Hotshot Berkeley journalist Michael Lewis got the idea to write about the Oakland A’s not too long after I ended four-plus seasons covering the team full-time for the San Francisco Chronicle, in 1999. Lewis’s notion was that in baseball, as in business, a smart decision-maker could throw orthodoxy out the window and discover great opportunity by buying up undervalued, underappreciated talent. The result was the megabestseller Moneyball, a certifiable cultural phenomenon. The book is both a lightbulb tract about intelligent management and an underdog story of the cheap, smart outfit that finds a way to overachieve.

So how could the post-Moneyball A’s have become so pathetic? In the past three years, while Hollywood writer-directors Steven Soderbergh and Aaron Sorkin angled to do a film version of Lewis’s story, the A’s degenerated into one of Major League Baseball’s least inspiring franchises. General manager Billy Beane, the dashing, brilliant, to-be-played-by-Brad-Pitt star of Moneyball (and, truth be told, a friend of mine), became a target of jeers from both sports columnists and formerly loyal fans.

But I think Moneyball still holds the key to understanding this once proud franchise: As widely as they are demeaned, the current A’s are a great example of hidden value. Like the quirky talents Beane picked up and turned into valuable major leaguers, the A’s have a tremendous upside that few can see. That’s because their co-owner and managing partner, the surprisingly little-known developer Lew Wolff, along with his deep-pocketed partner, John Fisher, can—and will—move the team to a beautiful new stadium in the one city where they can reach the World Series, which has eluded them during the Beane years: San Jose.

How can I be so sure of the A’s future, especially given the facts before us? If you follow Bay Area development, you know that just last year, Wolff and the A’s were set on building a new stadium and shopping complex in Fremont, not San Jose; you also know that the San Francisco Giants have long threatened to thwart an A’s move to San Jose, and that baseball’s boss, Bud Selig, is a forced-consensus, Nikita Khrushchev type who won’t tolerate such a public squabble over turf among those he’s invited into baseball’s club of owners. So, sure, Wolff and Fisher face some serious hurdles. But if you take another step back and consider Lew Wolff, San Jose, and both of their histories, those obstacles don’t seem important. Indeed, the story of the coming San Jose A’s has unfolded over four decades. And only by tracking its long arc can you see how inevitable its dénouement has become.

I’ve been talking to Wolff and Beane, along with other baseball insiders, over the past four months about the team’s bid for San Jose, and this article will be the first place where the two A’s owners have decided to make their case for San Jose. Wolff spoke at length, and Fisher, who never talks to the press, also weighed in passionately. Only Beane refrained from giving me a juicy quote about San Jose as the club’s ideal future location. Though the A’s have the lowest attendance among baseball’s 30 teams and the biggest dump of a stadium, he’s aware that the core fans who continue to come to the Coliseum deserve his loyalty, not taunts for theirs. So in our talks, Beane just restated Wolff’s mission for the A’s: a new stadium somewhere in the Bay Area. “In the last 10 to 15 years, it seems almost every team in baseball has a new venue, so you go on the road and see all the amenities that make the game more enjoyable—and not just for players, but for fans, too—and we’re one of the few who doesn’t,” Beane said on the October day of the amazing storm that dumped a tenth of a typical year’s worth of rain on Oakland. “When I go to the Coliseum to work out today and it’s pouring, the toilets will all be overflowing in the clubhouse, and the clubhouse guy, Mikey—if we can get Mikey in there—will be going in to get buckets to capture the rain. It’s a great venue for us, as far as history goes. But it’s just time.”

