Big brains from the Giants, 49ers, Raiders, Warriors, and A’s gathered at the City Club a few weeks ago, mixing with the crowd of 300, then taking questions in a panel format from M.C. Brian Murphy of KNBR’s weekday-morning show, Murph and Mac.

The aforementioned brains belonged to Amy Trask, CEO of the Raiders; Paraag Marathe, COO of the Niners; Larry Baer, CEO of Los Gigantes; Joe Lacob, majority owner of the taking-a-year-off Warriors; and Billy Beane, V.P. and G.M. of the A’s, who has recently been immortalized on silver screens nationwide by Brad Pitt in the movie Moneyball.

Brian Murphy gave the participants their money’s worth. Tickets were $100 with proceeds going to TLC for Kids Sports, which goes about the Bay Area fixing up youth fields. (Hey! How about filling the craters on the WWI battlefield atop Potrero Hill where my softball team is often relegated to playing?)

Interspersed with candy-coated puffball questions, Murphy zeroed in on the biggest looming conundrums in the world of NorCal sports: Are the Niners abandoning the City, and are the Raiders following them? Will the Giants negotiate their territorial rights in a deal to allow the A’s to move to Fremont?

On the football question, Marathe of the 49ers said, “We’ve had a number of discussions over a number of occasions. We have a preview center in Santa Clara.” His claim that, “We are centrally located in Santa Clara,” was met with polite silence by the attendees, who were sipping cocktails in the heart of San Francisco’s Financial District. Marathe noted, “We are committed to Santa Clara.”

Trask of the Raiders stated, “A new stadium is absolutely, positively, indubitably essential. Our relationship [with the Niners] is a wonderful working relationship. We have an open mind about sharing a stadium with the 49ers. The day and age of municipalities writing a check are behind us. Anything that’s done has to be a true public-private partnership. Where that stadium will be is the 800-pound gorilla.”

Acknowledging the 49ers’ puppy love and not-so-secret, pre-pre-pre-engagement with Santa Clara, Trask countered, “We think that our site in Oakland is very central, with multiple freeway access, existing BART and Caltrans stations. We absolutely love the site in which we play. Baseball and football need separate stadiums. We need to respectfully and lovingly move apart [from the A’s]. The NFL is asking that we [Raiders and 49ers] share a stadium. Within 24 hours we could reach a very fair and equitable stadium agreement [with the 49ers].”

We fans now stare in the face the grotesque possibility of geography-challenged teams known at the San Francisco 49ers and Oakland Raiders playing their “home” games in a Santa Clara stadium, far from the cities emblazoned on their uniforms. Perhaps the stadium will be named “Reverse Commute Park.” Here’s a movie idea: Rip Van Football Fan wakes up and can’t find his team anywhere near the city in which it has played for over half a century.

In reality, the Coliseum and the Stick are perfectly fine – one could argue that they are wonderful – places to watch a football game (great weather compared to Green Bay). But in terms of making investors significantly richer, as places to adequately segregate the One Percent’s luxury suites from the masses, as places to squeeze every last dollar on everyone’s credit card, they suck.

On to the baseball conundrum. Murphy asked, “What’s going on with the blue ribbon panel?” This is a Major League Baseball panel, supposedly conjuring up a solution to the problem of the Giants holding South Bay territorial rights, thereby blocking a move by the A’s to a locale more in proximity to the salt-collecting ponds and Silicon Valley dollars. The blue ribboners have been dragging their feet for almost three years.

The A’s Beane elicited lots of laughs by responding, “I’ll trade you my stadium for theirs.” He went on, “Seriously, if I was Larry [Baer], I wouldn’t want us to go down there either. The way it works now works perfectly well for the Giants.” He added, “Do I think it will happen? Yes.”

The Giants Baer danced around the question. Murphy asked Baer, “What did you think of the movie Moneyball?”

Baer noted that the film de-emphasized the wonderful pitching of the A’s teams in the early 2000s. He said, “I can’t imagine what it was like to have Angelina Jolie over for breakfast.”

Beane replied, “As good as you think, Larry.”