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Baseball can't hit fever pitch
GIANTS, A'S WIN; DOES AREA NOTICE?
By Mark Emmons
Mercury News


At Pacific Bell Park, Giants superstar Barry Bonds performs historic feats on a regular basis. Over in Oakland, the A's once again defy logic as they make their annual run for the playoffs on a shoestring budget.

This should be viewed as a golden age of Bay Area baseball. Yet do we fully appreciate it?

Or put another way: How come in mid-September, with the A's in a pennant race and the Giants considered a favorite to return to the World Series, there's still more buzz about the 49ers and Raiders?

``The Bay Area should consider itself the luckiest place in the world and yet it doesn't realize it,'' said Michael Lewis, the Berkeley-based author of ``Moneyball,'' the bestseller about A's General Manager Billy Beane. ``People here don't care about baseball like they do in Boston, Chicago or New York. Could you imagine two teams like this in Chicago? Imagine the hysteria.''

Actually, in Chicago it is hysteria as the Cubs and White Sox both have been in first place this September. The last time that happened was 1906.

But the Bay Area public remains calm as both teams continue their remarkable stretch of success that began in the late 1990s.

Now, no one is suggesting either local team is unloved. Both are drawing well, TV ratings are up and the interest should mount in the coming weeks. That said, there is precious little rabid passion.

``Here it's like, whatever,'' said A's third baseman Eric Chavez. ``This is definitely football country -- especially Oakland. It's just the way it is.''

Or perhaps we've just -- ho-hum -- come to expect such baseball excellence.

``Maybe people would get really excited if there was a World Series between the two teams,'' said Giants Manager Felipe Alou. ``But right now, people think the A's and Giants being in first place is just automatic.''

Bay Area `just different'

Both teams have compelling story lines. The Giants have dominated the National League West, and Bonds is approaching Willie Mays' 660 home-run milestone even as he copes with the recent death of his father, Bobby. Meanwhile, the A's keep winning mostly with players that other teams didn't want.

``These are two of the most interesting teams in baseball,'' Lewis said. ``Yet the Bay Area remains an apathetic baseball market.''

A's first baseman Scott Hatteberg played five seasons in baseball-mad Boston. What would it be like there if, as the A's are on the verge of doing, the Red Sox were heading to the playoffs for a fourth consecutive year?

``It would be frenzied,'' Hatteberg said. ``Sports-talk radio would be crazy. It would be the hot topic on everybody's mind.

``But here,'' he added, ``it's just different.''

Hatteberg, like everyone interviewed for this story, wasn't complaining. In fact, Hatteberg likes it that Bay Area residents understand that baseball, far from being life and death, is still just a game.

``I was born and raised in California,'' added Giants first baseman J.T. Snow, ``and Californians are just a different breed of people.''

Any talk of fan-dom in the cosmopolitan Bay Area inevitably descends into a discussion about how there's just so much to do here and that people have such varied interests. This is not a fertile climate for sports fanaticism.

``Here, the quality of life is pretty nice, so people don't really lose their minds over the baseball teams,'' said Gary Radnich, the KRON-TV (Ch. 4) sportscaster and KNBR-AM talk show host who grew up in San Jose. ``And when the cost of living is so high, you've got your mind on other things.''

While the Bay Area might not do rabid very well, there is an exception: the NFL.

Radnich has a theory about that, too. He believes football is better suited to our hectic lifestyle.

``This is a big-spectacle market,'' he said. ``The average person in the Bay Area doesn't have the time or inclination to follow 162 baseball games. That's too much time to invest. Football has become king in this market because it fits the needs of more people.''

Giants owner Peter Magowan, however, begs to differ.

Attendance not suffering

Don't tell Magowan that his baseball team is underappreciated. He notes that the Giants will draw 3.25-plus million fans for the fourth year in a row to the gleaming bay-side jewel that is Pac Bell Park -- a picturesque venue that attracts casual fans.

