Kimera site?

Oakland is never going to move forward if we keep changing our minds about everything. The failure of the Council to demonstrate sustained political commitment to long-term plans is one of the biggest problems in City government! In any case, the Army Base should be used for Port supportive business.

I like the Tidewater idea more and more. There may be some barriers that haven’t yet occurred to me, and obviously parcel consolidation would be an issue, but a ballpark there could be spectacular. Of course, it’s really irrelevant since the team’s ownership has no interest in Oakland.

Another argument for (or against?) the floating stadium!

We always play in the best stadium. It just happens that sometimes Fremont needs a rest. And if that just so happens to be when a lefty is pitching, so be it.

comparable (slightly smaller) to Chicago. The problem is the inequitable split and the Bay Area having so many other attractions to offer.

It is for most people.

Hey, the A’s don’t care what you want, or what I want. They care about what 35,000 people want. If people showed up to the Coliseum, they wouldn’t have to move to Fremont. But they don’t, and won’t, largely for the reasons stated above.

And, like, for real, it’s twenty miles. Twenty. Most people wouldn’t move if their job was relocated 20 miles down the road.

“I live in Oakland, so the A’s are wrong to move the team!” sounds, dare I say… selfish?

The point I’m trying to make with Chief Wahoo is that there’s always public outcry from hardcore fans when a team makes a big off-the-field change. Remember all the people who were upset over the renovations to Fenway? Or the addition of lights to Wrigley? No matter how much sense a move makes to outsiders, team execs, and casual fans, the die-hard’s judgment is always clouded by their loyalty to that which with they’re familiar.

there aren’t that many of us and most of us are going to pass on our dollars, regardless.

I took my 8 and 5 year old daughter to the A’s v. Cleveland Indians On Friday, APril 4th. We sat int eh bleachers and the girls got introduced to flag waving and me and my brothers disdainf ro the wave.

What do they remember:
2 idiots trying to kill each other on the BART ramp when we left in the 7th inning. I witnessed two guys beating each other up and one dude tried to throw the other off the Amtrak ramp.

If you think that is not an indelible image burned into the minds of little children, and bi proxy their father, and that is not an important part of deciding when and where to attend games, you are one of three things:
1. Unobjective
2. Unrealistic
3. Stupid

I don’t think you are stupid, based on your articulation throughout this thread… but it is clear you are not very objective or realistic.

I have been to most west coast stadiums, but not to a game at Anaheim (I toured it once in the off season). The strange thing is that back in the early 90’s, Oakland was one of the best, but upgrades in San Diego, Seattle and San Francisco plus remodeling in Oaktown have dropped it from top to bottom.

since the Tank was built, it’s 50-50 (SF v SD) private to public …

FWIW, I don’t dislike it (though I have nothing positive to say about it either, since Mt Davis went up), and I think that the franchise’s (and Selig’s) argument that they “can’t be competitive” there/without a new stadium is a load of horseshit.

the Coliseum has one significant positive and that is that every seat (except the upper bleachers) is a relatively good seat—they all have good sight lines where you can see more or less the entire field.

The Coliseum has a number of drawbacks:
The field is too big, making seats be too far away from the field of play.
Non-seating areas are very inefficiently laid out. If a game draws 25k+ fans, it’s nearly impossible to walk around the lower level concession areas.
The stadium is too big. It is built for something like 55k (though 20k of those are not sold) fans and the average attendance is less than half of that.
It lacks any real non-nostalgic charm.

In my opinion, the Coliseum is a bit underrated - since it is considered to be as bad as stadiums outside of Minnesota and Florida get - but, even from that optimistic perspective, the best thing that you can say about the Coliseum is that it is basically neutral - it does not get in the way of you enjoying the game - which is fine for you and I—but as I mentioned earlier, you and I are not the fans the team is really concerned about attracting.

Maybe the A’s players aren’t engaging enough, or the local media is giving the team the collective cold shoulder, or the organization is bad at marketing their product. Maybe most folks just don’t like the colors green and gold. Or maybe they don’t like the outdated atmosphere of the Coliseum, or the total lack or atmosphere of the surrounding Oakland neighborhoods.

