The San Francisco Giants have retired the jersey number of Barry Bonds for his performance with the team over 15 years. While his baseball achievements were significant, his more lasting impact may have been on real estate development in San Francisco.
The tech industry has transformed San Francisco over the past several years, but in many respects those forces merely leveraged the foundation put in place during Mr. Bonds’ heyday. Neighborhoods like South Park and South Beach would look a lot different if Mr. Bonds hadn’t signed with the Giants 25 years ago.
You can’t talk about the transformation of San Francisco’s southeastern side without talking about the Giants’ stadium, AT&T Park. And the roots of AT&T Park go back to the Giants’ struggle to find a new home for the team starting in the 1980s. The Giants’ former home, Candlestick Park, was not a pleasant place for sports. It epitomized the line attributed to Mark Twain of “The coldest winter I ever saw was the summer I spent in San Francisco.”
In the 1990s, the Giants ranked in the bottom half of attendance in the National League every single year. The team’s owners put the question to Bay Area voters four times between 1987 and 1992 about building a new stadium in San Francisco, Santa Clara or San Jose. All four times, voters rejected the proposals. For a time, it looked as though the Giants would relocate from San Francisco to Florida. Eventually, the frustrated owners sold the team to a new group.
Fortunately for those new owners, this happened just as Barry Bonds, a Bay Area native, became a free agent and signed with the team, in December 1992. The following year, the Giants won 103 games, the most in franchise history, and Mr. Bonds won the National League Most Valuable Player award. A couple of years later, in early 1996, a stadium vote was once again put before San Francisco voters, and, perhaps heartened by that 1993 season and new ownership, voters approved.
Opening in 2000 as Pacific Bell Park, the stadium quickly went through a couple of name changes before becoming AT&T Park, but from the beginning it felt like the House That Barry Built.
The park’s iconic feature is its right field wall perched right in front of a body of water called China Basin. Left-handed batters who hit home runs far enough to right field could reach said body of water. Mr. Bonds’s record-breaking home run season occurred in the park’s second year, thrilling spectators by hitting home runs into the bay and sending an armada of kayaks racing to retrieve the ball. Thirty-five of the first 45 “splash hits” by Giants players were hit by Mr. Bonds.
Giants games during the Bonds years were the hottest ticket in town. Even after the dot-com bust, the Giants ranked first or second in National League attendance each of the first five years of the stadium’s existence.
As fans swarmed to the games, real estate development in the surrounding neighborhood boomed. Bars like Momo’s became popular watering holes for office workers congregating before games. The 21st Amendment brewery opened a couple of blocks away from the stadium in 2000. Luxury apartments and condos were built nearby. An extension of the Muni transit system was built from the Embarcadero past the stadium, connecting to a Caltrain station.
In the early and mid-2000s, San Francisco’s role in the tech industry was mostly as a place for Steve Jobs to give his keynote speeches. As recently as 2006, an eBay coworker of mine who was desperate to live and work in San Francisco ended up taking a corporate finance position at Gap. Ridership on Caltrain in 2005 was slightly below 1998 levels.
Once the tech industry began to take off again in the late 2000s, neighborhood adjacent to AT&T Park, as well as the South of Market area and the controversially renamed East Cut, provided two things for the tech industry: a significant amount of underdeveloped land and a burgeoning community that had already become a hot spot for young professionals.
Coming out of the financial crisis, San Francisco was pointed to by urban planners and economic development professionals as a successful model worth emulating. Its combination of tech jobs, luxury apartments and hip amenities in walkable, transit-oriented communities were what young, college-educated employees in the millennial generation wanted.
It also should be pointed out, though, that San Francisco essentially had a 10-year head start on most other cities in the United States — thanks to Barry Bonds.
Connor Sen, an investment portfolio manager, is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.
First Published: August 25, 2018, 4:00 a.m.
