PROPOSED, A TRADE

Coming out of the hills the other night you could see the glow of the Coliseum lights through the misting rain, and I thought how it sucked to be a member of the Coliseum grounds crew and have to work out in that cold and nasty wet weather to get ready for the next day’s game.

When I got home I turned on Channel 2 and found that it wasn’t the grounds crew but Terrance Long who was pacing around in the A’s centerfield, in front of a handful of folks in the stands huddled under programs and umbrellas.

Though we don’t like to talk about it, that’s always been the real problem with Bay Area baseball. Not the apathy of the fans. Not the proximity of the teams in a small market. Not the idiocy of building on Candlestick Point or the equal idiocy of the building of Mount Davis. It’s the fact that it gets t’urrible cold ‘round here at night, spring and fall alike, and while you can put up with freezing at a football game, baseball is just too slow to keep your blood warm.

For the fans’ sake, for the region’s sake, for the game’s sake, we should have built the Coliseum in Pleasanton or Walnut Creek, beyond the hills where the wind don’t blow off the bay. But Oakland wanted to be major league and so it seems like we’re going to follow this thing out to the bitter end, like explorers watching their toes fall off crossing the South Pole ice pack, insisting that if we find just the right downtown location, or turn home plate to face in just the right direction, or get just the right set of owners, then we could make this experiment work.

Meanwhile, the City Manager is convinced that building a new baseball stadium in downtown Oakland will not only revive baseball attendance in Oakland, it will revive downtown Oakland as well. Although one should never denigrate the expertise of Mr. Bobb…after all, he does this for a living…I’m not sure he appreciates the complexity of the problem. The problems of Oakland are not quite like the problems of Baltimore and Denver, and so I’m not certain how much this ongoing Grand Tour of America’s Stadiums is going to help. This calls for a more creative solution. Therefore, in the tradition of baseball general managers everywhere, I propose a trade.

Let’s give up, say, ten blocks of downtown Oakland for a stadium site on the other side of the hills.

Talk to people in the Bay Area, and the big problem with getting shoppers to come into downtown Oakland is fear. It must be an irrational fear, because these non-Oaklanders will shop in an area that has as rough a history as Oakland, with a serious drug and prostitution problem and where even gambling is legal. That community is called Emeryville, and it’s entirely surrounded by Oakland. In fact, you can’t really tell where Oakland ends and Emeryville begins. But folks just don’t seem to want to shop in Oakland.

So why not Concord?

Concord doesn’t have a bad name. And Concord has certainly shown that it knows how to put together a successful business district. So give Concord that whole uptown Fox Oakland tract. Call it West Concord or something, just so folks don’t think it’s Oakland. Oakland’s gain will be the enhancement of development in the area surrounding, the same way we said it would work with a downtown ballpark.

We’d keep the A’s, Oakland name and all, and get a ballpark in an area where folks won’t freeze. Having an Oakland-owned ballpark out in Concord would make us more like San Francisco, which owns an airport near San Mateo and a waterfall in Yosemite.

If there ain’t enough room in Concord for a stadium, make it a three-way deal with, say, Pittsburg. That ought to keep’em confused come intraleague time. And if Concord says we’re not giving them enough, then we could throw in an extra, such as, maybe, a light-hitting mayor, well-traveled, hardly ever used, guaranteed to guarantee to put them on the map.

Makes about as much sense as all these other proposals we’ve been hearing.