We rarely get to drop the name of Wayne Gretzky into the baseball column. We do so today because his hockey team could throw baseball into a state of chaos, in the Golden State and perhaps beyond.
Gretzky coaches the Phoenix Coyotes, the NHL team that filed for bankruptcy last month. The Coyotes want to recoup as much money as possible by selling the franchise to Jim Balsillie, the guy behind the BlackBerry, who would move the team to Canada. The NHL says no, that only the league can decide who owns a team and where it can play.
Bud Selig says the same thing about his league, but his lieutenants appear more than a little worried about the Coyotes case and the precedent it might set. The commissioner's office has intervened in the bankruptcy court, in support of the NHL, at a time when Selig has committed himself to getting the Oakland Athletics into a new ballpark.
The Minnesota Twins get one next year. The Florida Marlins get one in three years. That leaves the A's as the only team left sharing its home with an NFL team indefinitely, and the return of the Raiders in 1995 wrecked the Oakland Coliseum for baseball.
Lew Wolff has worked on a new stadium for six years, two on behalf of the former A's owners and four more since they sold him the team. He couldn't get a deal done for a new ballpark in Oakland, and the deal he had for one in suburban Fremont blew up in February.
He wants to take the A's to San Jose. He envisions a cozy 32,000-seat ballpark, adjacent to a downtown train station, in the largest city in the Bay Area.
San Jose already has secured the land. The A's will pay the $400 million needed for construction, Wolff says, largely with revenue from a naming-rights deal with Cisco and a new cable contract with Comcast.
By the time the team's latest class of freshman pitchers -- Brett Anderson, Trevor Cahill, Vin Mazzaro and Josh Outman -- gets expensive, the A's could be in a new stadium. That, Wolff says, would enable the A's to afford contract extensions rather than repeatedly sacrifice talent in trades driven by financial necessity.
This all sounds great, except to the San Francisco Giants. Under major league rules, the Giants' territory includes San Jose, and they're not about to hand San Jose to the A's.
"We're 16 miles from the Giants' stadium now," Wolff said. "We want to move 50 miles from it."
