Another try for the Olympics

Yesterday San Francisco made the list of five finalists for the US Olympic Committee's bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics. The others are Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Notably absent is New York City, winner of the 2012 bid that eventually lost to London. USOC officials are scheduled to visit San Francisco for two hours on the afternoon of May 18, after first visiting LA in the morning. BASOC has a press release touting great business support throughout the region.

The debates that surrounded the last organizing effort at times highlighted how fractured and territorial the Bay Area is. There was criticism that the too many venues were centered in Stanford, not in San Francisco. The idea of bringing BART all the way around the Bay was also heavily debated, just as it still is today with the BART-to-San Jose effort. Plus there's always a question about whether or not hosting the Olympics is just a gigantic pork barrel project.

What should be interesting is how the SF bid will look once it's available to the public. Many things have changed since November 2002, when NYC narrowly beat SF in what shouldn't have been considered a shocker (post-9/11 patriotism), but was a shocker nonetheless. Among the changes:

• Stanford Stadium, which was going to be rebuilt as the centerpiece Olympic Stadium, is being converted to a much smaller, 50,000-seat, football-specific venue. It could be a great soccer stadium for the Games, but it won't handle much else.
• Where would the new Olympic Stadium be built? Would it be the 49ers' new stadium? The Candlestick Point/Lennar development could be shaped to fit a Stadium/Olympic Village concept.
• Baseball and softball have been, for the time being, taken off the Olympic competition list. That would render AT&T Park and a future A's ballpark useless, unless both were used for other field sports such as soccer or field hockey, or unless the IOC were petitioned to bring the sports back into the fold.
• An extensive plan was in place to develop Moffett Field into the Olympic Village. Since then Moffett has been split into multiple uses: consolidated military housing run by the Army, Air National Guard post, expanded NASA center, Google-plex. Would the Olympic Village even be feasible at Moffett at this point? And could someone figure out what to do with Hangar One?
• The 2012 bid had beach volleyball at Edwards Stadium at Cal. Since we're conveniently located on the Pacific, how about having beach volleyball on, I don't know, an actual beach like Santa Cruz Main Beach or Ocean Beach in SF?
• The tennis venue would not be at an existing facility, such as Taube Family Stadium at Stanford. A new complex would be built at Mission College (not sure how this would go over with my parents, who live in Sunnyvale less than a mile from the site).

Not to belabor the points, but the keys to this bid have to be the Olympic Stadium and Olympic Village. It would be best to place them in areas that are easily accessible by mass transit (BART or the very least MUNI or VTA light rail), yet are also easy to secure. Either Candlestick Point (if someone can figure out how to keep the place warm at night during the summer) or the Coliseum complex could be good candidates. Either way it would be expensive. A track stadium does not have preferable design characteristics for a NFL stadium, so it would have to be designed to temporarily accommodate the Olympics and permanently handle football. However, it would appear that such construction would be the only truly significant project to undertake, which, relative to what's been done at previous Olympics in Atlanta and Salt Lake, would be peanuts. Many of the area's venues have been built, recently renovated, or are undergoing renovation. This includes Stanford Stadium and Maples Pavilion on the Farm, and Memorial Stadium and Haas Pavilion in Berkeley.

That leaves the transportation problem. Several issues abound there - even if Santa Clara County Measure A passed in June, there'd be a big scramble to get BART up and running by the time the Olympics began. Caltrain would absolutely have to be electrified to make it efficient enough to provide the number of Peninsula trips that would be required. There'd be a few venues spread out in places like Napa and Sacramento, but those are for more genteel pursuits like equestrian events or niche water sports like canoeing and kayaking. How would the region deal with the traffic? Would BART run 24/7? Caltrain?

The Olympics' possible effects on the A's? Probably nil.

A traffic snapshot

Before I left work today, I went to 511 and took a quick snapshot of the East Bay traffic scene. The typical choke points were heavy as usual, except for greater traffic near the Coliseum due to tonight's game (click the pic for a larger version).

SFGate A's blogger Vlae Kershner picked up on the snake-mongoose vibe between me and drummer510 through our traffic-related posts from a couple of days ago. That makes this snapshot a good illustration of where the problem doesn't lie. 880 South from San Leandro on down is pretty clear, with an expected slowdown at the 92 interchange and another one at Mowry Ave in Newark. 680 south has a couple of short bad spots near Danville and Walnut Creek, while everything from the 580 interchange south is smooth sailing. 238 is acting like 238 does, so a detour from 580 along Fairmount/Hesperian would be in order.

From the South Bay, 880 is remarkably clear coming towards the ballpark (the pink "X"), while 680 has its usual backup as it approaches Mission Blvd/262, a few miles before the Sunol Grade. 237 eastbound is in better shape than usual. And from the Peninsula, both the San Mateo and Dumbarton bridges are fairly congestion free, at least until they reach 880.

Periodically, I'll take other snapshots of this reverse commute and of the journey into Downtown San Jose.

A's SuperStation: A Missed Opportunity

With all of the upheaval happening in cable and broadcast television, it can be difficult to keep track of the casualties. Take for instance the once-fledgling networks, UPN and WB. Both thought they could be the next FOX by following the FOX blueprint of making shows for specific target audiences. In UPN's case the audience was blacks, followed by sci-fi. For WB, the target was the under-30 crowd. The failure of both experiments was finally made clear as parent companies Warner and Viacom announced a joint venture that would bring the best of the two networks together. The new network will be called CW, a nod to its Warner and CBS/Viacom roots. Its target audience will once again be young people, evidenced by its holding onto UPN's WWE franchise and several WB dramas.

Most of the stations that will make the switch to CW are currently WB affiliates. This is not the case in the Bay Area, where current UPN station KBHK-44 will be the local CW affliate. Moreover, FOX's recently announced and also youth-oriented My Network TV will appear on stations around the country formerly occupied by UPN/WB. The Bay Area is an exception in this case too, as KRON-4, once the proud local NBC affiliate, will carry My Network TV's limited (and based on KRON's existing programming, anti-KRON) lineup.

So what's to become of KBWB, the current WB-20 (formerly KOFY)? Parent company Granite Broadcasting had its earnings call today, and it announced that KBWB and WDWB-Detroit will be sold to a consortium of investment groups (including at least one hedge fund) for $150 million. KBWB and WDWB were supposed to be sold last year to a group that included several Granite shareholders, but the CW announcement effectively killed the sale so no network would be affiliated. In 1998, former station owner James Gabbert (does anyone remember the subliminal message scandal from several years back?) sold KOFY for $170 million to Granite, which immediately changed the call letters to KBWB. According to WDWB's Wiki entry, Granite is in danger of default (though it's not clear if the default is for either station or both), so it makes sense that the deal was for cash.

This looked like a unique opportunity for certain Bay Area investors if they felt emboldened by their $54 million equity gain (hint hint). There were several advantages for the A's if they acquired or partnered in acquiring KBWB:

• They'd be able to finally quell criticism about poor signal emanating from KICU-36. KBWB's transmitter is on the always centrally located Mt Sutro, not in Fremont (KICU's current locale) or near Loma Prieta (KICU's former locale).
  
