The Bay Area is one of just four metro areas across the United States blessed with not one but two major league baseball teams (five, if you count Washington, D.C., and Baltimore as a single metro area).
That means we have two teams to root for—odds are at least one of them won't stink in a given year—or one to cheer and the other to jeer (hey, you San Francisco Giants and Oakland A's fans, can't we all just get along?).
One of the big differences between our local teams: their home stadiums.
After years and years of trying to get out of Candlestick Park, the Giants succeeded in building a jewel of a ballpark on the waterfront south of the Bay Bridge. The new place, named after a phone company, opened in 2000, and the crowds have rolled in even when the home team's play was less than inspiring.
The Athletics, on the other hand, are playing in the badly remodeled Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, the multipurpose stadium that became their home in 1968 after the late owner Charles O. Finley moved the franchise from Kansas City. In addition to the botched renovations, undertaken in the mid-1990s to make the facility more welcoming to the Oakland Raiders, the stadium is showing its age. Last month, for instance, a sewage backup forced both the A's and visiting Seattle Mariners to flee their clubhouses to take their postgame showers in the Raiders's locker room.