Fresno in Hardball Battle Over Stadium Plan

The old-timers in Fresno will tell you that this town became smitten with the national pastime the moment Yankee legends Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig first stepped off the train in 1927 on a raucous barnstorming tour through California.

Ten years without a minor-league team--a dry spell that ended just this year--did little to temper what baseball historian Kerry Yo Nakagawa calls “this incredible legacy of baseball in Fresno.”

All of which helps explain why the fast-moving debate over a proposal to build a $30-million-plus baseball stadium in downtown Fresno has triggered something of a bean-ball war among city leaders, pitting feel-good images of old-time baseball Americana against old-fashioned fiscal conservatism.

Backers of the plan see the stadium as a vital way to jump-start the Fresno region out of its economic rut. But opponents insist that city taxpayers are being asked to pony up too much of the bill and are effectively being held hostage by well-heeled developers.

City Manager Jeffrey Reid, a chief nemesis of the stadium’s proponents, says sometimes he feels as if he is lobbying against motherhood and apple pie. “Baseball is a religion here. I’m trying to add some reason and rationality to a religious debate. . . . [The developers] are trying to keep us deaf, dumb and blind, and we’re being told it’s their way or no way.”

The stadium proposal is being championed by the Fresno Diamond Group, which bought Tucson’s minor league club and moved it to Fresno this past season as California’s only Triple-A baseball club, a notch below the major leagues. The city had languished without a club since 1987, when its longtime team bolted for San Jose.

The Diamond Group, which includes Central Valley business people, Wall Street financiers and pro basketball players among its investors, seeks to build a stadium on a vacant city-owned lot in a blighted area as a permanent home for the Fresno Grizzlies. The club, part of the San Francisco Giants’ farm system, played this season at a college field.

The new stadium would hold as many as 15,000 people and is envisioned as a “mini-Camden Yards,” a scaled-down version of Baltimore’s vintage-style park, said Diamond Group Chairman William Connolly, once an undistinguished minor-league shortstop but now a successful investor from the Bay Area. It would also be used to lure concerts, circuses, rodeos and sporting events to a region that has lagged far behind the rest of the state economically.

Stadium developers predict an attendance of up to a million fans for Grizzly baseball alone--a figure approaching the attendance of some small-market clubs in the majors. These are brash projections, but backers say the nation’s 39th-biggest city, plagued by notoriously high unemployment and welfare rates, can afford to be more brash in its economic expansion.

“What this stadium represents,” said City Councilman Garry Bredefeld, “is a statement that Fresno is clearly moving forward and that we can compete with first-rate cities.

“There has unfortunately been a very small-town mentality here,” he said. “If you build a first-class, multipurpose stadium, you’ll be drawing people from all over the [Central] Valley.”

Fresno County has committed $7.5 million to the project, and backers have pushed hard for the city to sign on to the plan as well, turning out in force at public hearings and invoking passionate images of the game’s historic moments. They even recruited home-grown pitching legend Tom Seaver for a rally four months ago. Unfortunately, Seaver’s ceremonial first pitch was well outside the strike zone, soaring above the podium and knocking down part of a banner with a rendering of the dream ballpark.

The stadium plan itself has also proved to be erratic. The idea has gone through more than five years of false starts, including reams of market research, financial analyses, scuttled proposals and government votes that sometimes appeared to signal its death knell.

The plan turned a corner this month, however, when the City Council approved a pair of preliminary stadium-related contracts on a 5-2 vote--including a fifth vote from a councilman who had voiced opposition to previous plans.

In February, the council is expected to consider a final plan for the stadium--including $8.5 million in city money--and proponents say that a fifth vote could prove crucial because it would allow the council to override a possible veto by Mayor Jim Patterson.

Patterson isn’t saying whether he would veto the council’s approval of the stadium plan. But he has made his opposition clear, offering a competing proposal last month for a publicly owned stadium. He wants the issue put up for a public vote.

Patterson, who survived a recall effort this year over his stance on the stadium and related economic development issues, said the current plan will collapse because of the developers’ “reckless” approach and their “broken promises.”

His concerns are many. He and other city officials say the Diamond Group has been unwilling to allow access to the firm’s financial records. They say that it is still unclear whether the city’s $8.5 million would be a grant or a loan. They question whether the investors can raise the money to cover their $23 million portion. And they say the city’s position as holder of a third deed would leave city taxpayers holding the bag if the stadium goes under.

“The stadium is overpriced and overbuilt. You can’t find another Triple-A stadium that comes in over $20 million,” Patterson said.

Moreover, Patterson rails against the notion that Fresno’s economic situation is so bleak that “its future and its identity is somehow vested in a baseball team. . . . That’s a mentality of desperation. All things considered, baseball would be nice, but it certainly isn’t worth mortgaging a public park or closing a fire station or laying off police officers, which is really what this comes down if the Diamond Group doesn’t perform perfectly.”

But Bredefeld points out that under the current proposal, “the city won’t pay out one penny of that $8.5 million until the stadium is built and the doors are open. The problem is that the mayor has created so much confusion that people are concerned and confused about this,” he said. “The mayor at this point is working to kill the project.”

Amid all the rancor, Diamond Group officials are moving ahead on design and construction plans that would allow them to open the stadium in time for the 2000 season.

“I had no idea it’d be this tough, no idea that the politics of Fresno and the in-fighting was so extreme,” said Connolly, who was brought into the Diamond Group by an executive of the Grizzlies.

And what if the stadium deal collapses?

Connolly answers bluntly. “It’s a foregone conclusion that if we don’t get a stadium, we’re gone. . . . We’ll move the team to one of a number of cities that have expressed interest, or we’ll just sell it outright.”

Nakagawa, for one, doesn’t want to see that happen.

The baseball historian, director of a research group in Fresno dedicated to Japanese American players, said the region can’t afford to lose the stadium.

“How can anyone in Fresno not realize the positive impact this would have on our perception around the state?” he asked. “We’ve always been considered the armpit of California. What do we have to offer in Fresno? Here you have the opportunity to bring people into a first-class stadium. It’d be a shame to pass that up.”