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Tuesday, October 04, 2011

We are in the News

San Rafael neighbors continue to debate the merits of minor league
baseball in their town.

It’s midsummer, and a bright sun beats down on Albert Field in San Rafael,
doing its best to bake the infield rock hard and fade the grass from green to
brown. The stands are quiet, the dugouts filled with plenty of nothing. This
baseball park, which dates back to the 1950s, is old in a charming way—like a
favorite aunt who’s arrived at that age where her face speaks gently of
character, and the twinkle in her eyes peeks out from beneath a feather of salt
and pepper hair.

Centerfield Partners (CP) wants to fill the stands
here next season with families and baseball fans, and the dugouts with minor
league players hoping to punch their ticket to the big leagues.

The
company, led by CEO Brian Clark, Corte Madera resident Michael Shapiro and
Petaluma’s Brian Sobel, hopes to have a yet-unnamed entrant to the new North American League (NAL) playing at Albert Field for 45
games next season. The NAL is an independent league, which means none of the
teams are associated or under contracts to major league teams. (For instance,
the San Francisco Giants have a rookie team in Oregon, a Class A team in San
Jose, a double A squad in Connecticut and its top farm club in Fresno.) Instead,
the teams in this league would hail from a dozen different locations as far
flung as Edmonton, Alberta Canada; Wailuku, Hawaii; Edinburg, Texas; and Chico,
Calif.

For years, the city of San Rafael has tried to bring activity and
energy to its downtown after 5 p.m. with its “Live after Five” program. So
bringing a minor league team to Albert Field, just a block off Second Avenue,
would seem to be a home run.

Not so fast.

Early innings
Before a public hearing regarding the team in mid-July, a
TV truck from KTVU (Oakland Channel 2) is parked outside San Rafael City Hall.
The cameraman is filming a group of kids dressed as a hot dog, bags of popcorn
and peanuts as well as Cracker Jacks. The kids are either very gifted costume
creators, or mom and dad are minor league baseball fans.

Not everyone is
a fan, however, not by a long shot. Lawyers Nick Rossi and Dotty LeMieux have
been hired by different groups of Gerstle Park (where the ball field is located)
residents who’d like to keep the pros off the field. The neighbors are concerned
with traffic, noise, alcohol abuse and parking woes.

Well…in the best
tradition of Marin County, it’s a little more than that. After a public hearing
that ran more than four hours and included 45 different citizens speaking both
for and against the idea of baseball at Albert Field, I can tell you first-hand
that some neighbors are concerned with their home values being dragged down by
minor league baseball. There are also folks worried about their health—so much
so that one well-meaning local offered to bring the mayor a note from her doctor
regarding the ill effects of noise on the human body—or concerned that their
tree-lined streets might become home to post-game violence or car vandalism.
There are also neighbors who fear people using their front yards as
restrooms.

Just as there are two teams in every baseball game, the
meeting also included neighbors who support the upstart league, expressing to
the patient city council their hope to be able to bring their kids to see
baseball in a less pricey venue than the Giant’s yard at AT&T Park. Some
supporters talked about dining downtown and walking to the park. Other speakers
told the council they simply wanted to enjoy baseball in an old-fashioned
setting in their own hometown.

As the clock slipped past the midnight
hour, Mayor Al Boro found himself in front of a crowd so large the Fire Marshall
had to hang around all night. Boro, a baseball fan who was once a batboy for the
San Francisco Seals (when the Pacific Coast League team called 16th and Bryant
home), knew the time had come for him to play umpire. He told the crowd that
while the city staff had recommended Centerfield be allowed to use the park, the
council wouldn’t take a vote on the issue. It was clear the neighbors had
legitimate concerns. Instead, he said, another meeting would be scheduled. Vice
mayor Greg Brockbank chimed in, imploring Centerfield Partners and the neighbors
to get together to find some middle ground.

The minors
CP owns the rights to four different NAL baseball franchises
in the Bay Area. This means the NAL will let CP own four independent teams—and
CP hopes the San Rafael entry will become a successful setup model for the
others to follow.

Since NAL teams are independent, the league has created
some guidelines for its teams to survive. Team rosters are limited to 23
players, and teams have a minimum and a maximum payroll for all players; the
least that can be paid is $60,000 and the most is $90,000. To put that into
perspective, the major league minimum salary is $450,000, exactly 80 percent
more than the NAL top rung.

On the other hand, the NAL has left room for
teams that feel they want to go the route of the New York Yankees and buy
themselves a title. Teams can exceed the cap by $20,000 and kick in a 25 percent
luxury tax. The scale goes all the way up to $80,000 extra if the team is
willing to pay 100 percent tax.

