People and Pop Culture
The Sit-Down: Dave Kaval, President, Oakland A’s and San Jose Earthquakes
On the job with the A’s since November, Kaval talks about finding the quest for a new ballpark and the importance of having the right team when it finally opens.
I’m pretty much focused on the A’s. There’s a lot to do with the ballpark and re-engaging the community to get their input on everything we’re doing with the organization.
[We’re] really engaging the community to get their input on where we should build, what we should build, how we should celebrate the past, how you do all those things so it’s not just the A’s ballpark but the community’s ballpark.
We believe the city of Oakland can support a major league team in a real way and we’re doubling down on that.
We feel very confident this year we will announce the site and we will also announce the timeline. And I think the two go hand in hand.
It gives all the other stakeholders … the kind of marching orders and direction they need in order to build a competitive club, what players are going to be here when we open the new building.
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Photo by: RICH SCHMITT
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We’re looking very closely at what the Indians did in the early ’90s [under GM] John Hart and really assembling a nucleus of young players, peaking at the right time to open a new ballpark.
It’s very difficult to communicate to fans with unknowns. They get very frustrated. We know it’s not easy to develop in California. We did it with [the Earthquakes’] Avaya Stadium, and it was super challenging.
We learned a lot of what we did at Avaya with a privately financed plan. That’s the basis of everything that we’re looking at. But there may be infrastructure and things like that where we need assistance from the county and city.
[Asking for public money is] not even a viable option in California in this day and age.
The ancillary development that goes around this will be critical. It gives you the economic basis to help build the ballpark. And it helps give you a destination and it becomes its own neighborhood.
Things like Petco [Park in San Diego] will also be an influence, where they took the Gaslamp Quarter and totally re-energized it. That’s the kind of vision we have. Urban settings are fantastic for ballparks.
We see a very intimate, neighborhood-oriented park. Think Wrigley. Think Fenway. Think all the way back to League Park [in Cleveland] or Shibe Park [in Philadelphia], stadiums that were really built into a neighborhood.
The plan is to announce the final site. We saw this in San Jose. [The choice] triggers a lot of other things, and it’s hard to keep parallel sites open.
We’re making multimillion-dollar investments [at the current stadium] in things like a new West Side Club, which we’ve now rebranded Shibe Park Tavern. It’ll have old artifacts from Shibe Park in Philadelphia, an old-time tavern feel. It’ll be a nice place for millennials to gather and watch the game.
People want something different than AT&T Park. You go there, it’s very expensive. Obviously, they have a great fan experience, but some people want something a little different than San Francisco kind of elitism.
They want more of a people’s team. And that’s the East Bay. You come to the East Bay, it’s a little more working class, reminds me of growing up in Cleveland. Great fan base. Energized. Excited.
