and while it’s still not off the table, it makes good business sense for the Athletics to look elsewhere, although San Jose is a stupid place to look based on the territorial rights alone.
Why is Lew so adamant on building on the current site instead of Jack London Square? Because building at Jack London Square is going to cost someone, probably tax payers, $500 million just to start construction with an extension of BART, relocation of affected businesses, and rebuilding surface streets to accommodate 81 days of 30,000+ non-indigenous visitors to what is largely a non-commercial area.
So, for all the people who think Lew Wolff and the A’s organization have done nothing to stay in Oakland, I think the argument can be made that they’ve done more for Oakland than they did for San Jose where they’ve merely purchased land rights. Have they done it all the right way? Absolutely not. Wolff’s inability to give a straight forward answer when pressed about the topic and the organizations public lack of respect for Oakland leadership have done as much to hurt the process as anything else but efforts have been made. If Wolff really wanted San Jose, he’d be building his 3,000 homes and shopping complex down there right now and suing MLB (San Jose is suing on their own volition without the support of Lew Wolff or the Athletics) to restructure the territorial rights.
As always, your comments are welcome. If you’d like to hear both sides of the argument, be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes as we interview prominent bloggers from both camps.
"But should an investment of half a billion dollars for a new stadium to meet the needs of present and future Bay Area baseball fans be based on your, my and/or Doug’s convenience or on a sound economic foundation?"