Post by TheShadow on Dec 9, 2006 7:10:11 GMT -5
sfgate.com
by Chip Johnson
Two months ago, the Oakland Athletics were in the second round of the American League playoffs, while the Oakland Raiders were in court arguing the facts of the team's return to Oakland -- 11 years ago.
Now it's a whole new ballgame.
The A's, acknowledging the lack of suitable sites for a ballpark in Oakland, have announced their intention to pull out of McAfee Coliseum and move to a new stadium to be built in Fremont within the next five years.
And the NFL's Raiders, who've made noise about moving out of Oakland -- whether it was back to Los Angeles or Baltimore or elsewhere -- since returning in 1995, aren't going anywhere. Not physically and certainly not in their division standings.
This week, the team and its public landlord, the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Authority, officially waved the white flags, calling an end to their decade-old legal disputes.
It's a far cry from a few years ago, when the football team and public officials were at each other's throats while the A's kept plugging along without landlord-tenant conflict. Now that the Raiders are likely to be the only team at the Coliseum in a few years, they and public officials in the East Bay are kissing cousins.
"This means we no longer have to spend incredible amounts of resources and money fighting this," Oakland City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente told me Thursday. "It's the last battle. Now they can concentrate on running the team, and we can worry about running the stadium."
The two sides have agreed to work together to serve the team's fans -- dropping the personal seat licenses, known as PSLs, that fans hated -- and have expressed a desire to open negotiations aimed at extending the team's lease in the Coliseum past the end of the current lease in 2011.
That is just about the only positive development for the team this year, even if the court battle ended in yet another loss.
A state court of appeals, in a 2-1 ruling last month, overturned a jury's $34.2 million damages award to the team in 2003. The court ruled that the Coliseum Authority, the city-county agency that runs the Coliseum, had already compensated the Raiders adequately.
The team's Oakland lease, negotiated when the Raiders returned to the East Bay from Los Angeles, provided $109 million in reduced interest payments to the team, and legally amounted to just compensation from stadium operators and a waiver of the team's right to sue for fraud, the court ruled.
That's an awful long way from the $833 million lawsuit originally filed by the team, but the Raiders are better off in the long run.
The difficult relationship between the football team and its landlords has been no fun at all for Oakland and Alameda County taxpayers stuck with stadium renovation costs and fans who balked at PSLs, season-ticket surcharges designed to pay for the upgrades.
The plan to sell personal seat licenses to cover the cost of upgrades didn't work as planned, and the shortfall in revenue fell to the city and county, infuriating residents and leaving a few local politicians with egg on their face.
The public perception of the Raiders was that they were bleeding the city and county of millions of dollars a year in subsidies while the A's slogged onward trying to make the best of things, particularly after the construction of Mount Davis, a high-rise expansion in the space where baseball bleacher bums once roosted, ruined the stadium as a baseball venue.
Parts of the stadium are now in shadows, even on bright days, and the new bleacher seats -- embedded in what is essentially a four-story cement wall -- cast a pall over the place, blocking light and heat from pouring into the stadium.
As important as it is for taxpayers and stadium officials to settle all disputes with what likely will be the only stadium tenant, the Raiders, it's even more important for the team, which has waged a countless string of legal battles as its performance on the field has sagged.
Beset with injuries, the team has won just two games this season, tied for the worst record in the NFL. And Al Davis, 79, who is said to be in poor health, has shown no signs of relinquishing any control.
"Al Davis currently has, and will continue to have, total control of the Raiders," Amy Trask, the team's CEO, told The Chronicle last month. "And that will continue into perpetuity."
Under the current arrangement, Davis' wife, Carole, would assume his position in the event of his death.
That entrenched position also appears to be taking a toll on the team's value in the corporate world. For several months, Davis has offered a 31 percent share of the team on the open market, but there have been no takers, and it doesn't take a Wall Street analyst to figure out why.
The opportunity to own a professional sports franchise, or even a stake in one, is a rare offer indeed, and moguls like Lewis Wolff, the owner of the Oakland A's, regularly line up to get the chance to join such an exclusive club.
The fact that Davis has received no offers worth announcing says a lot about how the investment community views the team.
If the Raiders become the only big-time sports tenant in the Coliseum, which seems inevitable, the team's success on the field and as tenant in the public stadium will certainly be welcomed by their fans and taxpayers alike.