The past year was not what Lew Wolff had in mind when he became the Oakland Athletics’ owner in 2005. The Athletics finished last season with their worst won-loss record and most distant division finish in Wolff’s four-year tenure. As if that development were not frustrating enough, Wolff felt forced to scrap his plans for a new park in Fremont 22 miles south of the team’s long-time home in Oakland.

Billy Beane, the team’s talented general manager, made some player moves during the winter that could help the Athletics come back on the field and in the standings in the coming season. His boss has a far more difficult task finding a city in northern California to house the team.

Wolff, by this time, expected architects to be working on designs for Cisco Field in Fremont. The team’s 2008 media guide even has a featured photo of the proposed park. Now, however, that park will have to be built elsewhere.

“We’re taking a time out,” Wolff said in a telephone interview this week. “We were trying to go into Fremont. I believe we easily had a majority of the city council prepared to approve it. But in California, as I tell people, if you have a cure for cancer someone will be against it.”

There was sufficient opposition from others, however, to Wolff’s plans, which at a projected cost of $1.8 billion also included shopping and living areas. Area residents and merchants vehemently opposed the plans, as did residents in an alternate area, which Wolff said was separated from existing residential areas by an elevated freeway and “one of the widest freeways in California.”

“Residents on either side came out en masse against what we were doing,” the owner said. “We could have worked with them but they stirred up a lot of stuff to the point if we had the city council passing it they could have filed an environmental lawsuit, which almost anybody can do in California to question the impact. It could go two, three years. Then there was a threatened referendum. Referenda are popular in California.”

In pursuing the team’s move and the overall project, Wolff said he spent $80 million, of which $24 million is not recoverable. The latter amount is around the level of the Athletics’ payrolls not long ago.  The remainder of the expenditure is in real estate, Wolff said, “which has not gone up lately. But Fremont is no longer a consideration.

“We tried,” Wolff said. “We’ve exhausted ourselves.”

Staying in Oakland is not an option either.

“We have fully exhausted our time and resources over the years with the City of Oakland, dating back to previous A’s ownership,” Wolff said in a statement last week. “We recognize conditions have not changed.”

The Athletics moved to Oakland from Kansas City in 1968. When they arrived, the National Football League Raiders had been playing in the Coliseum for two years. The park, now McAfee Coliseum, is antiquated, and the Athletics’ attendance has decreased each of the last five seasons, falling last year to 1,665,256, second lowest in the American League and the Athletics’ lowest since 1999.

Without a new park in sight, Wolff almost certainly could get Major League Baseball’s permission to move to a different area, but Wolff said in his statement, “Our goal and desire for the organization is to determine a way to keep the team in Northern California. That goal has not changed.”

By issuing the statement, Wolff said, he wasn’t trying to anger anyone in Oakland, but he wanted to head off any expectations Oakland supporters might have, given the end of the flirtation with Fremont.

“Nothing has changed in Oakland,” Wolff said. “For two years before I bought the team, I investigated every site put forth to us and all the other issues. We’ve exhausted every opportunity.”

Had Wolff been able to move forward with his Fremont foray, the Athletics could have moved into Cisco Field in 2012.

“It’s very frustrating,” Wolff said. “Other people have battled through these things. We’ve paid our dues. We should be doing drawings now and be in the ground next year. That’s disappeared. Putting our self-interest aside, we were really contributing something. It would be nice today to have construction jobs.”

There’s one obvious solution, but it’s not available to the Athletics now. San Jose sits 37 miles from McAfee Coliseum, south on Interstate 880, yearning for a major league baseball team. But San Jose is in Santa Clara County, and according to the description of the National League Circuit in Major League Rule 1 (a) Santa Clara County is included in the territory reserved for the San Francisco Giants.

The paragraph pertaining to the Giants covers San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Monterey and Marin counties but also stipulates, “provided, however, that with respect to all Major League Clubs, Santa Clara County in California shall also be included.”

Despite that barrier, the Athletics would like to move to San Jose, where Wolff owns the Earthquakes of Major League Soccer. Wolff, speaking diplomatically, didn’t declare that his position, saying only “It’s the Giants’ territory at this point, but it’s a decision for Major League Baseball to make to be fair to our franchise and to the Giants’ franchise.”

The Giants had no comment on the matter, but they have previously made it clear San Jose is an important part of their territory and they will do whatever they have to do to retain it as their territory.

Bob DuPuy, baseball’s chief operating officer, did not return a call to discuss the San Jose situation. However, a baseball official said both the Athletics and the Giants have spoken with Commissioner Bud Selig about the matter and Selig knows he has to deal with it. Whatever decision he makes, the team that loses will be irate. 

The mistake was giving the Giants the territory in the first place. The National League took that step in the early 1990s to give the Giants leverage in their attempt to get a new park in San Francisco.

The Giants say the San Jose area is important to their attendance, but it’s more important to the Athletics’ future. It has become clear that the Athletics will not survive at their outdated home in Oakland. They need a new life, and a move to San Jose would give it to them.

Selig, in the best interests of baseball, could cede San Jose to the Athletics. He would probably be accused of doing it to help his college fraternity brother, Wolff, but Selig has long been accused of helping his friends.

Anyway, Selig has a precedent on which to base a San Jose decision. A few years ago he allowed Arte Moreno, the Anaheim Angels’ owner, to hijack the geographical name of the National League Dodgers for his marketing use. Moreno’s team has been known as the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim since, though no one bothers with the Anaheim part of the name.

If Selig allowed the Angels to take the Dodgers’ name, he can let the Athletics take the Giants’ territory. Moreno wanted the Los Angeles designation to enhance the Angels’ revenue. Wolff, though he hasn’t said so, wants San Jose to enhance the Athletics’ revenue.

“At some point,” Wolff said, “we’d like to be contributors to revenue sharing rather than be recipients.”