• In future arrangements, the team would have full control over how many games could be on KBWB, as opposed to either FSN Bay Area or Comcast Sportsnet. The A's would finally have their own broadcasting megaphone, which should automatically give them some leverage over the regional sports networks (RSN's) and cable operators. They could also exercise a "convenient" revenue agreement between the team and station, the kind KTVU-2 and the Giants supposedly enjoy.
• The entry price could be extraordinarily low, especially compared to the $700 million Young Broadcasting paid to buy KRON.
  
• The A's would avoid the subscriber-carry problems that come with starting up a RSN.
• The A's would immediately have a larger audience for advertisers than with a cable network relegated to digital-only, as CSN and FSN+ currently are.
• An agreement could be put together starting in, say, 2011, in which Bay Area broadcasts would be handled by KBWB while Sacramento and the Central Valley would have broadcasts on CSN.
  
• Control over the station would allow them to do more brand-building exercises, such as game replays or capsules (FSN did these a while back), or extended or more frequent pre-game shows. AN TV anyone?
• In 2004, Granite invested in a DTV setup to replace the station's old analog equipment. That means the station is able to do HDTV out of the box, and they'd have the potential for two additional digital channels (AN TV anyone?). More HD broadcasts of A's games can't be a bad thing.
  
• Should the A's really go after a MLS franchise, they'd immediately have a local broadcasting platform that MLS would kill for.
• By including the station in the A's ownership group's holdings, franchise value could go up significantly, perhaps as much as it would once a new ballpark is up and running.
• Success gained in the local television market should lead to the radio market opening up nicely for the A's.
  

Obviously, there are caveats to such an acquisition. Programming an independent station outside of the sports programming tends to be a crapshoot these days, with the virtually unlimited number of syndicated shows - especially crappy shows that really don't deserve to be in syndication. There are existing broadcasting agreements that would have to expire before the A's could get really aggressive with their own network. They'll have to hire industry veterans that know how to run stations - they could keep KBWB's staff intact. The A's have a long road towards proving themselves a worthwhile ratings performer on TV. And a "free" TV station wouldn't net the handsome subscriber fees a cable-based RSN would. The price would have been $75 million for the KBWB. It's easy for me to judge when it's not my money, but $75 million doesn't sound like a large amount when one considers the potential above.

Think about it. Wouldn't this have been a great way to enter the media market and solidify the A's presence? Would it not be a huge paradigm shift, moving from being a team with little leverage over its broadcasting future to one with potentially enormous leverage? If the A's were surveying the market, they should have been aware of the possibilities. Did they show any interest? I intend to find out.

Fremont's traffic situation

When news about the Pacific Commons location came out weeks ago, one of the chief complaints was related to traffic. The idea was that a Fremont-based ballpark would only exacerbate existing commute problems. However, I am here to tell you today that most of that claim is wrong.

Before I go further into "why" it's important to understand how the commute through South Fremont compares to others in the Bay Area. Throughout the dot-com boom era, the routes from Alameda and Contra Costa Counties into Silicon Valley were nearly unbearable. With the bust came relief for many commuters, enough that no part of the East Bay-South Bay commute is on MTC's Top Ten list. That's not to say the area isn't congested - it definitely is - but the picture of gridlock many have painted simply isn't there. It should continue to get better as additional improvements are made in the area. Among these changes:

• Widening 880 between Mission Blvd (262) and 237. A revamped 880/237 interchange has helped to get commute traffic better separated from Milpitas local traffic, but it's the widening of 880 that will have truly significant effects.

  The diagram above shows the existing bottleneck on the left. Three lanes to handle converging traffic is a recipe for delay. Once widening is completed, 680-based/bound and HOV traffic will be separated from the existing north/south flow. Of course, that relief won't be fully realized until the...

• Completion of the 880/Mission Blvd interchange. Scheduled for opening in 2008, this new interchange will solve two big traffic problems by providing a direct route for 680-based/bound traffic and by offering a separate exit ramp for local traffic, which according to ACTA, accounts for 45% of the area's congestion. Clearly, the original designers of the interchange had no idea that so much development would spring up around South Fremont.

  Current

  

  Future

  

  There will still be an issue in routing HOV traffic from 880 to 680, but solutions for that issue are in planning stages as well.

The 880/Mission construction project also causes a southbound bottleneck in the afternoon. Once completed, this should be eliminated since traffic is not particularly heavy at that time and in that direction. Along the 880 corridor, the 880/92 interchange would be the one remaining bottleneck. On 680, traffic should be fairly smooth, except perhaps for the area near 580 and Stoneridge.

The end result would be that if you're driving to Fremont from elsewhere in the East Bay for an A's game, you shouldn't be adversely impacted. If you're coming from the South Bay, you'll have to contend with an existing commute backup, but one that will be made much more bearable with the improvements that should be completed well before a first pitch is thrown in a Pacific Commons ballpark. If you're coming from the Peninsula, you'll still have to contend with a bridge.

Moving forward: NYC, Minny, and Sac?

While the threat of franchise relocation may be cooling, some cities looking to keep their teams haven't shown an aversion to throwing tons of public money a team's way.

Take the Yanks and Mets deals. Both will rely on the issuance of public, tax-free bonds to finance both ballparks. No taxes are being raised to pay for either project, but both teams will pay off the debt using PILOTs, or "Payments-In-Lieu-Of-Taxes." In this case, the taxes would be property taxes that would be levied on the land improvements. The use of government-issued bonds may be illegal, so the IRS is going to take a look at it.

The Twins are using the typical playbook in bypassing a referendum for their sales tax hike. Yesterday the Minnesota House passed the Twins' stadium bill. The state Senate is expected to be more baseball-friendly than the House. All signs point to the Twins staying put.

Closer to home, Sacramento pols are trying to put together a public financing plan for a new Kings arena. To accomplish this, they're attempting to circumvent the 2/3 voter approval required for a specific-use sales tax hike. If this sounds familiar, Santa Clara County is doing the same thing with their Measure A "BART tax." If you're wondering, there's no mention of the A's anywhere in that article, which should be a clear indicator of where Sac's focus is - not on the A's.

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Tonight is the last San Jose ballpark EIR outreach meeting (City Hall, 14th floor, Room 1446, 6 p.m.). Thank you, SJRA, for scheduling it earlier - preventing a conflict with Sharks-Preds Game 4. I attended Tuesday night's game, and the Tank really did hit 113 dB after the first Marleau goal. Marc Morris's traffic-related comments document is available if you're interested. I didn't come away from the previous meetings overly convinced that the expanded traffic study (area and time) would take place. Hopefully the continually applied pressure will make it happen.

Election time

The June election is less than 6 weeks away, and some major things will be decided that could have an impact (direct or indirect) on the A's future in the Bay Area. Among the issues:

• Oakland's mayoral race could extinguish or revive any hope of retaining the A's within city limits. Frontrunner Ron Dellums appears to be convinced that the A's already have one foot out the door, while Ignacio De La Fuente has said he's willing to fight to keep the team.
• San Jose's mayoral race is wide open, and that means it's getting ugly. Yesterday, a Merc report linked Vice Mayor/mayoral candidate Cindy Chavez to the 11th hour, backroom deal for the Grand Prix race. Opponents Chuck Reed, Dave Cortese, and Michael Mulcahy seized upon the story, with Mulcahy calling for the Santa Clara County DA to investigate the matter further.
• Santa Clara County Measure A proposes a 1/2-cent sales tax hike that would fund hospitals, emergency services, and transportation - chiefly BART. At 8.75%, the County would tie Alameda County for the highest sales tax in the Bay Area. This tax is expected to be the deciding factor in the push for BART to San Jose, as its revenue stream is designed to make up for a federal funding component that hasn't materialized. Should BART not come to San Jose, the Warm Springs extension could be delayed indefinitely, even though they are technically "de-coupled."