While the league lives on a shoestring,
that hasn’t kept some big names from getting involved. The Lake County Fielders,
the Zion, Illinois-based team, is partially owned by actor Kevin Costner. The
Edmonton Capitals are owned by Daryl Katz, the same guy who owns the Edmonton
Oilers of the National Hockey League. Jose Canseco, the one-time Oakland A who
wrote a tell-all book on baseball and steroids, is co-managing a team in Tucson,
Ariz., along with his brother, Ozzie.

Like all independent leagues, the
NAL is colorful. For instance, the Fielders have bounced paychecks or not issued
them at all, the play-by-play announcer quit in mid-game and a new stadium
promised by the city of Zion failed to open. Almost the entire roster of
players, fed up with living hand-to-mouth, either quit or were released after
protesting their plight. (Lake County has gone out of its way to explain Costner
isn’t involved in the day-to-day operation of the team.)

In July, the
Tucson Toros ceased operations, and the Yuma Scorpions are now pinch-hitting for
them while Toros ownership tries to unravel a puzzle that involves the city of
Tucson, its Hi Corbet Field and various claims. One of the 2011 starting
pitchers for the Chico Outlaws is Eri Yoshida, a 19-year-old woman who was born
in Japan and throws a wicked knuckleball. It’s the second year in the league for
the player known as the “Knuckle Princess.”

In the interest of full
disclosure, I need to fess up a bit. My Dad played in the minor leagues—with
Jackie Robinson in Montreal in 1946, no less. I’ve watched minor league games in
Denver (before the Rockies were a glint in Major League Commissioner Faye
Vincent’s eye), Reno, Chico, Stockton and Sonoma. I played in an instructional
league for the Dodgers and in college. Baseball has always been a part of my
life, so I bring a little understanding to this story.

Minor league
baseball is about a trio of adults bending over to put their foreheads on a bat,
spinning around and then trying to walk a straight line between innings. The
minors are a place for 8-year-olds to get a huge thrill from getting the
autograph of a guy who won’t get any closer to the big leagues than buying a
ticket. And it’s the spot to see a player like Sergio Romo strike out the side
on his way to the bigs.

By the way, Romo played in the NAL before ending
up in the bullpen of your world champion Giants.

The deal
CP is led by Brian Clark, who made his money in the travel
industry. Clark was formerly an officer with Virgin America and senior vice
president at Fly.com, a travel search site. The Dublin, Calif.,
resident is now CEO of travel startup Vayant Travel Technologies. While Clark has no background in
minor league baseball, he does have two key ingredients: cash and
passion.

He’s also had the good sense to bring Corte Madera’s Mike
Shapiro on board as a consultant. Shapiro has a baseball background, having
served in either management or legal capacities with the San Francisco Giants,
the Atlanta Braves and the Washington Nationals. He also has his own company,
Redwood Sports and Entertainment Group. And Clark brought Brian Sobel in to help
navigate the maze of municipal approvals in Marin. Sobel, a former member of the
Petaluma City Council and a long-time political consultant, has his own
business, Sobel
Communications, in the city that was once the chicken capital of the
world.

Clark views the San Rafael team as a good first entry into the NAL
for CP. “San Rafael would be our first team, and it would have the smallest
venue [1,500 seats at Albert Field] in the league. By way of comparison, the
average attendance at independent baseball games last year was more than 2,800
fans,” he says. “Despite the smaller venue, we feel comfortable we can do well.
But the margins in independent baseball are typically thin. We’d be pleased to
have multiple teams each making ’OK’ margins, adding up to a decent return
overall.”

While Albert Field, from an old-time baseball perspective, is
charming, it’s also long in the tooth, and the city of San Rafael has pretty
much given up on maintaining the park, choosing instead to focus on keeping the
libraries open and cops on the streets. This means CP is on the hook for any
needed improvements. The team will replace the backstop, paint the grandstands,
refurbish the locker rooms and bring in more seating as well as temporary
bathrooms and concessions. “We expect to put tens of thousands of dollars worth
of improvements into Albert Field before we’ve ever made a nickel,” Clark
says.

The city expects to make $4,000 to $12,000 from rental of the park
to Centerfield, with much of that payment being made before the season even
starts. The team plans on charging between $6 and $15 per seat. CP will take
advantage of the parking lot at the adjacent office complex owned by Seagate
Properties.

The brushback
Dotty LeMieux is a
spirited advocate, the kind of lawyer who brings a passion along with a major
league savvy to any fight. She’s long been a presence in Marin politics as a
consultant, and her 13-page, anti-NAL letter to the city is a study in reasoned
argument. In the first sentence, she tells the city that minor league baseball
at Albert Field is, essentially, a privatization of a public facility. She says
the city stands to gain little, if anything, from its association with the team,
which she labels a “highly speculative business venture.”

