NYC to spend ONE Billion for TWO new ballparks, while it asks Feds for $20 BILLION more

[ken5050]

Am I the only one who sees something, bizarre, and very wrong, with this? This afternoon,Mayor Guiliani, in the final act of his administration, is set to announce deals for TWO new stadia, for the Yankees and Mets, that will cost the taxpayers about one billion. Now, if the projections are one billion, figure about a 50% cost overrun. But, despite all the projections that this will be a good deal for the city,

[Psycho_Bunny]

No. Seattle ain't all that bright.

[LN2Campy]

This moronic stadium idea will hopefully go nowhere. The state and city are BOTH broke and Pataki and Giuliani are both hanging around DC like a couple of crack addicts looking for a handout.

Hey Rudy -- why don't you get yourself a SQUEEGEE if you're gonna beg for money for your stadium addiction?? The least you could do is clean a few windshields. Overblown windbag makes a few speeches and shows up at a bunch of funerals and everyone calls him a hero. He's a citrullo, a real sfacim'.

Only a few more days, and hopefully he'll disappear into oblivion with his little shackjob (if he can ever get a boner again, that is).

[Psycho_Bunny]

That's exactly what happened in Seattle.

The public paid for most of the new baseball stadium but, for some 'unknown reason' it's called Safeco Field.

Same thing's gonna happen with the new football stadium.

[BluesDuke]

The good people of Minneapolis and probably 2 or more cities, will be losing their baseball teams, while subsidizing New York's. Indeed, on several occasions, the voters of Minnesota have turned down funding referenda for a new stadium for the Twins, yet now they are going to pay a portion of the cost of TWO new edificies for New York?

I don't like this idea any more than the next one, and I have been a Mets fan since the day they were born (my first major league game, at age seven, was to see the Mets play at the ancient Polo Grounds, where they played while waiting for Shea Stadium to be built), and would love to see them in a new ballpark otherwise. (For all the alleged parking problems at Yankee Stadium, I haven't noticed any big dents in attendance and the park is still a hell of a place to see and play baseball in.) And anyone who thinks teams cannot build their own ballparks without "public funding" or "public financing," please look west and gaze upon PacBell Park, which was built with no public funding or financing. It can be done. Not to mention, my other baseball passion (the Boston Red Sox) are talking of renovating Fenway Park and not as yet mentioning OPM to do it (the Red Sox, not Boston or Massachussetts, own the ballpark), or, if it absolutely comes to it, building a new park themselves, thus far.

But may we please remember, too, that, before the good people of Minnesota got religion and turned down funding referenda twice, it was the good people of Minnesota who acquiesced in the first place to the abomination known as the Metrodome, when a Twins owner (Calvin Griffith) with a million dollar heart (whatever his flaws, and they were many, he really did love baseball) and a brain running a deficit, let a very good, very serviceable, and very much loved ballpark (old Metropolitan Stadium) go to pot in order to get something new that would be dirt cheap to build and run and not have to pay for it in the first place? (Griffith was once quoted as saying of the Metrodome, "Get 'em in, show 'em a game, and get 'em out.") And that, now, Gov. Jesse (The Body In The Feather Boa) Ventura, who formerly opposed "public funding" for a new Minnesota ballpark, is now on record as saying he would consider "public financing"?

And let us please cease this nonsense about "the good people" of two other cities maybe losing baseball teams in which those good people didn't really have that much interest to begin with. We're not talking about something like the Brooklyn Dodgers, whose owner had the most profitable franchise in baseball but had his own reasons for letting Ebbets Field become a dump (and people wondered why Dodger attendance was dipping a bit in the 1950s even while they were winning all those pennants and, finally, that memorable 1955 World Series), namely: he wanted a new and bigger ballpark and he wanted it built and handed to him on a silver platter. (Robert Moses may have been a scamp mountebank when he was the de facto emperor of the Empire State, but he was perfectly within his proper purview when Walter O'Malley, in essence, told New York, "You build a ballpark and give it to me," and Moses and New York told him, "F@ck you." Though, to be fair, Moses had plans for building a ballpark in Queens, though O'Malley snorted back that that would mean they wouldn't be the Brooklyn Dodgers anymore.) This is part of the net result of baseball owners' chickens beginning to come home to roost.

