Notes from the Blue Bear Republic

The Golden State Pastime

A letter to SF Chronicle reporter Steve Tady, aka The Betting Fool:

The Fool Wrote: A MAYS-ING MEMORY:

The year was 1970. I was getting close to reporting to sixth grade at Portola grammar school in Los Altos, but I went to a ton of Giants games that summer. On July 18th, I saw Willie Mays poke a grounder to left past Montreal's Coco LaBoy for his 3,000th hit. Ron Hunt was hit by a pitch, Gaylord Perry twirled a masterful four-hitter and less than 30,000 witnessed it all. The Giants' stock lineup for much of that summer was Bonds-Hunt-Mays-McCovey-Henderson-Hart/Gallagher-Dietz-Fuentes-Lanier. Perry and Marichal were backed by Frank Reberger, Ron Bryant and Skip Pitlock. Happy birthday, Mr. Mays.

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My reply:

Dear Fool,

My stars. I remember this game.

I was twelve and this was the first year I was old enough to follow the boxscore and the rest of the league. NBC’s “Game of the Week”, Saturdays at 11 am, had meaning. And how could you leave out Frank Johnson, Bobby Taylor and Russ Gibson?

This was the first game I ever attended on my own, the second game overall (my first was a trip for school crossing guards in ’68). Willie was set to get his 3,000th hit.

I had two younger neighbor kids with me and we were going to have fun at the game just like the grown folks. Boy, was I excited.

Except that I never saw the game. General admission tickets sold out and I didn’t have enough cash in my pocket for reserved seats . So we left.

I remember hearing the roar go up as Willie got his 3,000th hit. I remember walking down Jamestown Street back to the number 15 bus to go home wrapped in one of the worst feelings I’ve ever had as a kid. I remember my father asking me why I was home in the seventh inning with the Giants up 10 – nothing or something.

I remember swearing that, as God was my witness I’d never miss another game like that as a kid. So for the next couple of years, esp 1971, when the Giants won the division, I doubled the price of a seat when I asked my folks for a ticket to the game. Sometimes I'd end up in general admission and wandered over to reserved (this before the ushers started speaking German and waving nightsticks at morally suspect migrating bleacher creatures). Sometimes I sat in reserved, out of the sun, and ate the sandwich I brought in to save a little money. But I always had enough for a seat.

Thanks for resurrecting the memory. Honestly, those early years of mine at the ‘Stick were great times, and recalling this game, as poor as it was, was a key part of it all. Thanks again. Sincerely.

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Say "classic baseball" and most people think of hot summer nights in an Eastern or Midwestern city. Yet, in 2004, five of California's six major league teams drew over three million fans. The minor league Sacramento River Cats have been at our near the top of minor league attendance since coming into the Pacific Coast League in 2000. The California League has enjoyed great attendance over the past decade, particularly in the booming inland areas. California loves the national pastime. This is baseball country. I like that.

It's also the land of sensible taxpayers who don't want to spend money so millionaires can make more millions. I like that too.

San Francisco Bay Area voters said "no" to four different measures to spend tax dollars to build a stadium for the Giants, two votes in in San Francisco, one in Santa Clara and the last in San Jose. San Diego's Petco Park was held up for several years due to lawsuits over its use of public money, and the final project required the Padres to make a multimillion dollar investment in the community around the new park.

Fans don't stop at baseball. The Sacramento Kings pro basketball team is immensely popular here in the Capital City, but over two thirds of the voting public objects to proposals by the mayor and my councilmember to spend over a quarter billion to build them a new arena. Similar objections keep the NFL from relocating to Los Angeles.

This doesn't mean there's a complete building moratorium on sports arenas in the Golden State, oh no. Stockton recently put together a tax package to build the California League Stockton Ports a lovely little park. San Jose put the Shark Tank together. But these are generally few and far between and built to house relatively inexpensive "B" level sports teams.

There’s just something about sports stadiums and arenas which turn ordinarily sensible public officials' brains into goo.