At the July meeting, she was very much at home as she
patiently ticked off her objections to minor league baseball at Albert Field in
an organized fashion, attacking the city’s lack of an environmental impact
report along with detailing concerns of her clients. She told the council and
the standing-room-only audience that having a college or semi-pro team play at
Albert is a far cry from a season of minor league ball. She called on the city
to delay a decision for another night, and her presentation was greeted with
cheers from opponents of the proposal.

She was followed to the
podium by a parade of people wishing to weigh in on minor league ball in
downtown San Rafael. Those who felt Albert Field is a bad location for a minor
league team talked about a public address system blasting music and bright
lights disrupting calm summer evenings. Neighbors told the council that they
feared the Gerstle Park neighborhood would become inundated with fans trying to
save the $5 parking fee. Still other opponents worried that beer and wine would
be available at the ballpark.

In the weeks that followed the meeting,
Centerfield’s Clark and company met with neighbors. “We’ve actually had several
productive meetings already with neighbors and other local residents. We met
with the Federation of San Rafael Neighborhoods on April 20, which was before we
ever presented our plan to the Park and Rec Commission. We’ve spoken with
individual neighbors on several occasions since, and we sent an open letter
outlining our plan to the Gerstle Park neighborhood.

“This program of
community outreach is central to our operating plan and is detailed in several
places in the use agreement proposed to the city council. Baseball, at its core,
is a community activity. So we plan to be out and about in the community
in-season and off-season,” says Clark.

Change strikes out?
One of the basics of living in Marin County is that
change is rarely a welcome event. It goes beyond simple NIMBYism (the generic
not-in-my-backyard attitude that can be found in many neighborhoods across the
county). Here, it’s more pronounced, with bedrock roots driven deep by the heady
combination of a population that’s well-educated, well-compensated and that
sometimes has some spare time to explore the complexities of how to retain the
highly valued status quo against all odds.

As one neighbor told the mayor
and council, she moved to the neighborhood two years ago, attracted by its
numerous trees and old homes with porches. There was no hint that there would be
baseball at Albert Field, she complained. This, in essence, was not what she and
her family had signed up for.

It’s an open question just how much a
change the team would actually be. In the past, Albert Field played host to the
Seals, a team made up of college players that played a full slate of games. Beer
was served at the ballpark, and the city says it didn’t receive any complaints
from neighbors about the lights, noise or intoxicated patrons mistaking Buicks
for bathrooms.

Rick Wells, CEO of the San Rafael Chamber of Commerce, says his organization has
taken the temperature of the business community on baseball. “More than 95
percent of the businesses that responded to the survey said they think
professional baseball at Albert Field would be beneficial. The support is
clear,” he says. “This proposal is about strengthening our local economy—more
dollars circulating in the city and bringing the community together.”

End of the game?
As this issue goes to press, a decision regarding minor
league baseball at Albert Field is still up in the air. After a series of
meetings with neighbors and the community, the city has proposed conducting an
environmental study of how baseball will coexist with the
neighborhood.

The city would pick a firm to perform the study, which
originally was thought would cost $30,000 to $40,000, and take perhaps four
months to complete. But after CP took a closer look at what the parameters would
look like, it was clear the organization wouldn’t be able to complete the study
and get work done on the ballpark in time for the 2012 season. And with
Centerfield estimating the cost of the study could climb as high as $70,000, the
organization is trying to figure out if it can afford to play ball in San
Rafael.

With 2012 already gone and the team wondering whether it could
afford to bring pro ball to San Rafael, Centerfield brought a counterproposal to
the city. It would scrap its plans to double the seating at Albert, and instead
make do with the 700 seats already in the house. It would make parking free to
encourage everybody to stay out of the Gerstle Park neighborhood. It would
address the noise concerns by limiting music between innings.

The plan
essentially mirrors what’s been in place for the Novato Knicks, a semi-pro team
that has played at Albert Field over the years. And it reflects the use by the
aforementioned Seals. In a way, it puts the city on the spot, since CP is no
longer asking for anything more than what’s been allowed in the past.

At
this writing, in the dog days of August, both Centerfield and the city are in
modes of consideration. City Manager Nancy Mackle had this to say: “City staff
recommended approval of the Centerfield concept as we seek to partner with
others to bring events and activities to our community that we could not
otherwise offer on our own. As with any proposals, we attempt to assess the
benefits that would come to our community but also look at the potential impacts
and have plans in place to mitigate them. We will continue to look at this
proposal with Centerfield over the next few weeks”

As for Centerfield?
Brian Sobel, who makes a living dealing with the media, was circumspect, only
saying that Centerfield doesn’t know what will happen.

Were someone to
suggest a wager on whether minor league baseball is coming to Albert Field, I
have a Jackson that says if you want to see pro ball, you better hop the ferry
to McCovey Cove.

The final score: Neighbors 1, baseball fans 0.

Posted by Dotty LeMieux
at 3:08
PM

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Dotty
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