I haven't been able to attend any Oakland forums/debates so far, but I'm going to try to make May 15th's forum sponsored by Oakland Community Organizations (location TBD). For Oakland residents I have a request: If you have the opportunity to pose A's or ballpark-related questions at any of the house parties or other events, please send me any feedback you get. I'll be happy to devote a new post (and attribute you) on the subject matter. As a San Jose resident, I'll be attending Saturday's Public Policy Forum (at City Hall Council Chambers, no mayoral candidates expected), the Monday and May 13 debates (also at City Hall Council Chambers). Living in downtown SJ makes it quite easy to attend such SJ-related events, Oakland's another story.

Wake me when a good offer comes

Over at The Hardball Times, Maury Brown provided an assessment of the three teams that are most often targeted for a possible move (Twins, A's, Marlins), along with potential target cities (San Antonio, Charlotte, Portland, Las Vegas, Norfolk). In his judgment, we shouldn't expect the A's to find greener pastures outside the Bay Area. I've felt the same way for some time, and I'll continue to concur until details about a knock-Lew's-socks-off deal from outside California are revealed.

For those that think a big, free stadium is just around the corner anywhere in North America - think again. Those days are over. You can point to the DC deal and how the public has been swindled, but that took an extreme amount of coordinated (some would say collusive) effort by MLB and the owners, and the payoff had to be huge (which it will be). That payoff is not happening anywhere else.

News: Keep the A's in Oakland blog, Twins move forward, Fremont

drummer510 has started up a blog called "Keep the A's in Oakland." It's an outreach-type blog that encourages like-minded folks to call and write Oakland pols and educate the public on what's possible in Oakland. I've given the author a few pieces of info to get him going, including my mock-up of the Broadway Auto Row site.

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The Twins appear to be in the home stretch of their political process to get a new open air ballpark approved. About three-fourths of the funding would come from a 0.15% sales tax hike in Hennepin County (Minneapolis, not St. Paul).

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A new article in the East Bay Business Times covers Fremont's vision for transformation, including the ballpark village concept and a new "downtown" area.

$54 million? Not bad for one year

Forbes finally released their annual team valuation list today. The usual suspects are at the top of the food chain, with the Yankees being the first team to surpass the $1 billion mark. The Washington Nationals had the biggest gain, jumping all the way to #6 with its $440 million value. That figure is in line with the expected sales price of still-ownerless franchise. Other low-revenue teams got a big boost as well, including the A's, who jumped from $180 million to $234 million in the calendar year the Wolff/Fisher group has owned the team. This rapid appreciation is due to the continuance of lucrative national TV deals and revenue sharing.

It gets more interesting when looking at how these numbers break down. Forbes usually gets the figures pretty close since franchise sale prices tend to come very close to Forbes' appraisals, so it should be pretty easy to accept these values even with the limited information MLB and the teams make available. Take a look at how the A's and Giants compare:

• Franchise value: A's - $234 million (+26% change), Giants - $410 million (+8% change)
• Debt-to-value ratio (less than 40% preferred): A's - 38%, Giants - 37%
  
• Wins-to-player cost ratio (% relative to per average wins-per-dollar of salary): A's - 116, Giants - 76
• Market value: A's - $73 million, Giants - $155 million
  
• Brand management: A's - $21 million, Giants - $50 million
• Season ticket rolls: A's - 8,000, Giants - 28,000

What do these numbers mean to you, the baseball consuming public? Not much if you're looking for huge future payroll increases. These are not liquid or cash figures. And don't be fooled by the Giants' debt-to-value ratio. Other teams with higher debt have ancillary assets they can sell off to reduce the load, the Giants don't unless Magowan and Co. are willing to dig deep into their own portfolios.

On the other hand, the market value and brand management numbers are telling. In both cases, the Giants more than double the A's. The Giants have 350% more season ticket holders, though that could change drastically for the worse next season. This raises more than a few questions, such as:

• How much are the A's and Giants tapping into their relative markets, and the Bay Area as a whole?
• Are the A's low values due more to the stadium, ineffective marketing, or other factors?
• How much of a difference will a new ballpark for the A's really make in the grand scheme of things?

Should the A's get a ballpark built soon and ink better media deals, they could see a surge similar to what the *ahem* Anaheim Angels experienced.

San Jose news

This installment comes from San Jose City Hall's Council Chambers, where the third ballpark EIR outreach meeting is being held. There are less than twenty people in the gallery this time, due in part to Soccer Silicon Valley calling off the dogs for now. As new items come up during the session, I'll post them here.

Update (22:15): The Q&A was focused on perceived inadequacies in the Draft EIR. They ranged from expanding the traffic study to cover a larger area and the 6-7 p.m. timeframe, to questions about mitigation costs (not currently covered).

That brings up a source of consternation. While there have been recent updates to the Diridon/Arena and Midtown plans to cover new projects, there's a lack of clarity on how the ballpark will affect more than just the study area. The EIR aims to cover some of this, but there's a general feeling that there's no overall vision. Impacts from individual projects are narrowly studied and focused, so there's no sense of how they are woven into the fabric of the whole community. Whatever happens with the EIR, there will be some heated debate when the Planning Commission holds its hearing on July 12. The first mayoral election will have taken place and the results should at the very least thin the herd for a November runoff.

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On the blog San Jose Inside, contributor "Single Gal" started a serious discussion over the ballpark, mayoral candidates, and the city's vision. She brought up candidate Michael Mulcahy and the notion that he may get votes simply because he's so close to the situation. Not to be lost in all of this is candidate David Pandori's swipe at Mulcahy over the weekend.

Yesterday, word came that Adobe is going forward with plans to acquire the 5.5-acre SJWC east parcel. There goes one major piece of a ballpark village, at least a viable piece for commercial use. As for the residentially zoned west parcel, nothing's been announced yet.

One bit of non-San Jose news that can apply universally: Phoenix is losing $3 million per year on a 2,800-space garage built north of Chase Field (formerly Bank One Ballpark). Promises of 90% capacity as a multi-use parking facility never came to fruition. The garage only gets significant use during the Snakes' home games.

Ticket price comparison

The start of the baseball season is usually accompanied by two neat statistical news releases. Forbes Magazine's 2006 team valuation figures are not available, but Team Marketing Report's newest MLB Fan Cost Index is. It shouldn't come as a surprise that the elimination of the Coliseum's third deck led to a 25% increase in the average price of a seat. What is surprising is the fact that many teams with new stadiums are towards the bottom of the list. Granted, most of those teams (Detroit, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee) have been perennial cellar-dwellers in medium-to-small markets, but there appears to be a clear correlation between on-field success and ticket price. Baltimore and Seattle charged a hefty premium when their teams were more successful and their stadia were newer. As both went into the tank in the last few years, price hikes have been fewer.

