What the San Francisco 49ers and the Oakland A's Have in Common

I'm sort-of parked (with the engine running), waiting in an aimless queue of cars to get out of Candlestick Park following the 49ers' thrilling playoff victory over the New Orleans Saints. I can type while I drive because I'm not really going anywhere.

That, in a nutshell, is all you need to know about why the 49ers are headed 40 miles south to Santa Clara.

The first of Candlestick's tenants left the premises long ago. It was no place for baseball; the Giants learned that lesson more than a decade ago and financed a beautiful ballpark that really is in San Francisco, walking distance from restaurants, bars and hotels.

The 'Stick is also no place for football. The Niners and their fans have given it a shot, though, suffering, not always in silence, for 41 seasons since moving from Kezar Stadium in 1971. Four decades and five Super Bowl titles later, the 49ers' ownership can see their future, a state-of-the-art facility in Santa Clara that could be ready for the 2014 season.

Should the 49ers be allowed to leave San Francisco? A better question is, should they be forced to stay? They play in a rickety facility that's probably closer to Kezar than to Cowboys owner Jerry Jones' ego-trip of a stadium in Dallas.

Across the San Francisco Bay, the ownership of the Oakland A's is asking the same question: Should we be obligated to play in a ballpark—and a city—that isn't working for us?

The A's have played at Oakland Coliseum even longer than the Niners have been at Candlestick. After moving west from Kansas City following the 1967 season, the A's won four World Series titles (1972-74, 1989) despite lukewarm fan support for much of their 44 seasons in Oakland.

The nadir came in the 1990s, when the city of Oakland dangled the carrot of expanding the ballpark in front of Raiders owner Al Davis, who brought the Silver and Black back to the East Bay.

Be careful what you wish for. The third deck took away the beautiful view of the Oakland hills.

Today, the Coliseum—despite having consistently better weather than the Giants' AT&T Park and ticket prices that are almost laughably low—continues to draw so poorly that, for the past six years, the upper deck seats are not even sold for baseball.

Even Al Davis, who passed away in 2011, didn't get everything he wanted from the city of Oakland. The Raiders rarely sold out home games, and the 2011 season was the team's first in 16 years when no home games were blacked out on local television.

During the 2011 season, meanwhile, the A's drew the fewest number of fans of any Major League Baseball park—less than 1.5 million for 81 home games. The Giants drew nearly 3.4 million, third-most in MLB.

Like the Niners, the A's want to move south, 20 miles down the road to Fremont. Fremont is making overtures, but is much farther away than Santa Clara from landing its prize.

Again, we ask the question. Should the A's be forced to stay?

Does the South Bay, which has shown great support for the NHL's Sharks, even deserve to have two more major pro-sports franchises? More importantly, can it support the NFL, MLB and NHL?

Why not? San Jose, California's third-largest city and the state's first capital more than 150 years ago, has nearly a million residents (945,000)—more than San Francisco (800,000) and more than double that of Oakland (390,000).

The Silicon Valley, equally important, is where all the jobs are. San Jose, Santa Clara and the surrounding cities and towns may have suffered economically like the rest of the country, but maybe not as much. Walk around downtown San Jose most nights of the week, or take a drive over to the more ritzy Santana Row west of downtown, and you can tell that the South Bay is full of people who have some money and are willing to spend it.

They love their Sharks 41 home dates a year, but they are positively frothing at the thought of getting the 49ers that much closer.

San Francisco's supervisors have said they will not bankrupt the city to build the 49ers a new stadium, five Super Bowl trophies be damned. And we should applaud them for their financial sanity.

The city of Oakland is in even worse shape. Their best hope of keeping their baseball team is that the cross-bay Giants' claim to the South Bay as part of their sphere of influence will hold enough sway with MLB owners that a proposed move by the A's will be voted down.

And it's not like either franchise would be going far, like the Oilers leaving Houston for Tennessee or the Colts vacating Baltimore for Indianapolis.

Last time I looked, Caltrain has 22 stops between its San Francisco end-line at Fourth and King (a block from the Giants' AT&T Park, by the way) and its downtown San Jose stop, which is a short walk to the Sharks' HP Pavilion.