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27 March 2006

Staying on point

At this point Lew Wolff must be getting tired of giving the same unrevealing answers about the state of the A's. Here's another set of vague quotes, courtesy of SF Business Times scribe Eric Young. Young also wrote an article on how stadium enhancements are allowing both the A's and Giants to pull greater revenues during spring training. One interesting factoid: the A's pay the City of Phoenix $400,000/year on rent at Phoenix Muni. That's almost as much as what they pay at the Coliseum for far fewer dates.

The A's are playing a sold-out exhibition game on Thursday against the River Cats in Sacramento. If a reporter or columnist with the Sacramento Bee gets ahold of Wolff, we'll see how the inevitable "What about Sacramento?" is handled. We can almost be certain of another Marcus Breton love letter to the A's.

If for some reason you still had some hope for the A's new home to be at the Oakland Uptown site, the final nail has been pounded into your optimism's coffin. Forest City and Macfarlane Partners signed a 66-year ground lease on the Uptown land. Yes, construction has already started there.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

News regarding Oaklands Uptown site is bad news, even for this San Jose ballpark supporter. I always thought the Uptown location was the best site for an A's ballpark in Oakland (even better than San Jose's Diridon South). The Fox Theater in center field, with the Oakland skyline looming over the outfield. Based on the old HOK renderings, it would have been a gem of a ballpark, and the surrounding area could have easily been on par with San Diego's Gaslamp District or Denvers LoDo.

Georob said...

Wolff feels that closing off the third deck really hasn't an impact, and I'm not surprised. Though the A's average attendance was around 26-27K last year, it's far lower when you throw out the Yankee and Giant games of over 40,000. Therefore, reducing capacity to 34,000 still leaves plenty of room for walk-up sales.

What will make the biggest diffrence is if the team has a strong start this year. That would hopefully generate enough early buzz to get more tickets sold for summer games. Whether those tickets are part of packages will be interesting to follow.

Otherwise, it's going to take a strong post-season showing to affect season ticket sales for 2007. Unforuntately, Zito's expected departure and any official announcements about the team leaving Oakland might put a damper on that.

And Tony, I agree about Uptown. However, that site predates Wolff's involvement with the team, and he'd still have needed a place for his "ballpark village" to finance it. Of course, he could have done it through entitlements, but one of the reasons why he likes Pacific Commons is that he'd have room for his village despite the fact that it's far from the proposed BART station.

Marine Layer said...

That's a good one. No actual relation, though Judge Wolff's and Lew Wolff's sons are about the same age and have first names that start with the letter "K".