Former Giants executive Peter Magowan passed away in his Pacific Heights home on Sunday. Magowan helped prevent the team from leaving San Francisco in 1992, and used private funding to build the club’s current home of Oracle Park. Magowan had been ill for several years, undergoing surgeries for prostate and liver cancer, and had recently gone into hospice care, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. He was 76.
Magowan served as the club’s managing general partner from 1993-2008. The club’s previous owner Bob Lurie reached an agreement with a group planning to move the team to Florida in 1992. The National League rejected the sale, and Magowan and now-Giants CEO Larry Baer put together a group that purchased the team for $100 million. Shortly after the purchase, Magowan changed the course of the franchise by signing Barry Bonds to a six-year, $43.75 million contract.
“Peter was a rare combination in life of a close friend and mentor,” said Baer via The Chronicle. “We carried on that relationship for three decades. When you really got to know Peter you saw that he had a heart of gold.”
“Peter Magowan did save baseball for San Francisco,” Bud Selig, then the commissioner of baseball, said in 2008.
Magowan was born in Manhattan in 1942. He graduated from Stanford with a degree in American Literature, and earned his master’s in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford University in 1964. He went to work for Safeway in 1968 and became the company’s chairman and CEO in 1979, a job he held until purchasing the Giants in 1992.