Reality check, folks: Florida was never a viable regular-season major league baseball market. (Neither, for those pondering the locale as a viable new home for one of the teetering teams, is Las Vegas - they've barely the market to support the minor-league 51ers, which they do support and vibrantly, but that is all she wrote for the Vegas baseball market.) The owners expanded to Florida (and other places) in the 1990s against all sense and sensibility a) because they were looking for a way to pay the collusion damages with OPM, and b) they had their eye strictly on the big fat expansion entry fees they could draw in to achieve objective a), without troubling themselves to look seriously into whether full-season markets for baseball were truly viable. Baseball's baronage is learning the hard way what empires ancient (Rome comes to mind) and modern (the late, unlamented Soviet Union) learned the harder way: too much expansion grows you to within a couple of blocks of the cemetery where a grave with your name on it is being prepared unless you watch where you're going.

I agree with those who say new ballparks should not be built by taxpayers, and I'm one of Camden Yards's biggest fans (I had the pleasure of watching my Red Sox play the Orioles at Camden in 1998, after the All-Star break; the Orioles won and began a kind of tear through that August) - I've never seen a more beauteous ballpark in my life except for Wrigley Field (I've never yet, alas, had the pleasure of sitting in Fenway) and old Tiger Stadium. Meanwhile, there is a billionaire from the South (Donald Watkins) who is itching to get into baseball and has the resources to run a team and build a nice ballpark - you'd think Carl Polehead would show some brains and sell this guy the Twins and let him build a new park and send the Metrodome where it belongs: the scrap heap. (I confess: I'd have been thrilled if it had been me invited to push the plunger that sent a certain Seattle abomination to Kingdome Come...)

[BluesDuke]

He'd be wrong. All new stadiums have corporate names (blech!).

Nay, not so: Oriole Park at Camden Yards. (Though who's kidding whom, no one calls it anything other than Camden Yards - which was the name of the land on which the park stands long before the park was built.) Jacobs Field (Cleveland; named for the Indians owners.) The Ballpark at Arlington (the home of the Rangers, and a rather unimaginative name at that, which you might expect from a team who believes spending $250 million for a shortstop will bring the team ERA back down under four - well, A-Rod is earning his pay, all right, but the Rangers' pitching is still the leakiest in the American League...).

[BluesDuke]

Actually I have no problem with what professional sports teams pay their players and how much they charge for seats, provided that they don't hit the taxpayers up for money to build the stadiums.

The real salary steroid shot: arbitration. That's been the real reason why the salaries went to infinity and beyond over the years. The irony: At the birth of free agency, arbitration was more the owners' idea than the players'. They had no clue that the concept would blow up in their faces in short enough order.


As for Guiliani, he also made a stupid statement yesterday, attacking Boston and San Diego as being "lesser" cities than New York. What was the purpose of that?

I can't figure on San Diego, which is actually a nice seaside city (the piers and docks are lovely waterfronts), but on Boston, well, maybe he's just looking to stick it to the Red Sox, especially after one of their new ownership group said the other day that, so far as he was concerned, the "Curse of the Bambino" was a spell they intend to break. Giuliani, of course, thinks every city is lesser than New York. But you'd expect a mayor of any major city to think thus of other cities compared to his own. And you'd be hard pressed to argue each city's particular uniquenesses, good and bad...

[BluesDuke]

Just heard Mo Vaughn's press conference at Shea...he was introduced as a "good guy, good family values"....while today's NY Post reported that he celebrated his birtday this weekend at Score's with EIGHT strippers......dontch just love it?

Oh, brother. The Mets went and did the deal after all? Just wait until Vaughn gets his first injury. He'll stay away from the park but find the strength to hit the clubs, just like he did with the Angels last year. And this is a guy with a reputation as a "team leader"? He's a dump truck at first base and he's a very half-and-half hitter, the kind you don't need on a team who needs more rally-enhancing and less rally killing.