Wolff, though, is done being circumspect, done avoiding the hurt feelings that will come when the A’s publicly abandon the East Bay and embrace the region’s demographic shift to the South Bay, done staying quiet as the Giants claim that a San Jose major-league team will damage their fan base and their finances. Wolff spent three years, both before and after he took over as managing partner in 2005, actively exploring locations in Oakland, starting with the parking lot at the Coliseum. But from my own reporting on the city’s stadium options the decade before, I suspected that was a dead horse, and Wolff probably flogged it long after it was clear it couldn’t run. He next spent an extraordinary $80 million of the ownership group’s money pushing for a new Cisco Field 21 miles south of the Coliseum, off the Auto Mall Parkway in Fremont, that would have been the cen­terpiece of a luxurious, Santana Row–like mall surrounded by custom houses and more. Wolff was ser­ious about the Fremont plan, even deploying his franchise star, Beane, to promote the idea. The location was approved by Major League Baseball and couldn’t rile up the Giants. But the bid did rile up Fremont—concerns included traffic, the threat to a neighboring mall, and Wolff’s developer mentality—and in February, Wolff announced it was dead. Finally, finally, he could bring out the option he’s had in his pocket ever since he and Fisher decided to purchase the A’s.

“When we bought the team,” Wolff told me, “I thought that we would resolve the ballpark situation in Oakland. Then we tried Fremont and spent a fortune on it. So over a great deal of time, five years now, we have determined that San Jose is the only option for us in California.” Reached in late October, Fisher—the billionaire son of Gap founder Don Fisher and a wide-ranging investor—reiterated this chronology, then went out of his way to poke holes in the long-standing claim that a major-league team in San Jose would hurt the Giants franchise, which he and his dad helped save. “My grand­parents went to every Giants game after 1958. I grew up a Giants fan. I love AT&T Park. We want the Giants to continue to be one of the most successful franchises in baseball. This is not a contest between the A’s and the Giants.”

The Giants will likely disagree. Though the team had no comment for this story, managing partner Bill Neukom was quoted in the summer as saying that the A’s “can’t have the South Bay.” So let the jockeying begin. It was bound to happen. If you know Wolff and hear him insist, “We did not buy the team with San Jose in mind,” you know from his voice that he means it in a certain way, like when you want to throw a look-away pass to your favorite receiver. That is: First you sell everyone, even yourself, on going to the guy you’ve got your eyes on. And if he’s open, you do throw over there. But in the back of your mind, you’ve got the itch to go in another, much more rewarding direction.

An affable, wisecracking businessman of 73, Wolff grew up in St. Louis riding the streetcar to Sportsman’s Park to watch his beloved Cardinals, and he likes to say he got his start in real estate development by posing in a tux in front of a vacant lot before a fraternity formal at the University of Wisconsin. An investor in numerous luxury hotels, he has always taken a particular interest in San Jose, though he has never lived there, preferring to live in L.A., partly to keep his wife, Jean, happy, he says. People thought he was crazy when he talked early on about San Jose’s dreary, decaying downtown as having any future—but starting in the late 1960s, he built regional headquarters for both Wells Fargo and Bank of America there, and, in 2002, he made over the towering San Jose Fairmont to give the city its first luxury cachet. He is especially captivated by sport teams and their symbolic importance to a city. He helped get the San Jose Sharks arena built; as part owner of the Golden State Warriors, in the ’90s, considered moving that team to San Jose; and, in 2006, with Fisher, bought the San Jose Earthquakes soccer team, for whom they’re building a new stadium.

As an owner and partner, Wolff has an easy, self-mocking style; he’s one of those guys who were successful enough at a young enough age that they like to keep things fun and light. Beane, who talks with Wolff daily during the season, describes him as “a soothing personality, inviting to talk to. He gets excited when you win and is comforting when you lose. With Lew, you view it as a personal relationship first, which is really unique in business.” Fisher and Wolff are a generation apart, but Fisher told me that he considers Wolff “a tremendous partner and friend, who, while he values my input, is the final decision-maker and has been from the very beginning—despite what [Chronicle columnist] Ray Ratto may write.” He talks to Wolff at least twice a week, Fisher said. “I’m very supportive of what he’s doing to make the A’s once again the storied franchise that it has been.”

