BUILD A NEW GIANTS BALLPARK AND THE FANS WILL COME BACK.

Byline: Kevin Acee Daily News Staff Writer

A homeless man, his matted hair not swayed a bit by the wind that whips off the bay, steered a shopping cart through center field.

Center field is a dusty street bounded by two old block buildings with filthy windows, more broken than not.

Three Aprils from now that street will be a memory, that man will have moved on. There will be 42,000 people in his place.

A red brick-and-limestone ballpark on the bay will save baseball in San Francisco.

Set to open in April 2000, Pacific Bell Park will uproot homeless people, intrude on boat owners' weekends, send business tenants grumbling to higher-rent locations, and pose a hassle for nearby residents.

But the park, for which ground will be broken in November, should end the speculation that the Giants are leaving San Francisco.

Revenues from increased attendance will make the Giants big-time players in the free-agent market. Increased attendance means money for other markets as well.

Shops and theaters - some 500,000 square feet of them - are planned nearby. Sports bars will abound. The Giants say their new park will help generate an estimated $135 million a year for the city.

``It's going to create a new commercial section of San Francisco,'' said Giants chief operating officer Fred Baer, the man who piloted the stadium plan through city hall, past the protesters and into the anxious hearts of most San Franciscans.

Home runs will have to travel less than 350 feet, clearing a 25-foot fence on the way, to take a swim in the San Francisco Bay.

It'll 307 feet to the right-field foul pole. Beyond that, a 25-foot wide promenade will separate stadium from water. From the promenade, passers-by will be able to look through arches to the game in progress.

The outfield wall will have more nooks and crannies than any in baseball. It will jut out to 422 feet in the right-field gap, the farthest in the majors. Of the 42,000 seats, all but 5,000 will be down the foul lines. Willie Mays Plaza will front the park.

``In one sentence, it's Wrigley Field marries Camden Yards,'' Baer said. ``The site is going to be the star. In a city of views, its ballpark has to have great views.''

Peter Magowan and his partners promised Major League Baseball when they bought the team in December 1992, saving it from a move to Florida, they would make every effort to build a new stadium.

Baseball isn't working out at 3Com Park, formerly known as Candlestick Park. The wind howls, actually howls, through the stadium. It is not only cold but inaccessible.

``If you don't leave early, it will take you an hour to get out of here,'' fan Frank Scritchfield said of getting to the 101 Freeway, a mile from the parking lot.

``They don't want to go to Candlestick,'' Giants closer Rod Beck said, empathizing with the fans. ``It's cold. It's miserable. There's one way in, one way out.''

Add to that the fans' resentment over trading popular third baseman Matt Williams in the offseason, the hangover from the 1994 strike that robbed Williams and other Giants of possible record-breaking years, and a 94-loss 1996 season, and you have this season's attendance woes.

Despite being in first place in the NL West, the Giants were averaging 15,601 fans through 36 home games. That is worst in the National League and roughly 1,000 behind last season's pace. The team's season-ticket base has fallen to near 7,000, down 6,000 from 1993 and 1,500 from last season. It will draw far fewer than 2 million fans for the fourth straight season.

``We came together to keep this team here forever,'' said Baer, a fourth-generation San Franciscan, a graduate of Cal and No. 2 to Magowan. ``Buying the team was part one, part two is building the new park. . . . San Francisco is a very exciting market. It could be a great sports market, but you have to have a great facility.''

The fans have bought into it.

The Giants have sold more than 9,000 of their charter seat licenses, which range in price from $1,500 to $7,500.

The Charter Seat Program differs from the Personal Seat Licenses sold by the Oakland Raiders. The charter seat licenses allow the person to buy season tickets for life, not just 10 years. The Giants are selling just 13,700 of the 42,000 seats through the program, not the entire stadium. And all the money raised goes to paying for the park.

``We didn't want anybody to think of it like the Raiders,'' Baer said.

Fans should be warned, however, that the $21 ticket at old Candlestick will be $36 at the new park.

On March 26, 1996, voters here passed Proposition B by nearly a 2-to-1 landslide. A ballpark in the China Basin area outside downtown would be built.