Anyway, the urgency is that something is preventing the team from drawing a reasonable number of fans on anything but a Saturday evening against the Red Sox. Ownership is trying to address that by updating the home stadium. They’re already past the point of listening to anyone who thinks the existing facilities are just fine.

is that A’s fans from Oakland (and, I count myself among them, even if I’m currently typing from Sacramento) are a minority of A’s fans. The move to Fremont will only be a significant inconvenience for a fairly small minority of fans (the very few that take BART out of necessity and fans from Berkeley, Richmond, etc). It’s actually going to be an easier drive for fans from the tri-valley as well as central valley fans. Oakland fans can drive 20 miles w/o a problem and fans from Hayward, San Leandro, etc are basically six of one, half a dozen of the other.

The Fremont location is much more central for fans in the Bay Area, outside of San Francisco.

The weather at the Coliseum is tremendous for 2/3 of the season—but it will be even better in Fremont.

First, some piling on: The concession areas are cramped, the restrooms/troughs are terrible, and the food selection lacking.

Next, some perspective: I’ve been to every ballpark in both leagues, save the most recently constructed few (DC, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati, though I did visit their predecessors), and while it pains me greatly to say this, having spent so much of my youth at the Coliseum, the great majority of venues around the country are superior to Oakland. Easily.

Tampa, Florida, Toronto, Minnesota … maybe Shea, and New Comiskey … other than that, it’s no contest. This isn’t to say that all the newer parks are masterpieces – some exude a copycat aesthetic blandness (St.Louis, Texas), some are overwrought amusement parks (Milwaukee, Phoenix), etc. But they’re all cleaner, more wide open, more visually impressive, and for the most part more distinctive than the Coliseum. Detroit, Pittsburg, Colorado, San Diego, Seattle, Baltimore, Cleveland … all beautiful, urban-integrated stadiums (or if you’re in a particularly haughty mood, “stadia”) that – sorry to say – put our wind-bitten hole in the wall to shame.

And I think if I wasn’t a veteran of hundreds of A’s games through the years, I’d likely be even less charitably disposed towards the Coliseum. It is what it is: old, creaky, and burdened by a giant concrete clusterf**k in the outfield. That doesn’t mean I don’t still love attending games there, or that I’m necessarily thrilled by the implications of a move to Fremont (I’m not), but it’s pretty silly to pretend that McAfee measures up to most other parks around the league.

again bringing down the average ticket price, i’m sure.

Why are they so silent about the A’s moving?

a fractured (borderline broken) city with 8,000 violent crimes/100,000 people should be investing its time, money, and labor in a baseball stadium?

There’s a benefit to having a baseball stadium in your town (even though they are, essentially, traffic nightmares that only attract people for about 3 hours at a time, 81 times/year). But building a stadium is a long and costly process, and I don’t think it’s in the Athletics’, nor the City of Oakland’s, best interest.

I think that PaulThomas’ point is that when teams ask for public financing, and quote lofty numbers about the numbers of job’s created by a stadium opponents of public financing point out that the jobs created by a new stadium are either short term (like construction) or at the very bottom of the income scale (like selling hot dogs) and that there is no significant economic benefit to the city by way of “job creation.”

Public financing for Fremont is not on the table. The idea is to use the development around the stadium to pay for the stadium…. the retail and residential district is key to making a stadium happen anywhere. One of the main hurdles to a new stadium in Oakland is that there is not, as far as I know, a realistic plan for creating something similar.

Fremont’s advantage is a 200 acre parcel located next to a major freeway that can be rezoned/developed to fund the stadium without the use of general fund or bond money.

This is an over simplistic summary, but if you are really interested in understanding this stuff a great place to read up is newballpark.blogspot.com

the crime rep is entirely based on the murders.

I so want to be in that band.

Hmm …

It is in San Francisco

only at our park, at least seven languages are being s