[ken5050]

Enjoyed your several comments very much. Well written. ASre you perhaps a sportswriter-in-disguise?....Re the comments about San Diego and Boston, Rudy was referring to a report last year that praised those two cities for their "community policing" models, while criticizing NYC's...Since the report came out, murder rates in SD and Boston have risedn sharply, while NYC's has come down....so Rudy was getting in a well-deserved shot at some critics..

FWIW, the problem with baseball was not arbitration, though it's hurt...it goes back to when the owners lost the lawsuit over collusion in not signing free-agents.....they had to pay several hundred million in fines/penalties....that's what scared the crap out of them..led them to roll over to thew players....oddly enough, the owners have a great issue, if they want to use it....lock out the players and force a salary cap........look, using round figures, Yankees and Mets each drew 3 million this year, and each have a payroll of 100 million....now suppose we have a $70 million payroll cap, and the teams annonce that they would REDUCE prices by $10 for each ticket, across the board.....it's revenue neutral, right. the fans would love it, support the owneres big time, and actually the teams would make more money, cause they'd sell MORE tickets and MORE concessions.......but the owners have no guts......but that may be changing.......

[RichardW]

What is the deal with all of these new ball parks? The old ones aren't that old to begin with except for Yankees stadium which is about 75 years old or something. But why Shea? What is wrong with it? They want to do the same thing in St. Louis and it looks to be in excellent repair.

[ken5050]

Shea is a dump......believe me, I go to about 25 games a year..and hardly any luxury boxes, or the expensive loge seats......it's one of the all purpose parks, for both football and baseball......it has all the charm of a used tin can........the new ballpark is gorgeous..a great model.....just use private money, or sell seat licenses......not public funds...

[BluesDuke]

I'm a professional writer but not by trade a sportswriter, although I have now begun writing a book about the Cubs and the Red Sox. The collusion issue hurt the owners pretty seriously, but the salaries were spiraling out of control because of salary arbitration long before collusion was even an actuality. It will probably have to be a combination of adjusting or even eliminating salary arbitration (remember - that was the owners' own dumb idea, the players weren't even looking for it when free agency was first born in earnest, as it should have been: the so-called reserve clause should never have been allowed to be used as the owners had done so for all those years prior) and making for sensible revenue sharing.

This may be hindsight at its best, but did you know that, of all people, Kenesaw Mountain Landis actually had an idea which, had it been adopted, might have a) brought about the demise of the misuse of the reserve clause and b) made the worst of the free agency boom impossible? Here it is: Landis once proposed, after a 1928 case involving future Hall of Fame outfielder Earl Averill (he's the one whose batted ball off the toe prompted Dizzy Dean's ruination, after Dean changed his motion to favour the injury and blew his arm out): the Indians bought him from the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League for $50,000, for the 1929 season. Averill refused to report at first when he learned he wouldn't see a penny of the money, made it public, and got Landis's attention. Landis actually said that Averill's demand sounded reasonable enough: Landis in fact proposed that baseball as a whole take up a rule by which a player got a cut of the action if he was sold, rather than traded; or, if he'd been traded for cash as well as player(s), he get a cut since the cash was part of the package to get him.

Say whatever else you will say about Landis, who made an awful lot of dunderheaded decisions (like his stubbornness in refusing to allow the colour line to be rebroken in his lifetime; that's why Bill Veeck was refused a chance to buy the moribund Phillies in the 1940s - Veeck had let slip that he'd sign a black player or three and Landis quashed the deal; it's no accident that Branch Rickey went scouting the moment Landis croaked, Rickey had been looking to re-break the colour line for years), but that one just might have saved baseball a lot of grief. The Messersmith decision might still have been necessary (and it was), but there might have been far less ramifications if, say, when the Giants sold Dave Kingman to the Mets in 1975 for $200,000, Kingman himself had been cut in for, say, $75,000 of the money?

