Night of the Joestown Flood

Greetings boys and girls, welcome to the first installment of Boston sports and townie topicality in a blog in which I’ve decided to forego the tedious tradition of a clever name for a rotating series of bad puns, pompous alliterative allusions, and Carlos Quintana references. Tonight’s title: The Night of the Joestown Flood.

In honor of the imminent destruction of the Yankees' glimmering ode to the kind of Soviet Bloc concrete stark-itecture that brought us Government Center, Sullivan Stadium, the UMass Dartmouth campus and Chet Curtis’s hair, I thought I’d take a look at the new ballpark being built in my adopted home here in the Boogie Down Bronx. As it turns out, the Yanks are giving us 800 million more reasons to hate them, one for each dollar that taxpayers are kicking to Steinbrenner and Co. to tear down one of the oldest stadiums in baseball, bulldoze a popular children’s park, and build a luxury-box infested baseball shopping mall that will have fewer seats at higher prices. Congratulations Gotham!

It isn’t the first time either, in 1972 New York City bought Yankee Stadium for $24 million—more than twice what George Steinbrenner would buy the entire team for a few months later. The city then renovated the stadium for $160 million, and leased it back to the Yanks for about the same price I pay for my apartment. What did city taxpayers get in return? For starters, a giant wall that ended a 50-year tradition of catching a glimpse of the game from the elevated train, a spike in ticket prices, and a brand new four-story garage (what hip-hop historian Jeff Chang called “the most secure parking lot in the South Bronx”) that made it easier for suburbanites whose tax dollars weren’t paying for the stadium to get to games without having to use public transportation or patronize any non-stadium purveyors of food and beverage.

All this while the city was literally going bankrupt and the South Bronx neighborhood that the new stadium was supposed to “revitalize” was falling prey to a wave of apartment fires, drugs and violence that led one local doctor to call the area Necropolis, “a city of death”—think “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, who got their start a few blocks from the stadium. Maybe it had something to with the few dozen fire stations the city closed, or the 5,000 cops laid off on a single day in 1975 to try and trim the budget. But hey, all that money left Georgey Boy with enough cash to buy Reggie Jackson a Rolls Royce Corniche, make illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon and threaten to move the team to Jersey!

It’s more of the same this year, as the city and state are paying $800 million (and rising) to build a new Yankee Stadium, tear down the old one, bulldoze South Bronx parkland, and build a new children’s park along a haz-mat filled stretch of the Harlem River that’s blocked by a garbage train. My favorite detail: the city is actually paying the salaries of expensive Yankee lobbyists whose sole function is to lobby New York City for more money. For all that you’d at least think the Yanks would kick a little business towards the Bronx during the All Star Game, but not so much.

Compare this to the Red Sox, who’ve turned the smallest-stadium-in-the-bigs albatross around their necks into a cash cow, the Celtics, who actually had to move out of the Garden because the state needed to run a re-routed Route 93 through it, and Bob Kraft who (more or less) paid for Gillette after Tom Finneran called his Hartford Bluff. It’s all enough to get you screaming “unfair advantage” until you realize the Yanks will spend most of the money re-signing part of MacNamara’s Infirmed Band (Giambi pumps the old bassoon/ While I the pipes do play…) and picking up guys like AJ “Carl’s Jr.” Burnett. The new Yankee Stadium may be resting on the Bronx’s Fordham gneiss bedrock, but the team itself is riding on Phil Hughes’ cracked rib, Joba Chamberlain’s inflamed rotator cuff, Chien-Ming Wang’s shattered foot, the savvy of a man who got married to strains of “Take Me out to the Ball Game” and Stammerin’ Hank Steinbrenner’s trust-fund addled brain.

--Speaking of stadiums, nice to see the Red Sox finally break the consecutive home sellout record that the Indians set in 2001, a good excuse to remember the days when Pedro was a magician, Troy O’Leary was a contender for Irishman of the year and Tony Pena was beating us with 13th inning playoff home runs (a moment that brought a familiar wince to any New England male who ever tried to imitate Pena’s open-legged stance, only to realize why they made catchers wear cups in little league). The Cards had a solid streak of 125 sellouts in their new stadium, Wrigley sells out pretty regularly (even if it is to a crowd of Big 10 frat-boys turned bond-trading bandwagoneers, as even Barack Obama admits), and the Yanks will no doubt sell out plenty of games in their new $1.3 billion monument to vainglorious gaucheness, but it’s Boston, with a population smaller than Milwaukee or the Twin Cities, that shows the most love.

--Sellout was about the last word on my mind last Thursday when I and 14,038 faithful Gulf Coast Floridian baseball fans trekked to the House that Victor Zambrano built to see the Rays take on the Blue Jays. 14,000 people coming to watch the youngest, most exciting team in baseball? Really? When the Rays were pulling fewer than 10,000 people for non Friday night/Red Sox/Yankees games the story was that it was only their losing record that kept the fans away. So much for that theory.

And aside from the constant din of Sean McDonough conniption-inspiring organ music and cheesy sound effects piped in to make people forget they’re in a mostly empty dome with lower ceilings than an Allston sublet, the stadium isn’t nearly as bad as everyone makes it out to be. Close parking, tall beers, the chance to move down from the upper deck to field level without ushers giving you a second look, a fish tank where you get to pet a bunch of slimy devil rays (wait, aren’t they just “the Rays” now, with a glinting sun and none of Florida’s kite-shaped piscifauna in their logo? And can’t these things kill people? Whatever, it was fun petting/nervously poking at them) and all for less than 30 bucks! Even if it did feel more like the most expensive minor league stadium I’d ever been to than the cheapest big league park, there are worse places to watch a game than the Trop. 

But enough with the stadium talk, time for some Random Sox thoughts:

--Like the off-season Sean Casey signing, Kotsay and Bird are huge second-fiddle pickups for a team that is starting to look a bit like 2004, when the Sox started well, spent three months looking listless, and woke back up in time for the playoffs. I’m ignoring the Manny-Nomar trade comparisons here, as I can no longer wear my Manny Ramirez version of that Bob Marley “Legend” t-shirt that Fitzy gave me last year—I can’t tell you how many Bronx Dominican dudes have quieted the Red Sox insults down when they saw that t-shirt under my Sox jersey (“Alright, alright--Manny, he cool man, Ortiz too…). Time to dust of the Wily Mo jersey!

--Ditto for the D-backs picking up David Eckstein and the Phils for landing Matt “The One That Got Away That Isn’t Scott Hatteberg” Stairs.

--Is anyone else amazed Joe Mauer isn’t being mentioned much in MVP talk? I’ve got no sympathy for Minnesota after the baseball writers confused the MVP with the “Scrappiest White Guy Award” and gave it to Morneau over Ortiz (and Hafner) two years ago, but any guy who’s being called a young Jason Varitek when it comes to preparation and pitch calling and is getting on base at a .412 clip at least deserves a little attention alongside Pedroia and Quentin (thank God all that K-Rod MVP nonsense has settled down--Dennis Eckersley he is not, at least not this year).

--And last but by no means least, Manny’s apparently been too busy to update his website (although let’s hope he never gets rid of that picture at the top right from his days with Menudo)

-The Flood