Why I hate Al Davis (Reason # 12,473)

From today's Chronicle:

The A's have given up on the Coliseum area as a site for a proposed new park and Oakland City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente has proposed a new site on the waterfront.

(snip)

"The other tenants objected to our building a new park,'' Wolff said, "and frankly, I can't blame them. They're trying to run their own operations, and this would get in their way.''

(empahsis mine, of course)

"Other tenants," eh? Like who? Could one of them be the Oakland Raiders, owned by Al Davis, the king of litigation in the world of sports?

First, Al Davis decides to move the Raiders back to Oakland, erecting Mt. Davis and ruining the Coliseum for baseball. Due to the financial fallout from the Raiders' Coliseum renovation, East Bay voters are leery of publically funding any sports venues. And when the city of Oakland and Alameda County are racked with record budget defecits, Al Davis decides to sue to Oakland and the rest of the county for alot of money.

This is Karma, Mr. Davis. Sooner or later, it's going to come back and bite you in the ass. Perhaps it already has since the Raiders choked real bad (on my 21st birthday) the last time they were in the Super Bowl and since have been mediocre, at best.

I could read between the lines, if Lew Wolff was to continue with his plans to build a ballpark in the Coliseum Parking Lot, Al Davis would sue the A's for some BS lost parking revenue and stuff.

So it's off to another site. The Esturary or Oak to 9th. The new A's ballpark blog has great info regarding the site. The author has done a great job scouting out all of the possible sites. It'd be kinda fun to have the "anti-SBC Park" bayside. But there are problems, the big one being transportation.

The place is a really small site, of which I don't envision good parking. However I'm pretty sure that this site is closer to the BART track than the Coliseum is. I can easily envision a pedestrian bridge that takes people over the rail yard and the freeway separating the site and the BART tracks. But there is no station there, just the tracks. I don't know how much it would cost to construct a new BART station at that site but I can safely assume it would cost a "crapload" of money. Since this ballpark plan is tied with a big housing development, perhaps state and federal funds can help with the construction of a new BART station on the Richmond-Fremont line.

It's no guarantee, but I think building a new station at that site would be a whole lot easier than extending BART to San Jose.

Also, Wolff has not really discussed this matter with Ignacio De La Fuente, the presumptive sucessor to Oakland Major Jerry Brown or anybody from Signature Properties, the people who will develop that site, but this is a good start.

I'm glad to see that somebody in the Oakland government cares about the A's. It's really been the only franchise that has brought sucess to Oakland.