Better yet - had the Landis plan been in place, could Bowie Kuhn have pulled his absolutely dunderheaded move of blocking Charlie Finley's selling of Joe Rudi, Rollie Fingers, and Vida Blue? Finley was the ass he's been portrayed but that doesn't mean you block, in effect, every baseball team's right to deal in sale of contracts over it. So Charlie Finley was an ass? Yo, Bowie, get a clue: you still could have had it stuck to him if the Landis plan had been in effect, because whatever you sell those guys for, Rudi gets his cut, Fingers his, Blue his...

Worth thinking about - hard.

[BluesDuke]

But why Shea? What is wrong with it?

For one thing (and I was a Shea lifer until I moved to California), a lot of the seating above the middle mezzanine level (my favourite seats there were always in the mezzanine either behind the plate or the dugouts) is very tenuous visibility around the sides of the outfield, and the upper deck beyond the dugouts leaves a lot of either right or left field obscured. For another thing, it is too cookie cutter with little subtle nuance. And, for a third, the lighting is horrid for a night game, to where even the pitchers - who usually thrive in the park (Shea was never really a hitter's park) - aren't always overjoyed by it. I don't want taxpayers footing the bill, but the Mets should have a better all-around ballpark, built strictly for baseball, to play in.

One of the great underexplored issues of the past three decades has been just how badly the cookie-cutter stadiums cut into baseball's attendances and ambiences - among other things, it was the cookie cutter RFK Stadium as well as the odious and incompetent Bob Short's ownership which sank the second edition of the Washington Senators in D.C. There was a market for that team. (The original Senators collapsed and moved to Minnesota because they learned too late how valuable building a farm system was, too late to recover their attendance, though the 1959 team began bringing people back to old Griffith Stadium.) And the Cincinnati Reds, once the classic Big Red Machine teams were shells of what they once were, practically had to pay people to come to Riverfront even when Pete Rose was the manager and the 1990 Reds, with the "Nasty Boys" bullpen, ran for the roses and took them. Believe it or not, baseball fans want the real ballpark atmosphere as it formerly was, not stadiums built predominantly for football where baseball fields got shoehorned in somehow. (Was it any accident that the Los Angeles Dodgers' attendance jumped when they moved out of the stopgap Los Angeles Coliseum, a.k.a. the world's largest outdoor insane asylum, and into Dodger Stadium?) Baseball fans want baseball parks. Not paid for by taxpayers, of course, but it was no accident that Camden Yards prompted a wave of retroparks. It sure took baseball's baronage a long enough time to wake up on that score.

[ken5050]

Great stuff, thanks....

The image of Bowie Kuhn sitting in the seats at Yankee standium during the WS, in just a suit, while it was snowing, and the temperature was in the 20's...is a classic....almost as good as the ones of all the apartment buildings burning from the riots around the stadium in the 70's...

I grew up in the Bronx, about 2 miles from the ballpark, and used to go all the time as a kid...all those day games.....right field bleachers were awesome...people forget before the renovation that the r.f. porch was only 296 feet, and that the seats were LEVEL with the field..the railing was only three feet high, and is was a mesh....so you'd sit there and the r.f'er....Skowron, Berra, would be ten feet infront of you, and he'd talk to you all during the game......in those days, you could get a ticket for 50 cents with your G.O. card and it was a great way to spend an afternon, and then, there were the double headers......

[ken5050]

Well, I for one hope that when your book about the Cubs and Red Sox comes out, they're playing in the WS.......(g)..just curious, do you have a working title.....like.."Profiles in Futility?"

[BluesDuke]

My working title is based on a line from Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Wrigley Field of the Mind, A Fenway Park of the Soul.

[BluesDuke]

I remember being able to watch a game at Yankee Stadium on the far end of the number 4 platform at the 161st St. station, before they remodeled the right field back wall. I watched Roger Maris still able to cover a decent right field even after the injuries the Yankees didn't want to talk about had cut into his longball power.

[ken5050]

What was even better, it the old YS, after the game, you could walk out ON the field, to the gates in the outfield...it was such a kick.....still hard to believe that it's Bob Sheppard's voice 50 years later....

[The Drowning Witch]

Thanks, lass...I sent you a FReepmail as well....

[Neets]

My pleasure kind sir!!!