San Jose mayors making pitch for Major League Baseball team

In a letter to MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan and four of his predecessors seek to overturn the Giants' territorial rights to Santa Clara County.

SAN JOSE — Five of San Jose’s mayors sent Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred a letter last week, asking MLB to permanently suspend territorial rights and create an avenue for the city to get an expansion team.

In a letter dated June 15 and obtained by this news organization Friday night, current San Jose mayor Matt Mahan and four former mayors — Sam Liccardo, Chuck Reed, Ron Gonzales and Tom McEnery — called on baseball to allow for Santa Clara County to be freed from being considered as the territory of the San Francisco Giants.

“San Jose and Silicon Valley present a unique market opportunity for an expansion MLB team or existing club. We must disabuse those who might conflate San Jose with our smaller neighbor to the north, San Francisco,” the letter reads.

The letter was sent on the same day that Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo signed a bill that will grant $380 million in public financing to help the Oakland A’s build a new stadium on the Las Vegas Strip.

The A’s had previously attempted to move to San Jose, but those attempts were stalled by MLB and the Giants in the past.

“We’ve reached out to the commissioner to express our strong belief that San Jose should no longer be the only major American city in any professional sport to be legally barred from hosting a team,” Mahan said in a statement Friday night. “This is a timely request given the A’s impending departure, and with increasing interest in MLB expansion.”

Unlike the two-team markets in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, where both teams share the entire region, the Bay Area counties were split between the two MLB teams. Santa Clara County was neutral territory until 1990 when the Giants, stymied in their efforts for a San Francisco ballpark, sought a ballot measure to come to San Jose. The A’s, under owner Walter Haas, granted permission for the vote.

The Giants would eventually build their stadium in San Francisco but retained the rights to Santa Clara County and San Jose. When the A’s looked to build in San Jose during the 2000s, the Giants would not give up the rights and received MLB’s support.

“While Haas apparently conceded those rights without any legal consideration, the Giants have exploited Haas’ goodwill to the detriment of everyone else in MLB,” the letter reads.

McEnery, who served as mayor from 1983 to 1990, called the Giants’ efforts to block the A’s from moving to the South Bay “one of the most outrageous and dishonorable things that has been recorded in professional sports, at least in our area.”

“When people do really decent things like Walter Haas did, they ought to be remembered for that. And when people do the exact opposite, that ought to be noted also,” McEnery said. “Maybe it’ll prohibit other such selfish behavior in the future.”

San Jose sued MLB in 2013 for conspiring to block the potential relocation, claiming the territory rules violated federal antitrust laws (MLB has had an antitrust exemption since a 1922 Supreme Court decision). The courts sided with MLB, and San Jose’s appeal up to the Supreme Court was rejected in 2015.

Now, with this letter, San Jose’s quintet of mayors argue that the city at the heart of Silicon Valley shouldn’t be automatically looped in with its neighbors to the north.

“Not only does San Jose eclipse San Francisco and most MLB cities in population (and it dwarfs Oakland), but the $410 billion annual GDP of the San Jose metro region — better known as the heart of Silicon Valley — exceeds that of thirty (30) U.S. states,” the letter reads. “San Jose and the South Bay present any team owner with an extraordinary opportunity to secure branding sponsorships from companies forming the highest concentration of leading tech employers on the planet, such as Apple, Adobe, Facebook/Meta, Google/Alphabet, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, LinkedIn, Broadcom, eBay, Paypal/Venmo, VMWare, Zoom, and many others.”