Build It, and They (Will) MIGHT Come

By RICHARD CORLISS

The other evening, three guys ran across Candlestick Park brandishing a bed- sheet sign that read PLEASE DON'T GO! Stung by the announced sale of the San Francisco Giants to a consortium representing St. Petersburg, Florida, these three were exercising the birthright of any sports devotee: impotent pleading. This was the charge of the night brigade. But the trio might as well have been riding into the Valley of Death instead of invading the blustery pasture of America's crankiest ball park. The people who buy the tickets, whose taxes pay for the stadiums, who fantasize and fret over their team like anxious parents -- they are mighty Casey at the bat. All muscle, no magic. Strike three. You're out. Game's over. The fans fan.

Fan, of course, is short for fanatic. Nothing else explains the loyalty, the emotional servitude of otherwise sensible folks toward a professional sports franchise. Talk to the proprietors of major league teams and you will hear that many of the 26 clubs are losing money. With the average player's salary topping $1 million this year, attendance slumping and TV revenue due to drop in 1994, the owners seem noble just to stay in the game, given all that hemorrhaging red ink.

Perhaps the owners have more mercenary motives. Like going where the money is. As one of half a dozen owners with a fortune in excess of a billion dollars, Jack Kent Cooke probably has enough money now. Cooke owns the N.F.L. champion Washington Redskins, but like many a Joe Lunchpail, he wants to move to the suburbs. Move the Redskins, that is, to a rail yard in Alexandria, Virginia. No matter that Washington doesn't want the 'Skins to leave and Alexandria doesn't want them to come. In a secret deal whose conspiratorial bravado would have set Boss Tweed and Mark Hanna drooling, Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder offered $130 million to construct roads and rail links to a stadium Cooke would build and own. And Cooke gets to keep all proceeds from food and parking.

Some years back, the Virginia Retirement System, a state pension fund, paid $350 million for these 320 acres of land, intending to develop it for mixed commercial-residential use. This is still mixed use: Cooke has use for free land and Wilder for political glory. Virginians with sharp ears could catch the sound of a state pocket being picked. Says Congressman Jim Moran of a plan that would bring the city few economic perks: "It is a classic case of how not to conduct public policy." Officials in Washington could only fear that getting Skinned meant the town would be rubbed off the map. "Brooklyn has never been the same since the Dodgers left," keened D.C. council chairman John Wilson, whose own city lost two baseball clubs in the 1950s. "You don't even think about Brooklyn."

It is instructive to think about Brooklyn, the borough that Dodger owner Walter O'Malley abandoned for Los Angeles after New York City's master builder Robert Moses blocked the purchase of a crucial piece of land on which O'Malley had planned to build a stadium. Not since the heady carpetbagging of the 1950s, when five baseball franchises (including the Dodgers) deserted multi- team cities to find gold in the West and South, have owners been so restless. Some get bored and take the pocket money, as Domino's pizza king Tom Monaghan did last week when he sold his Detroit Tigers for about $80 million to a rival pizza pasha, Mike Ilitch of Little Caesars. And some owners just feel like raising hell. Al Davis, keeper of those movable beasts the Oakland -- no, the L.A. -- Raiders, flirted shamelessly with upstate bigwigs who thought he might return to the Bay Area. By doing so, Davis won a sweeter deal in L.A. He was like a man who tells his wife he's been cheating on her and expects her to treat him more lovingly.

And, poor thing, she does. As long as city and state governments are willing to play the subservient wife, and pay for it, owners will take every advantage. Local politicians are obsessed with having their cities considered "major league." That means lavish tax breaks, awarding of ancillary revenue and, increasingly, funding of the team's stadium. No city would erect a skyscraper and then hand it over gratis to IBM or AT&T. But, writes Neil J. Sullivan in his book The Diamond Revolution, "elected officials across the country have fallen all over themselves to open the public purse to build stadiums that by every reasonable standard should have been paid for by the ball clubs that use them."

The officials will go further. They will follow the advice given Kevin Costner in the hit movie Field of Dreams: "If you build it, they will come." St. Petersburg built a field on nothing but dreams -- and $138 million, mostly from revenue bonds the voters never got to vote on. Next year, if the baseball owners approve, the San Francisco Giants will be the St. Petersburg Giants.