Having grown up in San Jose when it was the Prune Capital of the World and the most boring place on the planet, and having known Wolff from the time I was in college at UC Berkeley, I feel like I’ve been following this story forever without quite knowing it. When I graduated from high school in 1980, I understood nothing of my future except that I’d never live in San Jose again. But in 1993, covering the San Jose Sharks for their third season, when they moved into the gleaming new facility on the edge of downtown that Wolff had helped bring to life, what amazed me was how much the city had changed. It had been just a decade or so since I spent the summer lifeguarding at a downtown pool, kicking out winos before I could open the place up, still bummed after having broken up with, yes, Lew Wolff’s daughter Kari. But here was a new San Jose, with Wolff as a key player in its redevelopment, and with its first real sports team.
Even I, who knew how desperately San Jose yearned to be counted as big-time, had no clue how out-of-their-heads nuts the locals would be in their devotion to their Sharks. When the team made the play-offs for the first time, in ’94, the giddy atmosphere in what was then called the San Jose Arena was so rarefied, it was like the place had been filled with helium. “For me, it was that extra power I was getting from the crowd,” their diminutive, magic-wielding goalie, Arturs Irbe, told me by phone recently from Washington, D.C., where he is now a goaltending coach for the Capitals. “We were something new, and we experienced something that is hard to experience somewhere else: that unconditional support, like when a parent loves his child unconditionally.”


While Wolff’s vision of a passionately big-league San Jose was finally coming true, the hopelessness of the A’s future in Oakland was being cemented. As late as 1989, the team had won the World Series, and while the Coliseum was never going to rival Fenway or Wrigley, it could be mighty fine to sit there on a gorgeous summer day, nursing a beer with that great view of the Oakland hills. Then the stadium went downhill, and by 1997, Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis had ruined it by negotiating to erect a huge, gray edifice in the outfield that was a middle finger to baseball fans, adding ugly to decrepit as the key adjectives heaped on the stadium. The A’s ownership looked no prettier. When the team traded Mark McGwire in 1997, the year before he broke Roger Maris’s single-season home-run record, it was in part because McGwire was appalled by the legendarily tightfisted Steve Schott and his partner, Ken Hofmann, and had the fortitude to say so. One of the game’s best executives, Sandy Alderson, left the organization soon after having to make the heartbreaking McGwire trade, leaving his protégé, Billy Beane, in charge. Beane remembers that as the darkest time. “The apathy toward the franchise took off,” he said. “We were basically a non­­entity in the Bay Area.”

It was my job in those days to cover that nonentity, and to me it was clear the team’s gig in Oakland was done, no matter how smart Beane was. The A’s needed to reboot and regenerate the franchise with the revenue stream and excitement of a dazzling new facility, the way the Baltimore Orioles had done with Camden Yards, and nearly every other team in baseball—including the Giants—would soon be doing. Even then, San Jose was the franchise’s best bet. Two weeks after the McGwire trade, I had an exclusive that ran on the Chronicle’s front page, under the headline “SAN JOSE MAKES A PLAY FOR THE A’S,” and reported that the South Bay city’s officials had approached the A’s about building them a stadium. “The success of the NHL’s San Jose Sharks has whetted the appetite of South Bay civic leaders for more sports teams,” I wrote. The next spring, I published a follow-up in which I quoted a “major South Bay developer” who told me, “If I was going to pursue a ballpark...I wouldn’t spend five minutes on any other city besides San Jose.” That developer? Lew Wolff. But the A’s owners lacked Wolff’s political prowess and contacts, and they didn’t pursue the option.  

By the time Wolff was approved as the A’s new managing general partner, in 2005, the buy-low, sell-high philosophy and scientific system of player analysis articulated in Moneyball had managed to turn the A’s into a borderline play-off team for eight straight years. But there was a self-defeating aspect to the “moneyball” philosophy: The same bargain players who could make a team competitive in the regular season weren’t necessarily the kind of transcendent players who could get the team through to the World Series (a Jeremy Giambi is not a Derek Jeter). Plus, anyone could see that there  wasn’t enough money to hold on to players, as rising star after rising star discovered by Beane thrived with the A’s for a few years—hitters like Miguel Tejada and Nick Swisher, pitchers like Huston Street, Tim Hudson, and Mark Mulder—only to be traded or lost to free agency when the team could no longer afford them.

