Ultimately, they succeeded, but it would require a deeper commitment than either Magowan or Baer had intended to make.
“When you apply to own a baseball team, you have to say who is going to be the control person,” Baer says.
“Somebody was going to have to be the managing partner and run it. They looked to Peter who was the right age and was running Safeway. He said, ‘I’ll do it if Larry comes in as my No. 2.’ So that’s what happened. We were the ones who were nominated to run the team.”
It took a lot of effort to get to that point, but in some ways, that had been the easy part.
Now they had to turn around this team that was losing money and playing in an old ballpark that was disconnected from downtown. The previous ownership group had not been shy about expressing its frustration with Candlestick Park and the financial state of the team, which had begun to turn off many Giants fans.
That sentiment became abundantly clear when ownership surveyed fans to see how they felt about the team.
“People said, ‘We’re numb. There have been so many threats about the team moving and build us a ballpark with public money and this and that,’” Baer says. “The Giants story was always on the front page, not in the sports section.
“It was always a business story and everybody was complaining and nobody was happy. The fans said, ‘Just shut up and play ball. We want baseball to be an escape. We want to take our 12-year-old to a game and just enjoy it and not worry about all that other stuff.’”
So that’s what the ownership group did. They stopped talking about the problems at Candlestick and went underground for three years to come up with a plan for a privately financed ballpark and an election in March 1996.
“We’re a sports media entertainment company that is dealing in the leisure-time space,” Baer says. “You have to start with the notion that none of this is a necessity of life. People can take it or leave it. It’s discretionary. So as such, you have to earn everybody’s respect.”
During this three-year period, when anyone would ask about the future, Baer’s response was simple. We’re working on it. In the meantime, ownership invested more than $10 million in Candlestick to make it a better place to watch a ballgame.
“We wanted to show people that we’re trying to be positive and we care about the fan experience,” Baer says. “It may not be the prettiest house on the block, but it’s our house. We’re going to take pride in it. For the people who live in San Francisco, that kind of opened their eyes. It’s creating that culture of finding a way and innovating. We knew we couldn’t do the same kind of ballot measure. We had to do everything differently.”
In conjunction with the San Francisco Examiner, the Giants launched an initiative called Fix the Stick. Fans were welcome to submit any ideas they had to make the ballgame experience a better one and if their idea was chosen, they would be rewarded.
“We’d have them sit in the first row for games,” Baer says. “We’d celebrate their ideas. We completely changed out the concessions. We brought bleachers in that would hug the outfield fence as opposed to the way it was before where there was this huge separation. We brought in the first female public address announcer and a foghorn that would blow every time a home run was hit.”
They also did something to solve the problem of hot dog wrappers blowing around on the field. As any San Franciscan can recall, there were plenty of summer nights at Candlestick that would be downright chilly as the winds blew and hot dog wrappers and cups would get blown about.
“We had a rule that no hot dog wrapper would be on the field for more than half an inning,” Baer says. “We’d ring a buzzer if it happened.”