To put things into perspective, here are a few more bullet points that you might find interesting:

1. In 1999, the A's average ticket price was $10.10. That means that in seven years, ticket prices have gone up 118%.
   
2. 1999 payroll was only $26 million. The current payroll is $62 million, a 138% increase. Pay-to-play is the name of the game.
3. There's no better indicator of MLB clubs' revenue disparity than ticket prices. Ten years ago, Boston had the highest ticket price - $15.43. Cincinnati had the lowest - $7.95. Boston still holds the mantle of as ticket price champ, with its average price at $46.46. Kansas City now has the lowest - $13.71. There's also a multiplier effect because teams like the Red Sox, Yankees, and Cubs routinely sell their seasons out, as opposed to the oft-lackluster attendance records of the lower-revenue teams.

The Fan Cost Index is frequently cited by analysts and economists, but it tends to paint the fan experience with too broad a brush. Before his untimely passing, Doug Pappas wrote an article for Baseball Prospectus that deconstructed the FCI and sought to obtain more granular, circumstance-based data.

Now that the A's have raised ticket prices 25% over last season, what's in store for the remaining years on the Coliseum lease? And what can we expect when a new ballpark is opened? Will it have a China Basin-like pricing structure, or will it look like PNC Park's tiering system?

Third deck closure (again)

A new piece in Slate by SF Weekly contributor Tommy Craggs provides a nice forward for today's upcoming post on ticket prices. Craggs bemoans the loss of the Coliseum's upper deck, especially section 310, where he and his friends frequently sat during games. Perhaps a little too romantically he writes, "Underpoliced and sparsely populated, the coliseum's scruffy upper deck was perfect—the ballpark equivalent of Wyoming." There's value in being able to stretch out, place one's jacket on an adjacent chair, or use the next row of seats as a footrest. It's also nice to be able to render a printed row and seat assignment useless. Plus it doesn't hurt that vertical circulation in the Coliseum has always been excellent, making "trading up" quite easy.

Of course, Craggs doesn't mention that sitting in 310 often made one feel like he was watching the game while actually sitting in Wyoming. Believe me, I'm a cheap guy who loves my bleacher seats and used the "View level" as a reliable fallback when the bleachers were sold out, but the seating bowl's curvature was not conducive to actually watching a ballgame. I've had a chance to sit in every section in the Coliseum, even the odd Loge boxes in the corners that act as not-quite skyboxes. I absolutely sympathize with AN's Brian in 317 and FreeSeatUpgrade, who have championed the upper deck ever since the announcement to close it was made. Unfortunately, they're a small subset of A's fandom, and their counterparts in other cities have been slowly becoming extinct over the past two decades - or at the very least homeless.

The funny thing is that the upper deck vibe hasn't completely evaporated. It appears to have moved to the Plaza Outfield area (formerly Plaza Bleachers). While these sections are more likely to be sold out for high-demand games, the typical weekday series against Texas or Kansas City will render the Plaza Outfield a veritable pasture. There are far fewer desirable seats (front row for the most part) in Plaza Outfield because so much of the outfield is obstructed by the sheer height of the deck. It's still an interesting vantage point, especially if one get there early enough to sit in dead center.

My cynical side points to a strictly business ethos in the closing of the upper deck, in that sections 315-319 were too good. Similar seats in other stadia cost upwards of $20. Yet A's fans were only paying $9, or $1 on Wednesdays. For many, the price of a View level ticket acted as a cover charge, and upon entering the stadium they made a beeline for the Field level. If not trading up, finding a slightly better perch in the upper deck was likely as long as there were plenty of empty seats in the area.

Last September, Craggs also wrote about the ballpark design Wolff unveiled in his August press conference. He alluded to the scarcity issue in that piece as well, though in the throes of a pennant race I doubt anyone was even considering the idea that Wolff would experiment with the stadium in such a drastic way. The days of an A's being an inexpensive social scene are coming to an end.

Or are they? Certainly there are potentially innovative ways to bring these fans in without completely destroying their wallets, right? The A's transitioned several season ticket holders from the 300's during the offseason, but what about the young, spur-of-the-moment types? For them, I think there is a good solution: student sections. It works in college basketball and football, why not at an A's game? The student sections could be specially designated areas of either the bleachers or upper deck, with discounted tickets and special green T-shirts. Student sections at college hoops and football games tend to be loud, so they'd naturally work for cheering and heckling in baseball. Non-students would be welcome too, but a certain percentage of those seats would be set aside for students - say 500-1,000. At the new ballpark non-premium bar could be built into the stadium for the kids to visit after games - with a ticket stub acting as free admission. The best part is that it would be easy to market ticket packages to schools and students.

Some may argue that this environment is already in place at the Coliseum, but not the way I've defined it. The LF bleachers are always raucous due to the culture that's been there for decades. When the A's move to new digs, tickets will become even more scarce, which could further push fans away. Why not take a proactive approach and give it a new marketing twist? The more of those young fans can be kept in fold, the more likely they'll sign up for better seats as they get older, earn more money, have families, etc. Wolff said he likes the "neighborhood" concept being deployed at many new ballparks. Well, Lew, here's a group of fans just waiting for a neighborhood. What can you do for them?

Wolff confronts the rumor mill, Part II

Furthering the effort to dispel any notion of a hidden agenda, Lew Wolff spoke with Merc scribe Mark Emmons and gave a little more insight into the business operations side of the A's. Apparently Wolff owns 12% of the team, a partnership (which I assume includes members of the DiNapoli family) owns 13%, and John Fisher controls the rest.

After the warm-fuzzy stuff in the article, they get down to the ballpark issue, which doesn't reveal anything new on the dealmaking front. However, there appears to be clarification on a number of subjects.

On looking outside the Bay Area:

He will look elsewhere "only if we bomb out here."

Regarding Oakland:

Wolff said he has not closed the door to Oakland, although there has been no sign of meaningful talks in months. He has been in discussions with Fremont and calls the site adjacent to Interstate 880, currently leased by Cisco Systems, "an excellent location.''

Then onto San Jose (emphasis mine):

Then there's the question of San Jose, which has twin hurdles: A ballpark presumably would need voter approval, and baseball gave the Giants territorial control of the market. Wolff, who also has been talking with Major League Soccer about bringing a new franchise to the city to replace the Earthquakes, insists he won't "tilt at windmills'' and fight the Giants' claim.

Added Selig: "San Jose is a dead issue. The thing that holds the sport together is its own internal rules. If you start to break them, you're going to have anarchy.''

But look at this from earlier in the article::

Yet ask Wolff, a prominent figure in San Jose redevelopment for almost four decades, what would be a good next step in the revitalization of the city's core, and he says: "If they could get the A's, that would help.''

After reading the article I had to re-read it again twice. Frankly, I don't know what to think. Some of the OAFC-ers seem to believe that Wolff and Selig are playing good cop/bad cop on this, though Selig hasn't been nearly as visible as Wolff and Selig's given more soundbites to the Marlins' cause than the A's (which is likely a vote of confidence in Wolff, not in Loria/Samson). I find it interesting that those who have dealt directly with Wolff have given a near-universal appraisal of the man as a "straight shooter" or any number of words that are synonyms for "honest." Those who haven't dealt with Wolff tend to have a more cynical or negative view. I've never met Wolff myself, so I can only temper things I've heard as a San Jose local (also positive) with the various bits of circumstantial evidence that exist.