“Billy found inefficiencies—two guys to equal one Alex Rodriguez—but other teams with more money now have caught on to that,” Wolff told me. “So we’re effectively out of the market in terms of making a long-term contract to somebody.” Beane agreed. “What we have yet to do,” he told me this past summer, sounding depressed, “is show we can keep those really good teams on the field, together.” Though it may seem surpris­ing, the franchise is making a small profit, because baseball funnels the small-market teams money from the big-market teams. But it’s not earning enough to, as Beane put it, “invest in a player we can draft and keep his whole career, so a fan can see him on the field and think they can see him again the next year.” There’s only one way to accomplish that, Wolff said. “We need revenue. We need to have a fan experience that allows us to attract 25,000 people, rather than 4,000.”

That’s been MLB commissioner Bud Selig’s goal for the A’s, too. Selig is the strange ex–Milwaukee car dealer who will ultimately decide the A’s future. Despite his Don Knotts look, Selig is savvy enough to have presided over baseball during this past decade-plus of absurdly twitchy, steroid-fueled muscular excess, yet have managed so far to avoid being widely derided as the Steroid Commissioner. His gifts are evading conflict, building consensus within baseball, and intimidating anyone who crosses him; he plays baseball’s 30 owners like a violin, never allowing them to vote on a matter unless he has predetermined the result. When Wolff took over the A’s, I figured San Jose might be the new owner’s ultimate destination, though I wondered how he would get around Selig and the Giants’ apparent willingness to create a conflict. Then I learned something I hadn’t known, which made me think Selig might not be a problem: The commissioner had recruited Wolff as the A’s owner—maybe because he and Wolff had been college fraternity mates.

Wolff claims that his bond with Selig doesn’t guarantee his dream for the San Jose A’s, and that neither does the commissioner’s March 2009 decision (after the Fremont deal fell through) to impanel a three-person owners committee to make recommendations about the “current situation in Oakland.” In fact, Wolff sounds impatient with his old friend’s ways. “I joined baseball, and they told me there were two kinds of time, regular time and baseball time,” he said. “Selig likes process and tells me he wants to be as thorough as he can. That’s all I hear. I don’t hear, ‘I’ll get back to you.’ It can be frustrating beyond belief, obviously.”

Still, Wolff can be forgiven for likely smiling as he gives his old University of Wisconsin fraternity brother Bud a jab for his inherent cautiousness. Wolff has stayed friends with many of his fratmates, including three who’ve gone on to co-own sports teams: U.S. senator Herb Kohl (Milwaukee Bucks), attorney and movie producer Mel Pearl (Chicago White Sox), and Selig, the onetime harried fraternity president, who was the co-owner of the Milwaukee Brewers for years. Wisconsin was a formative exper­ience in fun for Wolff, who said he was a “flake” who took “three years to find out where the library was.” Selig, on the other hand, “wasn’t a wild guy, like we were,” Pearl said. “He was a fun guy but couldn’t keep up with us. His biggest job was to make sure that we didn’t do something that would get us kicked off campus.” Selig, in a phone interview, enthusiatically confirmed the portrayal. “Mel and Lew had a penchant for getting in trouble from time to time, and it was my job to keep them in line. I guess it taught me a great deal about things.”

Selig treasures those fraternity bonds, describing his old friends as “a remarkable group of people.” So 40-plus years later, during the 2002 World Series, he tracked Wolff down in Paris and asked him to one of the Giants-Angels games. To get there, Wolff enjoyed the first of many police-escorted trips with the commissioner. They traveled from the Mark Hopkins Hotel to PacBell Park. Then, during the game, Selig leaned over to ask Wolff if he had any interest in talking to the A’s owners, Hofmann and Schott. “Lewie, would you be interested in trying to purchase the interest of one of the partners in the A’s?” Selig asked.

