San Jose Makes Power Play for A’s Baseball Stadium

San Jose Makes Power Play for A’s Baseball Stadium
by Josh Koehn on Mar 30, 2011

http://www.sanjose.com/news/2011/03/30/mlb_selig_wolff_giants_athle...

On the eve of baseball season’s Opening Day—and more than two years since Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig formed a blue ribbon panel to study the relocation of the Oakland A’s—San Jose still sits by the phone like a lonely lover. The city waits, pines, hopes for a call, some news ... anything.

The future of professional sports in the nation’s 10th largest city is in limbo. In furious preparations for an opportunity that may never materialize—and to protect the land holdings that may one day house a ballpark—San Jose has taken extraordinary steps.

The San Francisco Giants hold rights to the San Jose market area, which they got when the club was considering a move to the area in 1990. And now the World Series champions are standing in the way of San Jose’s own bid for pro sports glory.


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Wolff’s job was to find a stadium. He exhausted four different options in Oakland before spending tens of millions on a failed multiuse project in Fremont. But Wolff’s eyes had always been set on San Jose, the place where he started his career, and near where his daughter and young grandsons live.

Twelve years ago, Wolff told Kettmann, then a San Francisco Chronicle writer: “If I was going to pursue a ballpark, I would certainly do it in San Jose, not depend on a vote outside of San Jose, and I would work through the mayor and the Redevelopment Agency. It’s the difference between a big-league city and a non-big-league city. I wouldn’t spend five minutes on any other city besides San Jose.”

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