Shrugging my shoulders as always...

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One more thing - I've added "Attendance Watch" to the sidebar. In my previous attendance analyses there has usually been a mention of standard deviation. I haven't done that yet with the figures because as the statheads usually say: Two weeks into the season is too small a sample size.

Two-team market dynamics + Scarcity revisited

Nate Silver of Baseball Prospectus wrote a piece analyzing attendance revenue for the four two-team markets. He wondered what effects one team's success had on the other. After running attendance revenue figures through a regression analysis, Silver surmises that for the most part, one team's success would have a symbiotic effect on its rival. The notable exception is Chicago, where loyalties seem to run the strongest.

As for the Bay Area, Silver wrote that either team had a slight but positive effect on the other:

Not much to look at here. Multiple choice--this is because (a) there’s a cleaner geographical distinction between the West and East Bays; (b) whatever Mapquest says, you couldn’t get from the Coliseum to SBC Park in 20 minutes if you were flying a Concorde; (c) Bay Area fans are characteristically non-committal and indifferent.

The last point is painfully true. Bay Area people are accustomed to having to drive an hour to get to work and at least 30 minutes to get to entertainment. I know plenty of Peninsula/SF people who never visit the other side of the Bay and East Bay folks who have little idea what the South Bay looks like. That begs the question, "How distinct are the four 'sides' of the Bay?" I've always thought it was a rather fluid dynamic because of the way I live, but maybe it isn't. Where does Fremont fit into all of this?

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Elsewhere, Chris Isidore of CNN/Money looks at how scarcity is affecting ticket prices and demand. He noted that the average ticket price of an A's game went up 25% from 2005 to 2006. That number coincides with the newest Fan Cost Index numbers released by Team Marketing Report.

I'd go further into the FCI, but I'll save that for next week.

Let's talk transit

The typical questions I'm getting now are "Where is the site?" and "How far is it from BART?" I've put together a couple of photos that give a pretty good representation.

First up is wide view of central and south Fremont. The yellow line represents the planned Warm Springs extension. The extension would run 5.4 miles, south from the existing Fremont terminus to Warm Springs. There is also an optional station that could be built in Irvington, roughly halfway between the two ends.

The aerial distance between Warm Springs BART and the Pacific Commons eastern boundary is 1.25 miles. Driving distance is 2.25 miles because there is no straight-line route. The next picture shows potential routes, yellow representing a bus/car route and pink an elevated guideway route for a BART, people mover, light rail, monorail, or aerial tram.

Now let's look at possible infill transit options. The assessment of positives and negatives is based on data I've seen for other transit projects and should be judged as speculative since there are no formally studied cost estimates. It also assumes that the Warm Springs Extension will be built, which is no certainty yet. BART could be extended west to the Pacific Commons site, but it could cost at least $200 million per mile. Because of the cost I will leave a BART extension off the list of solutions in the poll.

• Light Rail (LRT) could run on either surface streets in the area or on an elevated guideway to the area. Cost: $40-70 million per mile. Estimated one-way trip time from WSX BART: 5-7 minutes.

  

  Positives: Use of existing street infrastructure, familiarity, proven technology.

  Negatives: If street-based, would be the slowest system due to train sharing the road with cars. Some impact on businesses in affected area as roads are fitted with rails.

• Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) are buses an "express" variant of the a bus route, with high-tech features (GPS) and fewer stops. Cost: $5-10 million per mile. This would involve separate lanes for buses either along the median or along the curb. Estimated one-way trip time from WSX BART: 8-10 minutes.

  

  Positives: Usually will bypass unnecessary stops. Can use existing bus fleets if necessary. Traffic signals can be programmed to detect buses and let them through. Lower infrastructure costs than rail or dedicated guideway options.

  Negatives: May not elicit the same kind of public response as a solution with a dedicated guideway. Shares roads with other traffic.

• Shuttle bus. Cost: unknown. This option would probably use as much existing infrastructure as possible without building new infrastructure. Estimated one-way trip time from WSX BART: 10-12 minutes.

  

  Positives: Lowest startup and capital costs. Can accommodate the most stops. Can use existing bus stock, though new buses may need to be ordered as new routes are added. Buses can be easily added to accommodate demand.

  Negatives: Lesser public perception of buses when compared to rail-based service. Can add to short-term congestion before and after games.

• People movers are used throughout the US in airports for inter-terminal automated transportation. Cost: $30-60 million per mile. Estimated one-way trip time from WSX BART: 5-7 minutes.

  

  Positives: Less required right-of-way than BART. Lower construction costs when compared to other elevated guideway systems. Often fully automated. Can operate on high frequency headways.

  Negatives: Requires dedicated guideway which may be expensive.

• Aerial tramway (gondola) Cost: $40-70 million per mile. A project is underway in Portland, OR to ferry passengers between two sites using such as system. Estimated one-way trip time from WSX BART: 5-8 minutes.

  

  Positives: Possibly lower right-of-way and construction costs than rail options. Less environmental impact than other options. Could have lower maintenance costs. May become a tourist attraction on its own.

  Negatives: May hold an image as less safe than other options because the Bay Area is Earthquake country. Not a mainstream technology that immediately comes to mind as a mass transit solution.

• Personal or Group Rapid Transit (PRT/GRT). Cost: $30-60 million per mile. PRT uses numerous small, 4-8 person cabs on an elevated guideway. GRT uses larger cars that can hold 30 or more. Can run fully automated. Estimated one-way trip time from WSX BART: 5-7 minutes.

  

  Positives: Good on-demand potential. Supporters tout low startup costs.

  Negatives: May not be suited for event-based, high-demand usage such as baseball games. Not a widely deployed solution.

For now I've ruled out a pedestrian bridge option because of the 1.25-mile distance between WSX BART and Pacific Commons. The Warm Springs extension could open as early as 2012 should funding materialize. If this funding does not come through, or if the San Jose extension is not funded, the only solution for BART riders would be a bus that runs from the Fremont station. The trip would take 20 minutes. BART carries 15-20% of A's fans on any given game date. I have not included a monorail in this discussion for the time being because its benefits and costs are covered by other options like the people mover.

Oakland bites on the extension

In what can be construed as the only positive news to come out City Hall re: the A's in some time, Oakland officials and the Coliseum Authority agreed to a three-year extension for the A's. The extension could potentially keep the A's in the Coliseum through 2013. The structure of the deal is such that the pre-existing deal, which was guaranteed through 2007 and had one-year options through 2010, now guarantees the A's stay through 2010 and push the options out to 2011-2013. Some of the finer points:

• The lease allows the team to leave with 120 days notice without penalty if it moves to a 40,000-or-more capacity stadium in Alameda County.
• Should the team leave the area, it would have to pay the remainder of its lease and a $250,000 penalty.
• Whether the 2011-2013 years are optional or guaranteed has not yet been finalized.
• The payments will be higher than in the pre-existing lease, totalling $4.7 million over the last five years. The A's payment for 2006 is only $500K.

