Baseball : The Oakland A's play at the usually sunny Oakland (aka Network Associates) Coliseum (tel 510/638-0500), which has a BART stop in front. The San Francisco Giants play at Pac Bell Park, where home runs sometimes splash into the bay (tel 415/972-2000). There are 500 tickets made available two-and-a-half hours before game time and long lines form early and often. Walk up to the ticket booths at 24 Willie Mays Plaza, near Third and King, to get them.
Football : The San Francisco 49ers , many-time Super Bowl champions, also play at 3Com Park, where you may have to pay as much as $100 (tel 415/656-4900), and the Oakland Raiders , blue-collar heroes, bash heads at the Oakland Coliseum (tel 1-800/949-2626).
Basketball : The reliably awful Golden State Warriors play at newly renovated Oakland Arena (tel 1-888/479-4667).
Ice hockey : The San Jose Sharks (tel 408/287-7070) play at their own arena in San Jose.
Soccer : The San Jose Earthquakes (tel 408/260-6300, ), major league soccer champs in 2001, draw large crowds at San Jose State's Spartan Stadium. Women's soccer, also played at Spartan Stadium, is represented by the Bay Area CyberRays (tel 408/535-0980, ), who won the WUSA championship in 2001, the first year of the league's inception.
Stanford Stadium , scene of six matches in soccer's 1994 World Cup , is on the campus of Stanford University, 27 miles south of San Francisco and not far north of San Jose. The Stanford Cardinal football team plays here during the fall.
Copyright Rough Guides Ltd as trustee for its authors. Published by Rough Guides. All rights reserved. The Rough Guides name is a trademark of Rough Guides Ltd.
Copyright © 2006 United States.biz
