World Series 2012: Modern Ballparks Power Up The Giants and Tigers

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World Series 2012: Modern Ballparks Power Up The Giants and Tigers

Barry Zito will start Game One of the World Series for the San Francisco Giants against the Detroit Tigers on October 24. (Getty Images via @daylife)

 The 2012 World Series kicks off from San Francisco Wednesday night with Barry Zito, the Giants’ $126 million lefty, taking the mound to start Game 1. The fourth hitter Zito faces will be Prince Fielder, the slugging first baseman signed by the Detroit Tigers last winter for $214 million.

Forget, for the moment, that Zito’s mega deal has been a bust in the bigger picture since the Giants lured him across the bay from the Oakland A’s in 2007. The point for the Giants is that Zito, the type of expensive free agent the team would have had little chance of landing back in the 1990s, is here. With 14 wins during the season and a big playoff victory over the Cardinals under his belt, they trust him enough to open the World Series. His outsized paycheck now amounts to little more than a minor annoyance.

The same holds true for Fielder and the Tigers. One of the premier offensive players on the market last winter, his landing in Detroit would have been nearly unthinkable 15 years ago.

Call the Tigers and Giants the poster boys for the benefits of stadium development. Detroit’s Comerica Park and San Francisco’s AT&T Park (originally called Pac Bell Park) both opened in 2000, right in the middle of a stadium-building wave that began in the mid-1990s. The timing put both clubs right in the wave’s sweet spot — their stadiums opened after a handful of parks had gone up, providing ideas to draw from, but before costs began to rise substantially. Both cost little more than $300 million to build, substantially less than the likes of Washington’s Nationals Park and New York’s Citi Field and Yankee Stadium, all of which came later.

“It was the next iteration following the earlier parks, a chance to see what works well and what doesn’t,” says Bernie Mullin, an industry consultant and one-time Colorado Rockies executive who once borrowed ideas from Baltimore’s Camden Yards to prepare his club’s opening of Coors Field in 1995.

So what have the Tigers and Giants done right?

“Both used the local geography very well,” Mullin says. “The way AT&T Park uses the waterfront is pretty neat, that area wasn’t particularly nice before. And Comerica building right downtown exposes the team to a bigger crowd and public transportation.” How much Comerica, which took kid-friendly features to a new level with a Ferris wheel and carousel, has contributed to economic improvement in the area is debatable. But most people are convinced that the team’s decision to stick with downtown Detroit rather than flee to the suburbs played well with locals.

Since the stadium opened in 2000, the Tigers have made it to the playoffs three times, as many times as they made it during the three previous decades. The club did have a painfully slow start at the new park, turning in losing seasons in their first six years, including the historically awful 2002 and 2003 seasons (106 and 119 losses respectively). But Detroit has now gone .500 or better for six of the past seven seasons, while reaching the World Series twice. Revenue in the stadium’s first season jumped to $121 million from $71 million at Tiger Stadium the previous year. It then took a slight dip during the lean years of 2002 to 2004, but has been growing steadily since, along with payroll. Attendance has not fallen below 2.5 million since 2006; the only time the team ever reached that figure at Tiger Stadium was in its championship season of 1984.

For the Giants, meanwhile, it’s been a complete transformation.

The Giants have topped 3 million at the gate in all but one of their 13 seasons at AT&T Park. Not only did the Giants never top 3 million in all their years at Candlestick Park, they only cracked 2 million three times — in 1989 when they went to the World Series, in 1993 when they signed Barry Bonds, and in 1999, the ballpark’s farewell season.

The new park has hosted five postseasons, the same number the old one did across 4o full seasons following the team’s move from New York in 1958. Revenue, which shot up to $139 million from $72 million in AT&T’s first year, surpassed $230 million last year. The club is on schedule pay off the debt on its privately financed stadium early.

It’s not a stretch to suggest that AT&T Park has turned the Bay Area into a one team market. Back when the Giants of Will Clark and Kevin Mitchell reached the 1989 World Series, they were swept by the cross-bay Athletics, a powerhouse in the midst of a three-year run of American League pennants. The A’s of Rickey Henderson, Mark McGwire & Co. outdrew the Giants by 600,000 fans that year, and by over a million fans the following year.

But San Francisco has since left Oakland in the dust. In 2000 and 2001, even as the A’s were enjoying 100-victory seasons playing money ball, the Giants, in their first two years at the new yard, outdrew them by about 3 million fans. Even this year, during which the plucky A’s went on a huge second-half roll to wrest the AL West title away from the Texas Rangers, the club drew just 1.6 million fans, fourth-lowest in the majors and about half what the Giants got (both teams finished with 94 wins).  The Giants have added $322 million in value since opening AT&T Park, according to Forbes’ annual estimates, compared to $123 million for the A’s.

That’s a nearly $200 million disparity that fuels the frustration of Oakland owner Lew Wolff, whose efforts to get a new stadium for his club have hit constant snags. “The Giants have done a marvelous job, and I’m glad to see the World Series in the Bay Area,” Wolff says from his real estate office in Southern California. “But we feel it’s a two-team market. Our goal is to have a fan-friendly venue like the Giants.”

Wolff says the MLB commissioner’s office has asked him not to comment on the ongoing territorial dispute that’s been holding up his effort to build in San Jose. Wolff likes his young team and figures it can contend awhile longer before GM Billy Beane is forced to sell off key players. But he also knows he’s in a hole against the Giants’ 12-year head start. “They have set the bar substantially higher,” he says.

With an overpriced Zito, unaffordable to an A’s team he once won a Cy Young Award for, taking the mound in the World Series opener, they certainly have.

Source : Forbes - http://www.forbes.com