“I thought my role, if I bought in, might be to work on the venue and have a little fun,” Wolff told me.

Soon enough, while investigating the idea, Wolff got a call from John Fisher, with whom he had been a co-investor in hotels such as the Carlyle in New York, the San Jose Fairmont, and the San Francisco Fairmont. Fisher and his father had been part owners of the Giants before largely dropping out in 1995, so Wolff asked about the idea of crossing the bay to buy out the A’s owners. “I think it was around $180 million for all of it, which required about $100 million in cash,” Wolff told me. That was too rich for Wolff’s blood, so “I said to John, ‘I’ll just take a small piece, and I’ll run it. What­ever you want.’ So John called back and said, ‘If you’ll buy 10 percent now and commit to buying another 15 percent, I’ll join you.’

“I said, ‘You know, once you ask someone to run a team, they can’t be removed easily, unless I kill someone or something. So are you sure?’ And John said, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ve known you a long time.’”

Wolff told me he now has $15 million invested. “This is a significant investment for me, and it’s not chump change. I think my ownership position is as large as Peter Magowan’s was in the Giants.”

The theoretical threat that the Giants pose to the creation of the San Jose A’s is the result of a ludicrous accident of history. In 1992, when the Giants—like the A’s of today—were saddled with a terrible stadium and an urgent need to move, A’s owner Walter Haas and team executive Alderson were asked if the A’s would do the Giants a favor: give them “territorial rights” to San Jose, so they could go to South Bay voters with a ballot measure on building a stadium down there. The idea of the Giants’ moving to San Jose sounded good from Oakland, Alderson told me; plus, he said, “Walter Haas was the kind of person who would extend himself for the benefit of others.” But then, to everyone’s shock, the Giants lost the stadium vote, and in baseball’s scramble to secure the team’s future, the onetime territorial rights were never rescinded. “The mistake on our part—and I take responsibility for it—was not to get a sunset clause,” said Alderson, who later served as a Selig deputy and the CEO of the San Diego Padres. “And 16 years later, it remains an issue.”

Wolff told me that “the Giants are unfairly using a flaw in a past action to hold the San Jose area hostage,” but the Giants have been adamant. The team’s managing general partner, Bill Neukom, told a Rotary Club gathering in Los Altos last summer, as reported by the San Jose Mercury News, that “it’s our territory. We care a lot about it.” His core argument: In making a large capital outlay to build their new stadium a decade ago, the Giants were banking on having exclusive territorial rights to five counties: San Francisco, Marin, San Mateo, Monterey, and Santa Clara. Presumably to strengthen their claim, they recently bought a big chunk of the San Jose Giants, the farm team that has long played near downtown.

The Giants have always claimed they’d be happy to fight all day to keep San Jose free of a major-league team, but Selig doesn’t allow that sort of rabble-rousing. He will insist on finding a gradualist, consensus solution that he can steer the necessary three-quarters of the owners to approve, likely during next season. In a clear sign of progress for Wolff and Fisher, Selig’s committee quietly visited San Jose in late October to meet with city officials and scout downtown. Selig himself declined to discuss the A’s future. But he did tell me: “I’ve asked everybody to let the committee do their work. They’re hard at work, but I don’t know the time frame. It’s taking longer, but this is a very complex process. The goal is to get it done right, not necessarily to get it done in a certain time frame.”

