ANALYSIS/OPINION:
As the World Series moves now to San Francisco, the fall classic will be well served by one of the crown jewel ballparks in baseball, with a passionate Giants fan base that fills AT&T Park on a regular basis, drawing 3.7 million this season, fourth-best in all of baseball.
That’s a drastically different atmosphere from much of the time the Giants have spent in San Francisco, when they were on the verge of being moved out of town a number of times — including moving to Washington, D.C.
The Giants’ attendance and financial woes before moving into their new ballpark in 2000 and saying goodbye to the cursed Candlestick Park nearly had a major impact on baseball in Washington, in several different instances.
The Giants themselves are a relocated team, moving to San Francisco from New York after the 1957 season when Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley, moving his team to Los Angeles, convinced Giants owner Horace Stoneham to join him on the West Coast.
There was a great deal waiting for O’Malley at Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles, but not for Stoneham in San Francisco, where his team played in the wind-ravaged, cold Candlestick. It got worse when the Athletics moved from Kansas City to Oakland in 1968.
In January 1976, the Giants had a deal to sell the franchise for $13.25 million to Labatt’s Brewery and move the franchise to Toronto.
Charles Ruppert, executive vice president of the Giants, announced the team had an “agreement in principle” to sell the franchise. “The Giants will play in Toronto beginning in April,” he said.
Just a few months earlier, Bud Selig, president of the Milwaukee Brewers, called the rumors of the Giants’ sale and relocation “ridiculous” and “unfounded.”
But Bob Lurie, one of the minority owners of the team, put together a last-minute deal to keep the Giants in San Francisco. That life seemed short-lived.
Two years later, the story came out that the Bernard Investment Group had a deal — backed by Benihana restaurant founder and owner Rocky Aoki — to purchase the Giants and move the team to Washington. Financier Emil Bernard told United Press International that his group had been in talks with the D.C. Armory Board for a lease agreement to have the Giants play at RFK Stadium.
The Washington Giants. Six years earlier, it had nearly been the Washington Padres.
But Lurie managed to keep the shares the Bernard Group was using to take over the franchise, and the team remained in San Francisco.
Fourteen years later, it was Lurie who was looking to sell the team to out-of-town interests, in a relocation that, while not coming to Washington, may have had a major impact on baseball in the District.
In 1992, the Giants were on the verge of moving to St. Petersburg, where city officials there had been trying to lure a baseball team to the Florida city since building a domed stadium there without a deal for a baseball franchise. The Chicago White Sox nearly moved there in 1988, but a last-minute deal in Chicago for a new ballpark kept them there.
The possibility of moving to St. Petersburg, though, was as close as the Giants had probably come to moving. Fans showed up at the last home game of the season at Candlestick with signs that read “Don’t Tampa with our Giants.”
But another savior stepped forward — this time Peter McGowan — and baseball rejected the sale of the franchise to the St. Petersburg group. McGowan began the successful campaign for a new ballpark that finally anchored the team in San Francisco.
If the Giants had moved to St. Petersburg, though, that would have put Washington in play for an expansion franchise in 1995. Owners expanded by two teams during the baseball strike that had closed down the game, and, in a March meeting in West Palm Beach, were so impressed with the presentation from Northern Virginia businessman Bill Collins and his group that some owners considered actually adding a third expansion franchise.
They liked the notion of a team in Phoenix — the Arizona Diamondbacks — and though they were not thrilled about awarding a team to St. Petersburg, lawsuits against baseball following the killed sale of the Giants had forced owners to award the second expansion team to the Florida city.
But if the Giants were already in Tampa-St. Pete, it’s very likely baseball would have awarded an expansion franchise to Washington-Northern Virginia, and baseball might have returned to the area for the start of the 1998 season, instead of 2005, when the Montreal Expos relocated
If that happened, there would have likely been no MASN deal — no giveaway of the Washington team’s television rights to Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos. This all took place during the strike, when owners were seeking to use replacement players. They hated Angelos, who refused to field a replacement team, so much they probably would have put an expansion team in Dundalk if they could have.
This would have also solved a Bay Area problem. While the Giants have become one of the most successful franchises in baseball, their neighbors in Oakland have been struggling, with no real answer — because now there is no absence of baseball in Washington to help build new ballparks around the country.
• Thom Loverro is co-host of “The Sports Fix,” noon to 2 p.m. daily on ESPN 980 and espn980.com
• Thom Loverro can be reached at tloverro@washingtontimes.com.
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