Well, it sure looks like this battle over hundreds of millions of dollars is turning ugly. Not sure if we could have seen that. But the City of San Jose, which wants the Oakland Athletics to move there as badly as the team's ownership wants to move, is getting involved. A group called Stand for San Jose filed suit against the proposed ballpark, ostensibly for reasons related to flawed environmental and traffic studies.
The city isn't so sure that a much larger corporation isn't behind the group, which is supposed to be something of a grassroots effort. A larger corporation such as the San Francisco Giants:
Last week the city filed for a court order allowing it to examine the organizational structure -- and any Giants ties -- of Stand For San Jose, a community group whose lawsuit over the proposed ballpark has raised questions about the San Jose plan's viability.
...
The city's latest motion asked the court to compel Stand for San Jose to demonstrate that it has legal "standing" to sue the city over the ballpark. The city argued the plaintiffs must be city taxpayers or to have objected to the ballpark proposal on environmental grounds.
The response from the Stand for San Jose group has been to argue for free-speech and privacy rights. Are the Giants behind it? We might never know, but if the City of San Jose gets its way, we'll have a pretty good idea.