Investors Are a Who’s Who of Bay Area : Baseball: Magowan leads group that is seeking to buy the Giants.

Peter A. Magowan must have felt like the kid who got stuck inside doing homework while his favorite team was winning in the bottom of the ninth inning in the last game of the World Series.

As baseball owners were voting on the fate of the San Francisco Giants in Scottsdale, Ariz., on Tuesday, the Safeway chief executive was meeting with division managers at the supermarket company’s Oakland headquarters. Business as usual on a one-of-a-kind day.

Magowan, 50, is the managing partner of the Bay Area investment group that has offered $100 million in a bid to keep the Giants in San Francisco. That effort has caused him to divide his loyalties between Safeway and the Giants in the last few weeks and has had him jetting between New York and the West Coast to engineer the deal.

It appears to have paid off handsomely for Magowan, a lifelong baseball fan who was on the Giants’ board for 10 years; and others in the group, many of whom are longtime friends of Giant owner Bob Lurie.

The investors include a who’s who of Bay Area executives: Charles Schwab, head of a discount brokerage firm; Walter Shorenstein, a San Francisco real estate developer; Donald Fisher, founder of the Gap retail chain, and Richard Goldman, San Francisco’s chief of protocol. KTVU-TV, which carries Giants’ games in the Bay Area, also is participating.

Mayor Frank Jordan also recruited two people to help lure investors and put together the offer--sports agent Leigh Steinberg, who lives in Newport Beach and owns a home in the Bay Area; and Larry Baer, a CBS executive in New York who is a native San Franciscan and was once the Giants’ marketing director.

The strategy, Steinberg said Tuesday, was to find “some very public-spirited San Franciscans who saw this investment as a civic duty, as opposed to an opportunity to make a ton of money.”

Baer noted that all of the investors went into the deal knowing “that we have to get a new stadium” in San Francisco.

“We can do well enough at Candlestick (Park) to break even,” he said. “In a new ballpark, we believe the situation would improve substantially.”

San Francisco voters rejected plans for a new baseball stadium in 1987 and 1989. But Jordan has vowed to get one built using private funds.

At a Tuesday evening news conference at San Francisco’s City Hall, Shorenstein said the ownership group intends to study all aspects of a new stadium.

“My presumption is that it will be a combination public-private situation,” he said. “All our ducks will be in a row before we go to the public for a vote.”

Expectations are that the city will donate land for a stadium, with construction money coming from the private sector.

The investors are believed to be contributing about $5 million each for the team purchase, although the figures have not been made public. They raised their initial bid of $95 million, submitted Oct. 12, to $100 million on Oct. 28 to satisfy concerns that it was too far below the $115 million offered by the Tampa Bay group, which hopes to move the team to St. Petersburg, Fla.

Initially, Stanford University Professor H. Irving Grousebeck emerged as the Bay Area group’s lead investor. But after Lurie announced Aug. 6 that he had signed a deal to sell the team to the Tampa investment group, Grousebeck backed out, citing his prediction that the team would lose $10 million per year as long as it remained in Candlestick Park, its blustery, foggy home south of San Francisco.

Two days later, North Carolina entrepreneur George Shinn entered the picture. Shinn, who owns the Charlotte Hornets of the NBA, served as managing partner of a budding investment group, but dropped out abruptly last month when questions were raised about his background.

At that point, Magowan quietly resigned from the Giants’ board and assumed a greater role in the investor group.

“He has a true passion for baseball, and he loved being on the board,” Baer said. “In a way, this is really a dream come true for him.”

How much Magowan himself contributed has not been made public, but it is undoubtedly significant.

Magowan--no stranger to high-powered deals--earned $1.26 million from Safeway last year, and he owns about 1.9 million shares of Safeway stock, worth nearly $26 million at current market prices.

Magowan and other Safeway executives were chief beneficiaries of one of the high-profile deals of the 1980s. Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., a New York investment firm, led the managers in taking the company private in a $4.2-billion buyout in 1986. Four years later, the debt-ridden company--which was founded in 1926 by Magowan’s grandfather, who also was among the founders of Merrill Lynch & Co.--went public again. Its shares now trade on the New York Stock Exchange at about $13.625.

Magowan’s life has been strangely intertwined with the Giants. He has been a devoted follower of the team since watching the New York Giants play at the Polo Grounds in the 1950s. By the time the team moved to San Francisco, after the 1957 season, he was already there with his parents.

Among other investors in the Bay Area group are David Jenkins, founder of Alias records, a Burbank-based alternative music record label; Harmon Burns, an attorney with Franklin Resources, a mutual fund company in San Mateo; venture capitalist Arthur Rock; S. Daniel Abraham, chairman of Slim Fast, a New York-based diet-product company; and other executives whose companies have done projects or provide services for Candlestick Park.

Anticipating an inevitable legal assault by Florida authorities, the investors on Tuesday asked a federal court in San Francisco for a declaration that they did not violate antitrust laws in making their bid for the Giants.

Groves reported from San Francisco, and Warren from Los Angeles. Times staff writer Philip Hager and researcher Norma Kaufman, both in San Francisco, also contributed.

DENIED: Owners rejected the Giants’ proposed move from San Francisco to St. Petersburg, Fla. A1.