Magowan said he believes that until Pac Bell opened, Bay Area baseball fans never were given the chance to show how much they cared.

``Candlestick Park was not the kind of place designed to build passion for a baseball team the way Pac Bell is,'' Magowan said. ``I'd say the same thing for the Oakland Coliseum. I don't think the A's have ever had a chance to show what they could do if they had a really competitive facility.''

Beane's ingenuity has kept the A's competitive. But handicapped by playing in Network Associates Coliseum, which is really a cavernous football stadium, the A's say they haven't generated the revenue to keep players like former star Jason Giambi and perhaps Miguel Tejada, who might leave when he becomes a free agent after this season.

In the deciding playoff game last October against Minnesota, the A's drew only 32,146 fans on a Sunday afternoon. (The stadium has held more than 55,000 for baseball.)

Still, the A's are averaging a solid 27,053 fans per game -- a slight increase from last year -- and should draw 2.2 million spectators for the season.

``With all the things you can do in this area, I think that speaks pretty well of the appreciation of our team,'' Beane said.

There is independent data that supports these teams' popularity. TV ratings are up sharply. At Fox Sports Net, for instance, the Giants are pulling a 6.1 share, up 40 percent, while the A's are getting a 2.6 share, an increase of 28 percent. (One rating point equals 24,260 households.)

Less scientific is a look at the baseball business done at The Fan Club, a San Jose sports shop. Owner Mike Herkenrath said baseball merchandise sales are up about 30 percent from a typical year. But it's mostly Giants products, which explains why Herkenrath had a ``30-percent-off sale on all my A's stuff.''

How does this compare with sales of football memorabilia?

``Football is 80 percent of our business,'' he said.

As for ``buzz,'' it is a hard thing to quantify, especially in a region so sprawling and diverse as the Bay Area.

But there is a fairly recent example of the Bay Area going baseball crazy. Sport doesn't get much more dramatic than during the run-up to the 1989 World Series -- the Bay Bridge Series -- pitting the Giants against the A's.

There were colorful personalities: Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, Rickey Henderson, Dennis Eckersley, Will Clark and Kevin Mitchell. There also was a sense of anticipation for the showdown in those pre-interleague-play days.

Then, of course, the earthquake just before the first pitch of Game 3 overshadowed everything else.

The current Giants and A's are less flamboyant. Watching Giants pitcher Jason Schmidt and Bonds each deal with the death of a parent has tugged at heartstrings. But while A's pitcher/free spirit Barry Zito supposedly plays a nice guitar, both teams lack the rock-star antics that often pull in the interest of non-hardcore fans.

``The fringe fan knows Bonds and then maybe two other Giants,'' Radnich said. ``And with all due respect to the A's, who have a terrific young team with those great pitchers, but when the biggest name on your team is the general manager . . .''

Monotony of success

Maybe part of the problem -- if it even could be called that -- is just these teams have been so monotonously good that they've not only warped our perspective but also eliminated the suspense. The Giants started off the season 13-1 and never looked back. Also, was anybody shocked when the A's, the best second-half team in baseball, recently reeled off 10 consecutive wins?

But even if this doesn't seem special today, it may very well look that way in hindsight.

``I bet there's another book about these A's and there will be several books written about these Giants and what Barry Bonds has meant to baseball,'' Lewis said. ``And it will all seem much more important later than it does now.''

Snow contends fans realize that they might not ever see anything like Bonds again. But to solidify this run as a ``golden age,'' the Giants have to win a World Series, Snow said. Chavez said exactly the same thing about his A's.

``Nowadays it's all about winning championships,'' Snow added. ``People here aren't happy with just getting back to the playoffs. They want to win it all. That's a good thing because that's what we feel as players.''

The dream scenario is a Bay Bridge Series sequel.

``That would jolt it for sure,'' Chavez said. ``And if that didn't, I don't know what to tell you.''

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And now a home venue for the Expos