On the surface this sounds like a nice reciprocal goodwill gesture, but as I wrote earlier on this matter, simply pushing the options out three more years mostly benefits the A's since they get a nice safety in case a new ballpark is beset with delays. I suppose it makes City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente look better during an election year, and he certainly needs the help.

Taking off my cynical cap, it's possible that once the election's over, Oakland pols can get to work on a good Oakland site. Council member/mayoral candidate Nancy Nadel nixed my Broadway Auto Row idea. I think it deserves a second look.

Wolff confronts rumor mill

A second Argus article by Chris De Benedetti has Wolff fielding questions about the seemingly endless rumor mill (yes, I'm partly responsible for this) regarding the A's intentions. Alameda County Supervisor Scott Haggerty comes to Wolff's defense:

"I don't think in any way are the A's playing us against another community," said Alameda County Supervisor Scott Haggerty, who represents Fremont and grew up there. "The Wolffs are genuine people. They're the most sincere people I have ever met."

Wolff tried to quash the rumors as well:

"We don't have any hidden agenda," Wolff told The Daily Review last week. "Anyone who's a sports fan thinks everyone has a hidden agenda. Even if I wanted to go, I couldn't go."

Both Wolff and baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, a longtime friend and former college fraternity brother of Wolff's, also have said they have no intention of challenging the Giants' territorial rights in Santa Clara County. But supporters of bringing the A's to the South Bay point out that Wolff has several real estate holdings in San Jose.

The Mulcahy-DiNapoli connection was downplayed as well, simply as longtime business associates:

... the day after meeting with Fremont leaders, television cameras showed Wolff at the A's-New York Yankees game in Oakland, sitting next to San Jose mayoral candidate Michael Mulcahy.

Mixed messages?

"There is no intention of that," Wolff said.

He said there was little significance to their visit during the game, adding that Mulcahy owns A's season tickets near Wolff's seats and the two have known each other for years. Mulcahy's cousins are John and Jason DiNapoli, who own a small interest in the A's and have partnered with Wolff in some San Jose real estate deals.

"I've been a friend and a business partner with Lew Wolff for 30 years," Mulcahy said. "He's a supporter of mine."

Finally, Wolff issues a "firm" denial:

"We really want to stay in California, in the Bay Area, in the East Bay," he said.

"I don't know how many times I have to say that."

So are you satisfied with the responses? I know one thing: when this saga has finally played out and the A's have a new home, this blog will make for some interesting - and at times painful - retrospective reading.

Props to De Benedetti for tackling the rumor mill head-on.

Confidence in Fremont

The Argus's Chris De Benedetti reports that Fremont City Manager Fred Diaz is exuding confidence regarding the city's chances of luring Fremont.

"I think we are the lead candidate for the new home of the A's,'' Diaz added. "If there's a deal to make for both the A's and the City of Fremont, then we'll find it and make that happen.''

Though little news has emerged in the last week, the article appears to further confirm Fremont's now frontrunner status. Lew Wolff even has a few words for naysayers who dislike the current lack of transportation options at the Pacific Commons site:

"Everybody is looking for the negative here,'' he said. "There are lots of issues, and we'll deal with all of them. I don't have all the answers this minute.''

There will have to be three or four distinct mass transit solutions.

• Shuttle from the existing Fremont BART station
  
• Shuttle from the planned Warm Springs BART station (if it's built)
  
• ACE/Amtrak to the planned Pacific Commons station
  
• Bus/shuttle from Santa Clara County
  

Wolff also reaffirmed the notion that he's not looking for a public subsidy.

Santa Clara County - San José settlement

The long, bitter battle between Santa Clara County and San José appears to finally be over. A $33.5-36.5 million settlement to be paid by the City will go towards a new crime lab (excellent idea IMO). City and County had squared off in dueling lawsuits over County's desire to build a 7,000-seat, House of Blues-run concert hall on the County Fairgrounds. City wanted the concert hall downtown, either next to the new City Hall or across the street from St. Patrick's Cathedral.

The settlement doesn't mention anything about the concert hall, which leaves County with a dilemma: Do they go forward with it? Frankly, putting a swanky auditorium on County Fairgrounds makes little sense due to its location and lack of ancillary development, and when accounting for rising costs and litigation expenses, the concept may be less feasible than before. There happens to be one other venue that, because of a similar white elephant status, is now closed: Henry J. Kaiser Center in Oakland. SF's Bill Graham Civic Auditorium and SJ's Civic Auditorium have also struggled at times. Here's a suggestion for County: a soccer/football stadium with adjoining fields.

Beyond the concert hall, there are a few important impacts. Chief among them is that City will be able to go forward on its North San Jose development plans. City will still need to contribute other money for transit projects and it has issues to iron out with neighboring Santa Clara and Milpitas, but this is basically a green light. While most of the first phase of 5,000 housing units is spoken for, plans eventually call for up to 32,000 homes and 26.7 million square feet of office space. The glut of available commercial space makes office expansion unlikely, but homes can work should related infrastructure be built accordingly.

This potentially opens the door for the A's, who would have difficulty putting 2,000 homes anywhere near the Diridon South site (my guess is about 800-1000 tops). As part of a ballpark deal, SJ Redevelopment could local steer local tech firms with excess land towards the A's. That would allow the financing of a ballpark to take place and, more importantly, create a more palatable ballot measure for June 2007 that looks quite similar to the deal SF made with the Giants - only the A's wouldn't be overly dependent on ballpark-based revenue streams to pay the mortgage.

One problem with the deal: the settlement will come out of City's Redevelopment funds - the same funds that are being used to buy Diridon South. Will City have to sell additional land to finish the Diridon South purchase? Or will the payment occur after Diridon South is purchased?

This shouldn't surprise, but it will

Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal just posted their interview with Wolff that appeared in the April 7 print edition. Lots of non-answers to the questions that were posed. At some point these interviews will start to look like the lecture scenes in "Real Genius".

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So my eyes weren't deceiving me when San Jose mayoral candidate Michael Mulcahy appeared next to Lew Wolff in the first row on Tuesday. The Merc revealed that Mulcahy's cousins, John and Jason DiNapoli, are in fact part of the A's ownership group.

(pause to allow this to sink in)

Each adult member of the immediate Wolff family (that's five if you're counting) has given $500 to the Mulcahy campaign. You may remember my December post in which I mentioned Wolff selling a portion of downtown San Jose's Park Center Plaza to a group headed by two other DiNapolis. Naturally, the parking garage that's part of that block next to Hwy 87 has a Mulcahy banner hanging from the roof.

What's more interesting is the portion of the block that Wolff kept. In the southwest corner, across the street from the Adobe headquarters, is a rather nondescript, low-slung building with a sizable amount of surface parking. According to the Santa Clara County Registrar, this parcel is owned by a firm fronted by Wolff. Until recently the building held San Jose's first charter school, Downtown College Prep. In December, DCP moved into a more campus-like facility along the Alameda, west of downtown. The building found a new tenant quickly - another Latino-focused charter school called Escuela Popular. Unless Wolff is interested in allowing nonprofits to keep using an underutilized property in perpetuity, it's likely that the building will eventually be replaced. One of the biggest concerns San Jose residents have regarding the ballpark concept is the lack of parking, at the very least in relation to the requirements a new ballpark would entail. The 2-acre parcel could be extremely valuable at some point in the future. Wolff could build a 1,000-space parking garage (with Redevelopment's financial help, of course) there to handle the increased demand should a ballpark be built there. Or he could do a swap with Adobe, who's gunning for the SJWC property across the river/87. Or if he's bidding on the SJWC parcel and gets it, the school parcel could be a sort of gateway to the ballpark village. Housing may not be doable because of the SJC flight path overhead, but there probably aren't too many limitations on what could be done in terms of commercial use.

