The Oakland Athletics made another move this week in the chess game they hope will lead them to a new home down the road in San Jose.
The team’s managing partner, Lew Wolff, announced that the team has retained 360 Architecture to design the planned Major League Baseball stadium in San Jose, as well as another stadium for Wolff’s other team, the San Jose Earthquakes of Major League Soccer.
“During the past few years, 360 Architecture has worked closely with us as we have studied design alternatives and analyzed the feasibility of a new ballpark for the A’s and a new stadium for the Earthquakes, on a variety of sites,” Wolff said in a statement.
The firm’s resume of big-ticket sports projects includes the new New Jersey Meadowlands football stadium.
The A’s next home has been in question since the team’s previous effort to build a new ballpark — a real-estate driven stadium plan in suburban Fremont — fell apart in 2009.
Wolff doesn’t want the team to stay in the 44-year-old Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum.
The A’s say they would construct their new San Jose stadium without public subsidies. However, the city’s redevelopment agency is already neck deep in acquiring the desired property, having spent more than $24 million to buy half the necessary land, according to the San Jose Mercury News.
Oakland’s competing efforts to build a new stadium there for the team also depend on that city’s redevelopment agency.
The team can’t move south to San Jose until it resolves territorial rights issues with the San Francisco Giants. Major League Baseball granted those rights to the Giants as part of long-ago efforts to move the Giants to Santa Clara County. The Giants went on to develop their own stadium on the San Francisco waterfront, but they have shown no interest in giving up those rights.
