Why 2019 will be the Year of Real Estate for Bay Area sports teams

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There are lots of ways 2019 can go, sporty-wise, and this won’t be one of those insipid end-of-year columns predicting anyone’s future, or making resolutions for them, or even pretending its actually 2020 and looking back at 2019. The present is difficult enough for all of us, as you might have guessed by reading and listening to us all these years.
 
No, here you will get something you actually know will be true. Oh, it’ll still be insipid, but you can’t have everything, at least not at these prices. So here goes next to nothing.
 
In 2019, the major story in these parts will be real estate. Stadium real estate.
 
Oh, there will be games, to be sure – 700 pro events, give or take the odd postseason game, hundreds of college events not including the annual Alabama-Clemson game, and all the weird offseason dramas about who’s signing with whom and who isn’t going to like it and how many millions will be burned to make this whole pageant work.
 
But it’s still stadium stuff that will be of the most impact, and unless that sort of thing starts your engine, this could be a pretty dry year. Nothing sucks quite like stadium suck. The story seems to last forever, it often has no resolution, and when it does, it means prices are going up or availability is going down. But let’s do the walkthrough.
 
1.        The Oakland Raiders are playing somewhere in 2019, but nobody knows where yet, which is so very Raiders. Only they can institutionalize homelessness because only they work by the seat of their pants this often while pretending to a team whose “greatness is in its future.” 
2.        The Golden State Warriors are moving west and going to tell us all about it every day to the point that we may forget that there’s a basketball team attached to the new place. There’s no telling how much longer their dynasty will last, but it will happen against a backdrop of seat licenses and tickets for games that you can’t see.
3.        The San Francisco Giants are celebrating the 20th year at their park by seeing the Warriors move next door and start poaching event customers, while trying to decide if it needs the Raiders to chew up the field of their 75-win baseball team.
4.        The Oakland Athletics are going to keep futzing around the Howard Terminal site until they actually commit to ordering a shovel, which is when we can finally take them at face value on this matter.
5.        The San Francisco 49ers have to figure out how to hide all the empty seats that have framed their work product for the last five years because while their stadium may be a cash cow, cows are not particularly telegenic.
 
It’s not all stadiums everywhere, though. Our local colleges don’t have the building itch, the Sacramento Kings don’t factor into this because they’ve already done the arena thing and are finally crafting a team worthy of the building, and the San Jose Sharks, maybe uniquely, don’t want a new building even though theirs is more than 25 years old.
 
Yes, don’t want a new building. Owner Hasso Plattner, the German billionaire who bought the team because he likes hockey even though he still lives mostly in Germany, negotiated a new lease three years ago that runs through 2025 and pays $0 in rent in exchange for somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million in upgrades to keep SAP Center. That doesn’t mean they won’t want something new in the future on someone else’s dime, just that they have been silent on building matters since 2015 and remain so now.
 
But the Raiders in and of themselves are such a roaringly hot mess geographically that they may be the first team in the post-merger era (1970) to have nobody want them at all, and that’s a story in and of itself. The latest development is that two members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and a Supervisor-elect came out last week opposing the Giants potentially undercutting Oakland by picking up their team for a quick four-month slap-and-tickle.
 
This might drag Levi’s Stadium back into the whither-the-Raiders debate, even though neither landlord (Jed York) nor tenant (Mark Davis) seem to want anything to do with each other. And it keeps Oakland as the favorite to house the team for its true farewell season . . . that is unless the stadium in Las Vegas gets stalled for some unforeseen (or very foreseen, as these things go) reason.
 
The A’s remain in the Coliseum for the next few years, but have to advance beyond the artist’s rendering stage for the Howard Terminal version of their new park, which as we know isn’t a stage at all but merely watercolor sketches. What they do from this point on is the hard part, and there are skeptics who believe they might chuck it all in anyway, beg to relocate out of the area and throw themselves on the sandpapery mercies of Commissioner Rob Manfred, who remembers that the A’s voted against him when he was running for commissioner after Bud Selig’s retirement. Either way, that’s a year-long talker, too.
 
As for the Warriors, they will now move to the waterfront palace Joe Lacob cares about more than basketball, and if you think that won’t bring added pressure to the already exhaustive matter of keeping the dynasty fueled and stocked, you haven’t seen the way Lacob can agonize over a second-quarter turnover against the Suns.
 
Most of this will not be true in 2020. The Warriors will be fully embedded in the city, the Raiders will be moving-vanned to Nevada and the A’s will either be staring at a hole in the ground or have to explain why they’re not. By 2020 the 49ers will have to show tangible signs that they can get this football thing right and maybe put more of their seats to use, and the Giants will be a year into their rebuild and the simultaneous fight with the Warriors for non-baseball events.
 
Some of those problems will be resolved in 202 for good or ill, and we can move on to the games and the players and the coaching and the drama and the rumors and the gambling and all the other things that make us care as much as we do about spectator sport. Hell, we might even get a firing or two just to break up the monotony.
 
But for the most part, 2019 is about where we watch just as much as what we watch. Were I you, I’d drink. This could get . . . well, insipid. 

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