Back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s some of these people actually said that “Without the Giants, San Francisco won’t be a ‘major league’ city.” I guess the stunning scenery, the fantastic weather, the high culture, the cable cars and the history means nothing without a major league pitchers mound right smack dab in the middle of it.

I had a high school teacher in San Francisco who actually didn’t mind having taxpayers build stadiums. As he was a card carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, this was kind of surprising.

Stadiums are public places where people come together for relaxation and community, he said. That’s a good public purpose which even a lukewarm pinko like he could support. He just had one caveat.

If everyone’s taxes are paying for it, he said, every seat should be the same price because everyone should enjoy the same right to a seat as they generally would in any public space. You don’t set rates for Golden Gate Park, he said, holding the prettier parts for those willing or able to pay more. The maintenance and operations come out of everyone’s pocketbook, so everyone has the same right to access. The only qualification is who shows up early enough to get the best seat on the grass at the Park. Public stadiums should operate the same way.

It’s an interesting idea. I’ve carried it with me through years of debates over public stadium finance in San Francisco (for the Giants); Oakland (for the Raiders) and now here in Sacramento, where the NBA Kings are insisting that the city build them a new arena.

The proudest card carrying liberal can get swept up in all the supposed civic virtues of a publicly funded place for millionaire athletes and their owners to make even more millions.

In 1989 San Francisco's mayor was Art Agnos, a former social worker whose claim to infamy lay in part in allowing a smelly homeless encampment to take over Civic Center. He put time and energy into a proposal for a ballpark at the current site. He lost, and paid for it when the local left turned against him at the next election (splitting the vote and bringing in a former police chief to replace him.)

Oakland has almost no private tax base outside of the people who live there. It’s the core part of the House district of Barbara Lee, the lone persistent voice against giving George Bush carte blanche to start wars. It’s Berkeley with a ‘hood. Yet they spent millions in tax dollars to build swanky suites at the Oakland Coliseum (which have remained generally unfilled) to bring the Raiders back to Oakland from L.A. The city and county promised to sell tickets and corporate suites for Al Davis, so the team owner wouldn’t have to dirty his hands with trying to earn his own living. This was the second and successful attempt to bribe Davis back from Los Angeles. The first try, in 1990, sank when it was revealed that the city and county promised to buy unsold seats to guarantee Davis a sellout every game.

Sacramento mayor Heather Fargo is a nice, sensible, progressive mayor. She represented my district before becoming mayor. She has good ideas about managing growth, preschool and efficient government. But she’s nuts about spending $400 million on a new arena for the Kings. As noted above, local polls and other devices find little support for the idea. She had to pull an advisory vote on one proposal after it became clear that it was dead in the Sacramento River. But she persists, up to engineering the premature retirement of the city manager who opposed it.

They say it sells the city.“The Raiders sell Oakland.” Yeah, unfortunately, they do. When folks see the Hell’s Angels-in-Darth Vader guys beating the crap out of each other in the seats and the parking lot, they go, “yeah, that’s Oakland.” One would imagine a good public relations firm could do much better for far less.

Same here in Sacramento, which suffers under a poor self-image of being the “cowtown” of Northern California cities. Yep. Being the capital of one of the largest states and, effectively, nation of the world is nothing but a pile of oats and alfalfa without an NBA team.

Stadiums and arenas are not civic investments. Study after study finds this that they don’t add a dime to the tax base. The brilliant Field of Schemes website provides in-depth research and review on all this. Yet we’re in a Renaissance-style era of public stadium and arena construction.

And I’m part of the problem. Despite everything I’ve written above, if my favorite baseball team threatened to pack up and leave because it wanted a new place to play, I’d be the first to the street corner lying my tail off to get voters to give ‘em one. (I’m saved regarding the Kings in that I’m not much of an NBA fan.) There’s something about the crisp green grass, cold beer and the crack of the bat that I just can’t resist. I'd beg, borrow and steal to keep them around.

Play ball. Just do what I think and not what I feel and play it where the taxpayer isn't footing the bill.

posted by Terry Preston @ 8:16 PM