Where’s The Love For The A’s?

No, I’m not turning GAC into a sports blog.  After all, didn’t I say yesterday I’m not a sports blogger?  However, bear with me for a bit on this one.  It’s one of those “using sports as an analogy for something else” kind of posts.

Earlier this evening, I along with 43,000 or so of my closest most personal friends crammed into AT&T Park in San Francisco, home of the baseball Giants, to watch the Emerald Bowl college football bowl game between Cal and the University of Miami.  Cal won 24-17 (GO BEARS!!!).

AT&T was built strictly as a baseball stadium, so in order to place a football field there it’s necessary to have it hard up against the third base/left field side of the stands, so much so there’s no room on the sidelines there for a team which translates into both teams’ benches being on the same side of the field.  Cozy, to say the least.  Also, a row of temporary stands are set up behind the players, this stretching across right field and into the first base side of the infield.  It gives something of a weird high school football field charm to the proceedings.

When used for its given purpose, AT&T has a claustrophobic appeal.  If feeling like you’re right on top of the action is your thing, this is your ballpark.  The small amount of land available for its construction necessitated tight quarters throughout.  I’ve been to a few Giants games there, and every time a foul ball is headed toward the stands no matter its direction there’s a certain amount of fear for ones life due to their being insufficient space for the thing to appreciably slow down.

Note how I said a few Giants games, this despite my amply demonstrated sports fanaticism.  That’s because despite being a San Francisco Bay Area native I’m not a Giants fan.  Used to be, but this ended during the tenures of first Will Clark and later Barry Bonds.  No, my baseball-beating heart belongs to the Oakland A’s.  Which can be quite the challenge.

The A’s play in a stadium that should be named the Big Ugly for that is the most charitable description possible of the place.  It’s one of those concrete circles baseball/football places built in the ’60s and ’70s when municipalities en masse got this notion about how much money they could save having one stadium for two sports.  Most all said municipalities spent the ’80s and ’90s building new baseball-only and football-only facilities after discovering a place built for both was in fact perfectly suitable for neither.  Notice the word “most.”  The only cities yet to grasp this slice of reality are Oakland, which as an aside is next door to Berkeley, and Miami.  An amusing coincidence given which two football teams played tonight… in a baseball-only park.

In addition to playing their home games in a miserable place to see a baseball game, the A’s suffer with other issues unknown by the Giants and their fans.  Oakland has one of the lowest revenue streams in the major leagues, thus rendering the team unable to either pursue high-priced free agents or in most cases keep its own top-tier donners of the green and gold, instead trading them before they leave the team via free agency for less expensive prospects whom should they pan out… lather rise repeat.  While the A’s hope to fix this in four to five years with a new ballpark, the building of same is hardly guaranteed.  In fact, we who are A’s fans usually have a rather anxious eye on the sports page not solely for game outcomes and/or player stats but to see if either current ownership or some megabucks out of towner with the civic backing to build a new stadium will give cause for the A’s to leave the Bay Area.

Another element is how when it comes to pecking order of local media attention the Giants receive the lion’s share of the love while the A’s are often regarded as little more than an afterthought.  I’ll pick up on that — and actually get to the point I’m illustrating with all this — in tomorrow’s post.