When St. Petersburg built the Suncoast Dome in 1987, it aimed to be the first Florida city to attract a major league baseball team. The recession didn't stanch enthusiasm for the project. As assistant city manager Rick Dodge notes, in what sounds like a bow to Clintonomics: "Cities that are coming out of the recession are cities investing in the future." But this brave leap seemed to be over a cliff. Three times the majors took St. Pete to the altar, and three times the town was jilted: first with the Chicago White Sox, then with a prospective expansion team that went to Miami, then with the Seattle Mariners. Says local booster Jack Critchfield: "We've been used as a nuclear threat to other communities to make them give teams whatever they want."

Bob Lurie had become discouraged too. Lurie, who bought the Giants in 1976 for $8 million, wasn't getting what he wanted: a new stadium to replace drafty old Candlestick. Four Bay Area referendums on the new ball park were defeated. By 1987 Lurie was warning that he would "consider anyplace that wants us." In June he announced that he would accept the first reasonable offer, and St. Pete's $110 million had the cash-register ring of logic. Now San Francisco Supervisor Angela Alioto has unveiled plans for a downtown stadium, and the players' union is seeking to delay the transfer for at least a year. But the writing is on the check. It's enough to make St. Pete officials voice hedged optimism about the underused stadium. "We just hope history will prove we were visionaries," says Councilman Bob Stewart, "and not horses' derrieres." And San Francisco is as rancorous in losing the Giants as it was ecstatic at stealing them from New York City 25 years ago.

It can't be because a major league team brings a town economic vitality. Although boosters claim the value of a team cannot be measured solely in dollars, Teresa Serata, San Francisco's budget director, says she can document only a $3.1 million annual net gain from the Giants; the city's gross economic product is $30 billion, or 10,000 times as large. "Opening a branch of Macy's has a greater economic impact," says Roger Noll, professor of economics at Stanford University. Besides, discretionary income is easily diverted. If there is no ball club, citizens will find another way to spend their discretionary income.

A city has to work hard to earn money from a ball club, especially when it spends $580 million (up from an original estimate of $150 million) on a SkyDome, as Toronto did, or $100 million (up from $23 million) to freshen Yankee Stadium, as New York City did. But an owner has to work hard to lose money. He is a member of a most exclusive club -- a monopoly, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1922 ruled baseball exempt from antitrust legislation and the demands of the open market. "Major league baseball should have 40 or 50 teams," says Noll, "not 26 or 28. Then you wouldn't have to give away hundreds of millions of dollars to get one to relocate."

Yes, it does cost money to run a team. Players make five times what they received just 10 years ago. But athletes' salaries are covered by merchandising, hefty ticket prices and robust TV income. Even assuming that the owners' closely guarded books are not cooked, there's still plenty of cash on hand. "Revenues from these teams have gone up 10% to 15% a year," says Noll, "and players' salaries are growing at the same rate. Other costs are rising too, but only at the rate of inflation. It stands to reason that all the book costs not related to players are disguised profits."

Nothing in sport has escalated as fast as the price of a ball club or a ball park. In 1981, George Argyros, a California real estate magnate, bought the Seattle Mariners for $13 million. He monitored baseball's worst team for eight years, then sold it for a $50 million after-tax profit to Jeffrey Smulyan, a radio-station mogul. This June, Smulyan sold it for $135 million. That's a $ tenfold profit in just over a decade for a product few consumers are buying -- except the next gullible owner, the next town avid for major league status.

The result of all this high financing and finagling is a redistribution, from poor fans to richer ones, of the baseball-going experience -- jock Reaganism. The luxury boxes introduced at the Houston Astrodome in 1965 are now a moneymaking fixture in most parks; the Toronto Blue Jays mint $35 million a year from leasing Skyboxes -- more dens for the haves to entertain the other haves. Someday a town might build a stadium consisting of a thousand skyboxes and six rows of bleachers. It would suit the owners -- men who seem bent on making baseball a pursuit to follow on TV -- if you can get cable and pay-per-view.

There are good owners and bad ones, smart owners and dull ones, as in any fraternity. But the bad, smart owners are at heart corporate raiders, playing with other people's money (not the stockholders' but the taxpayers'), fleecing the locals and then fleeing them. Cushioned by the largesse and insecurity of city administrations that are strapped to pay teachers or collect the garbage, rich men play the new, high-stakes version of polo: passing civic assets on to other rich men.

And the greed goes on. When the baseball diamond is as big as the Ritz, the real game will not be played between the foul lines. It will be conducted in boardrooms and back rooms, on the field of schemes. Franchise swapping will be the richest established permanent floating crap game in the business world. It's a no-lose game called Monopoly. And few of the players care that it means winning ugly.

With reporting by Cathy Booth/St. Petersburg and David S. Jackson/San Francisco, with other bureaus