It was the fifth time the Giants had tried to coax a stadium out of folks in the Bay Area. Twice, San Francisco voters said no. Santa Clara residents balked once as did the people of San Jose.

All four of those attempts, however, were made with the premise that taxpayers would contribute heavily to financing a stadium. The 1996 attempt was made with a promise: The Giants are picking up the tab - nearly $300 million by the time it's all paid off.

The Giants backed their case with an army of influential people behind them - mayor Willie Brown, state Senator Quentin Kopp, most of the county's Board of Supervisors and many downtown business leaders. But they also spent $800,000 in their campaign to woo support for the park. It wasn't all about billboards and television spots. The Giants flew several land owners from the South Beach area around the proposed stadium to Denver and Baltimore to show them the positive effect new ballparks in those cities had on the community.

``That's the way you've got to do it in this town,'' Baer said.

The last privately financed baseball park was Dodger Stadium, which opened in 1962.

For the Giants, Chase Manhattan Bank is arranging a $145 million loan. Pacific Bell will pay the team $50 million over 24 years for having its name on the park. Another $10 million or so will be raised through selling other sponsorships and the right to sell food and drinks in the park.

The charter seat program will bring in around $40 million. The Redevelopment Project will put up $15 million and be repaid through the $3 million or so the Giants will pay in property taxes each year. The city will pay about $11 million to buy land and relocate tenants and will be repaid by the Giants' $1.2 million (with escalators) annual lease payments.

In the precinct where the park will be built, Proposition B passed 57 percent to 43 percent.

It is a vocal handful of boat owners and residents in the South Beach area that fear the worst in traffic snarls, loud music and intrusive lights.

``I think they are very legitimate concerns,'' said Michael Kaplan, senior project manager for the Rincon Point South Beach Redevelopment Project, a government agency that oversees construction and improvements of street, affordable housing and schools in the area around South Beach Harbor, where the stadium will sit.

Not 50 yards from where the homeless man pushed his cart the other day is a marina filled with sailboats and yachts. The homeless will be gone. Center field will butt up against the marina. A few blocks up from the boats are high-end condominiums that face the water.

``It's a residential neighborhood,'' Kaplan said. ``If they had their druthers they'd prefer the residential neighborhood would continue to grow and there not be a major-event place down the street. However, the people of the city voted two-thirds for the park, and I think (the residents) are being logical.

``The boat owners, we think they're being amply taken care of. On the weekends they like to go out on their boats and sip their martinis and not have a crowd. I think they're going to have to live with it.''

Kaplan also is involved with the Citizens Advisory Committee, a group that is working with the Giants to make sure everything the team says it will do is done.

The Giants insist the park's lighting and sound systems will not disturb its neighbors. Baer also maintains that traffic concerns are unwarranted, pointing to studies that show 25 percent of fans will use mass transportation. The Caltrain will stop less than two blocks from the park; Bay Area Rapid Transit is a 10-minute walk; the Muni rail line runs to a station across the street. And ferries from the East Bay and downtown disembark outside right field.

``There will probably be a concern until those things are in place that they won't get done,'' Kaplan said. ``The committee will keep the pressure on the best they can to make sure they are done.''

Kaplan also assures people that the Redevelopment Project will not let the Giants ruin the area. After all, he said, the agency spent $30 million revamping the harbor, ``We're not about to see it go down the tubes.''

Peter Moorhead, assistant harbor master at South Beach, is not looking forward to ``being in the middle of a construction zone for three years.''

Nor is he happy that some of the tenants in his marina are angry.

``I'll have to listen to them bitch,'' he said.

He laments increased traffic on the water.

``If they tell you there won't be, they're crazy,'' he said.

But, he said, ``Once it all gets done it won't be that bad.''

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1--color) Giants V.P. Larry Baer studies a model of the team's future home, Pacific Bell Park.

Associated Press

(2) Giants fans eye a model of the proposed San Francisco Bay ballpark scheduled to open in 2000.

Michael Macor / Special to the Daily News