In the meantime, Wolff is busy behind the scenes, planning the San Jose A’s. He has in mind the plot of land 500 strides directly south of HP Pavilion, where the Sharks play. Using no public money, on land the city has already bought and would lease or sell to Fisher and Wolff, the A’s would build a ballpark with 32,000 seats that would be the most intimate in baseball. It would cost a relatively cheap $400 million or so, because of the recession; look modern, rather than retro; feature all manner of Silicon Valley high-tech bells and whistles; and be sponsored by Cisco—and it could be finished two to three years after the go-ahead. Wolff wouldn’t be able to develop a mall or anything else around it—to his chagrin. “The land we’re getting is just for the ballpark, and we’re not seeking land around it,” he said. “We would like to, but others own it.”

Still, there’s money in it for Wolff. “This isn’t philanthropic,” he said. “If the Yankees are worth well north of a billion, according to a recent article in Forbes, and the Giants are worth close to half a billion, the A’s today are worth around $300 million. In 10 years, with baseball itself moving up in value, it may be two or three times more valuable.” Given that scale, a successful San Jose A’s franchise could someday be worth more than $1 billion, even with the huge debt that will accompany a new stadium. “We can reach greater value,” Wolff said.

I, for one, am convinced that the San Jose A’s would be greeted with the same rush of excitement that the Sharks unleashed. But what Selig and the other owners will have to decide is whether the Giants’ fan base and economic prospects would be hurt. As a lifetime Giants fan, I don’t think so. Let’s say the Giants have a base of 100,000 serious fans in the South Bay. Would they all instantly defect to the A’s cool new ballpark in San Jose? It just doesn’t work that way with a sports fan. My brother Dave, for example, lives in San Jose and is another lifelong Giants fan—and he would still go to five games a year at AT&T Park, whether or not the A’s started playing in San Jose. “I am a Giants fan,” he said. “I’d probably go to a lot more interleague games, though: A’s versus Giants in San Jose? I’d hit one of those.” Meanwhile, to the Giants’ advantage, disgruntled A’s fans in the East Bay and points north could be expected to shift their allegiance and start making the trip to AT&T Park.

Wolff is so convinced that the San Jose A’s wouldn’t hurt a flea that you’d expect him to explode with anger over the fact that the move hasn’t been approved already. But he’s a developer who is embarking on a sensitive development play, and anyway, he isn’t the type to blow his stack. It may frustrate him at times, but Wolff under­stands the Selig way of doing things more clearly than most, so he and Fisher stick to their talking points, addressing “baseball” as an institution.

“It’s not me that can move to San Jose,” Wolff said. “It’s not the Giants who can prevent it. It’s a case where baseball has to say what’s fair for both clubs. When you look at the other two-market cities in baseball—New York, Chicago, and L.A.—they all share their territory. What’s wrong with us doing that? Especially because the Giants have done a wonderful job of getting a great ballpark. We just want to do the same thing, and we want to be farther away from them.”

I think Selig will be persuaded for his own reasons. He faces two potential legacies: one as the Steroid Commissioner, the other as the Ballpark Commissioner. He’s overseen a revival in the national pastime through gorgeous new ballparks for nearly every team. An A’s ballpark would be one more success story to hold up against arguments tarring him as the man who looked the other way when ballplayers were doing their best to resemble a young Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Fisher told me that he did not decide instantly to buy into the A’s. Wolff was “very persuasive,” and so was the commissioner, whom Fisher flew to meet in Milwaukee. And Selig’s sales pitch included the ballpark, Fisher said. “He acknowledged the importance of building a new stadium. Certainly, he points with pride to the 20-plus stadiums that have been built and how that’s been an integral part of baseball’s renaissance.”

“From the moment we bought this team,” Fisher said, “the most important thing for Lew and I was to build a new ballpark to keep the A’s in the Bay Area. Our conclusion is that the best opportunity to build a ballpark is in downtown San Jose. Of course, everything I say to you is all subject to what the commissioner of baseball and all owners decide. It’s in their hands to see that this is in the best interests of baseball.”

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Former San Francisco Chronicle sportswriter Steve Kettmann, author of One Day at Fenway, has written on sports for the New York Times, GQ, the New Republic, and Salon, and he has co­written bestsellers, including Juiced (with Jose Canseco).