Going back to the DiNapoli-Mulcahy links, it's pretty obvious now that any talk of moving the A's out of state would have to come after all Bay Area opportunities are exhausted. With the combination of San Francisco interests (Fisher) and South Bay interests (Wolff-DiNapoli), it would appear that San Jose will have something to say about the A's future, whether by bringing the A's to San Jose or by pledging its support for Fremont.

Progress on the Fremont front

Today's Tracy Press has an article on the A's ongoing talks with Fremont and Cisco. Quotes come from Fremont city manager Fred Diaz, who appears to be up to his eyeballs in negotiation work.

The deal is still very much in the talking stage, and that places Fred Diaz, Fremont’s city manager and Tracy’s former city manager, right in the middle of the conversations.

“Everything is very positive right now,” Diaz told me over the phone this week. “I’ve met with Lew Wolff (the A’s owner) a number of times and more often with his son, Keith. They are very serious about this.”

...

Diaz said negotiations between Wolff and Cisco are nearing the final stages.

“Figuring out naming rights for the stadium is one of the last unresolved issues,” he said.

I had heard that Wolff already had a naming rights sponsor in mind when he entered these talks. Perhaps things have changed now that Cisco is officially in the picture. The San Jose-based networking firm already has a heavy advertising presence in the college basketball TV and pro football markets. The naming rights market has gotten sophisticated enough that much more than just the stadium can be sponsored. Club seating sections, lounges, and other architectural elements can all have a corporate name attached, as seen by Comerica's recently inked deal with HP Pavilion.

Odds and ends

Good links:

• A great technical document describing the noise problem for the University of Minnesota's planned football stadium is available. It contains an explanation of the impact of concert noise, which the San Jose Draft EIR has basically glossed over. I have yet to find anything that properly explains the impact of the inversion layer on sound, especially in the warm months. For those that wonder why I'm focusing on the noise issue so much - it's because any Bay Area location will probably have a huge environmental noise impact on surrounding neighborhoods. This is true whether it's in Oakland, Fremont, or San Jose.
• Marc Normandin's Beyond the Box Score blog has a nice interview with economist Andrew Zimbalist, who recently penned a book that I have purchased but haven't had a chance to read: In The Best Interests of Baseball: The Revolutionary Reign of Bud Selig.
• On the heels of the opening of Busch Stadium III is a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article about the Ballpark Village concept that is going up alongside the ballpark. Cleveland State economist Mark Rosentraub, who like Zimbalist has written extensively on the problems with publicly-financed sports venues, extends some hope that a properly planned development can work for St. Louis in a better way than other stadium-based resurgence projects in other cities. Incidentally, I don't count San Diego and San Francisco as good for comparison, since for both of those cities it's generally thought that their ballparks are but one factor in causing accelerated development, in conjunction with soaring land costs and other unrelated encroaching development.

Next week I'll be attending two mayoral debates/forums. San Jose's next event will be on Monday, April 10, 7 p.m. at the San Jose Stage Company (490 S. First St., San Jose). The forum's theme is Creativity & The Arts, and it's sponsored by a number of arts-related organizations including 1stAct. Oakland's next event is on Thursday, April 13, from 6-8 p.m. at the Oakland Museum's James Moore Theatre. The forum is sponsored by the Marcus Foster Educational Institute and the League of Women Voters.

China Basin noise data gathering happens on Wednesday.

Noise measurements inside the Coliseum

The measurements made last night will provide a baseline for measurements I'll make outside the Coliseum, China Basin, and other ballparks. The decibel (dB) scale is logarithmic like the Richter scale, so 70 dB can be interpreted as twice as loud as 60 dB. (There's a good primer on sound and noise propagation at quietsolution.com.) Last night I measured crowd noise in the bowl at three different points: Section 137 of the LF bleachers, the concourse behind Section 107, and the 4th row of Section 203. I don't have a very sophisticated sound level meter that has real time logging or analysis capabilities, so take these measurements with a decent margin of error (± 3 dB) and several grains of salt. I used "A-weighting" for the measurements.
The ambient crowd noise in the seating bowl was in the 70-75 dB range when the crowd was idle. Drums and chants brought the noise up 5-8 dB. Between innings, the PA caused the range to be 75-82 dB. Compare that to the interior of a BART train (60 dB stopped/71 dB moving).

Readings from the bleachers (first three innings):

• Giambi intro/BALCO chant: 92 dB
• Giambi groundout to 1B: 99 dB
• Matsui HR to RF: 96 dB spike, 92 dB roar
• "Let Go ___" chant: 90 dB
• First 2-2 pitch to Sheffield: 90 dB
• Sheffield HR: 95 dB

Concourse behind 107, where a group of shrill young girls (A's fans) were chanting back-and-forth with another group of slightly less shrill young boys (Yankees fans).

• Jeter drop/error: 101 dB
• Bradley single, 2 RBI: 104 dB
• Payton single: 104 dB
• "Let's Go Oakland" chant: 96 dB
• Kendall beats out DP: 102 dB
• Bradley walks, scoring Ellis: 107 dB
• "Yankees Suck" chant: 95 dB
• Waiting in line for dollar dogs: 82-84 dB

Section 203. After the Scutaro single, many Yankees fans departed. The Thomas double begat a mass exodus. The readings:

• Damon grounds out to Duke: 92 dB
• "Take me out to the ballgame": 82 dB throughout, 88 dB climax
• A-Rod K's: 94 dB
• Giambi intro: 83 dB
• Giambi flies out: 93 dB
• Sharks highlight on DiamondVision: 91 dB
• Bradley triple: 99 dB
• Cano error, Payton safe: 104 dB
• Kendall single: 98 dB
• Scutaro RBI single: 101 dB
• Thomas double, 2 RBI: 101 dB

Other readings taken elsewhere in the stadium:

• Concourse behind the bleachers: 82 dB
• Section 103 aisle during Dot Racing climax: 95 dB (proving that Dot Racing isn't the most cheered event at A's games)
• BART bridge almost underneath southbound tracks before the game: 88 dB
• BART bridge before game, middle: 75 dB
• Standing platform in RF near flags, end of game: 89 dB
• BART bridge after game near saxophone player but not while he's playing: 67 dB
• When the sax guy is playing (I really should ask him to play "Take the A Train" more often): 77 dB

It's important to note that very few of these "events" lasted for more than 2-3 seconds. There was a slight trickle of people leaving as early as 9:00 p.m. Roughly half the crowd was left at the end.

I'll make the next measurements in the Giants-Astros series next week, on the promenade outside the ballpark and McCovey Point (the little park across Mission Creek from the stadium). These will be important because unlike the current Coliseum, China Basin is an open design that doesn't trap or absorb noise as well as the Coliseum.

Attendance Analysis, Part I

Update: This post just got a mention in the SFGate "A's Drumbeat" blog. Sweet!

