Team President Dave Kaval told players in training camp that there are four potential sites for a new Oakland Athletics ballpark, including the current Oakland Coliseum site.
The four sites aren’t exactly mysteries and have been discussed in the past. Besides the Coliseum site, also under consideration are the Howard Terminal site and two sites near the Lake Merritt BART station. (The above rendering shows a 1960 proposal for the Coliseum at the so-called “Peralta site” on the west side of Lake Merritt. It goes without saying this is not a current proposal, but rather a historical artifact.) There are issues with all four sites, and the availability of all four is far from assured. One big issue is BART access; another issue is fostering development as part of the ballpark. From the San Jose Mercury News:
“Each one has to be studied individually, because there’s traffic and parking issues that change depending on where you put it,” Kaval said of the two Lake Merritt-area sites. There are a couple of ways it can work in and around Lake Merritt. Those are two different options.”
Asked about the importance of being close to BART, Kaval said BART does change the equation.
“If you are in a certain range of a BART station, it doesn’t matter if it’s one block or two blocks,” he said. “But if you start getting a little farther, it does change people’s willingness to actually take that transportation to the venue.”…
And while the Coliseum remains 100 percent viable, the difficulty of completing the club’s vision of a community village springing up around a small baseball-only park on the site means the current site is far from a home run.
The path to a new ballpark at any of these sites won’t be an easy achievement. The unsettled state of the Oakland Raiders and a potential move will complicate things, at least in the short term.
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