Now that the first three games are in the books, it's time to do a comparison between the new, smaller Coliseum and last year's larger model. Having the Yankees series at the beginning of the year creates a disadvantage for the A's because Opening Day usually brings in 40,000+, so to have a Yankees game on Opening Day effectively eliminates one potentially high attendance date from the schedule. The Coliseum's stated capacity this year is 34,077 plus 1,000 or so standing room admissions. Last year the capacity was 48,219.

First, let's look at the first series this year vs. the first series last year:

• 2006 (vs. NYY): 35,077 / 31,284 / 30,165. Total: 96,526. Average: 32,175 (94.4% of capacity)
• 2005 (vs. TOR): 44,815 / 10,106 / 15,860. Total: 70,781. Average: 23,594 (48.9% of capacity)
  

The drop-off in 2005, as noted by local media at the time, was precipitous to say the least. A small dropoff has occurred this year, though it really amounts to 6-7%. That should at least get the press off the A's backs for now. The next homestand against Texas and Detroit will paint a more realistic picture. Since the first series was against the Yankees, let's look at how May 2005's Yankees series stacks up against the last three days:

• 2006 (vs. NYY): 35,077 / 31,284 / 30,165. Total: 96,526. Average: 32,175 (94.4% of capacity)
• 2005 (vs. NYY): 38,636 / 41,180 / 37,237. Total: 117,053. Average: 39,018 (80.9% of capacity)
  

This puts the A's over 8,000 ahead of last year's pace but almost 7,000 behind last season's Yankees series. Those that decried the third deck closure referred to reduced capacity as reduced revenue opportunity. However, the new pricing tier structure appears to be meant to establish two things: a greater amount of revenue per ticket sold, and a less elastic demand curve for A's tickets. The first goal will be reached by default simply through the removal of 10,000 $9 seats per game, many of which turned into $1 seats on Wednesdays. There's too small a sample size at this point to know if the second goal has been reached, but I would expect that the last year's game-over-game standard deviation, 10,511, could be cut in half with these changes.

I didn't attend Tuesday's game, but Wednesday's game showed how effective the structure has been so far. Most of the empty seats were in the furthest reaches of the Plaza and Field levels, along with hundreds of Plaza Bleacher seats. That's exactly what the team wants on a regular basis. The removal of the third deck from inventory was not about staffing or security concerns. Excess inventory was a factor in creating the perception of reduced value - not just of any A's ticket, but of all pricing tiers as well. Once pricing tiers and their value are well-established, demand should rise and that terrible standard deviation figure should drop, perhaps as much as 50%. That should, in turn, create a stable fanbase to which the A's and their sponsors can market.

Of course, this completely ignores on-field performance. That's what it's supposed to do, because records can vary from year to year. Some years teams make the playoffs. Then again, they could lose 100 games. Whatever the case, this fanbase stability is supposed to provide a built-in insulation against record fluctuations. Premium seats are often sold in 5-7 year increments with the promise of controlled price hikes. The same could be said for luxury suites. The hope is that should the A's leave the Coliseum in the next 3-4 years, much of the fanbase will be precommitted to the new ballpark, wherever it is in the Bay Area.

When looking at the model from a distance, it bears a kinship with the "Moneyball" philosophy. It's about identifying market inefficiencies and exploiting them whenever possible. If basic microeconomic ideas can be applied successfully to the running of the baseball side of a franchise, it only makes sense that they also be properly applied to the place they were developed in the first place: the business side.

Coming tomorrow: Crowd noise measurements

KC Royals/Chiefs to get renovations

The drama over Kansas City pro sports futures may have finally ended peacefully as voters approved a sales tax hike to fund $575 million of upgrades to Kauffman Stadium (Royals) and Arrowhead Stadium (Chiefs). The Royals and Chiefs had different problems. Middling attendance and small market size hurt the Royals. The Chiefs, on the other hand, have had 14 consecutive years of sellouts and a much more rabid fanbase, yet are limited by their lack of premium seating and facilities. After the talk over a Downtown KC ballpark finally died down last year, the two teams (and leagues) put together a large package of improvements that was broken down into two separate ballot items: the stadium upgrades (approved), and a huge rolling roof that could cover either stadium (rejected).

Pro-stadium groups clearly followed the "new digs" playbook to get the deal done. It's equal parts hope, fear, and subterfuge. Here's a recap of how it got done:

1. Promote fear over the team(s) leaving. Not that Chiefs would ever leave, but fear motivates. A most telling quote came from Steve Glorioso, one of the campaign’s strategists: “I think the campaign struck the right balance between keeping the teams and the subtle threat that they might leave.” It also doesn't hurt to point out the economic impact losing one or more teams would have on the local economy.
2. Get media support. The Kansas City Star (a Knight-Ridder publication) came out in favor of the project two days prior to the election.
3. Break out the celebs and memories. Royals great George Brett and some current Chiefs players were out in public hawking the paper - the same paper that supported the initiative. The campaign didn't hesitate to evoke memories of past Royals/Chiefs glory days.
4. If you have to have a vote, don't have it in November. Putting ballot measures like these on a spring or primary ballot tends to make for better results since supportive fans may be more likely to vote than those who simply look at the ballot as limited and otherwise not worthy of their time. This time the stadium package brought more voters than expected out of the woodwork.
5. Outspend the opposition. The pro-stadium group spent $1.55 million on their campaign. The anti-stadium group spent $501. That's well over a 3,000-to-1 ratio.

Now you know. And knowing is half the battle. You may see some portion of this strategy used for an A's, 49ers, or Raiders stadium in the next year or two.

Interesting sighting

Just after Rich Harden got out of a first inning jam by blowing away Jason Giambi with a 98 mph heater, a shot was shown of the seats behind the A's dugout. Lew Wolff was there, as would be expected. But who was that young guy seated next to Wolff? It was none other than San Jose mayoral candidate Michael Mulcahy. Mulcahy also happens to be part of Baseball San Jose and is a scion of the influential DiNapoli family - the same DiNapoli family that has done business with Wolff for years. I wonder what they were talking about...

Wolff meets Fremont City Council + Opening Night

One of the first steps on a long road to a Fremont ballpark was made on Monday as Lew Wolff, presumably coming from his daughter's residence in Los Gatos, stopped in Fremont to meet with members of the city council and city manager Fred Diaz. Diaz has been responsible for much of the policy-related work that has gotten Fremont to this point.

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I didn't notice any significant changes at the Coliseum last night, but there were a few minor things that popped out:

• There are now signs that separate the gate/security line and the traffic headed towards the will call booth.
• Some plasma screens were scattered around the field concourse. The panels only showed ads. Anyone who wanted replays or game video needed to look at an older tube TV.
• One of the souls in the always lively left field bleachers posted a sign that said "IF U BUILD IN FREMONT WE WILL NOT COME". Or at least that's what I think it said. It was impossible to see from section 123, where I was sitting. I had to walk halfway to the BBQ Terrace to see it clearly, and I have pretty good vision. Guys, I know that the purpose is to get the sign on TV, but you're trying to sell the idea to fans in the stands too. Make a bigger sign.
• I loved the Bill King tribute. If they could only make the sign above the broadcast booth permanent.

Tomorrow I do noise measurements at the Coliseum.