Sunday, May 10, 2009

Fenway Park still stands

The debacle of Yankee Stadium is — not surprisingly — making waves in Boston, too. Here’s baseball writer Sarah Green in the Harvard Business School Press blog.

Several months ago I was lamented to an old friend, a Yankee fan, about what a pig’s ear the Yankees were making of the stadium move and the prices. I objected — as who in the real world hasn’t? — about Yankee prices, especially given the support the Yankee Organization has received from the taxpayer.

My friend actually denied that the Yankee Organization got any taxpayer money at all. Huh? Blogger Jason, from It's About the Money, Stupid, wraps up a list of woes and includes credited photographs showing the empty expensive seats.

Unlike Sarah Green or Larry Greenberg, both of whose love of baseball and grasp of its minutia are things to marvel at, I am not a Fan. But baseball is the one sport I actually pay attention to. I suspect that's true in many American households. Come to think of it, as I contemplate a move to Chicago's Hyde Park, I have actually been looking at the White Sox website. Chicago has plenty of scandals, but at least the taxpayers don't get their noses rubbed in municipal follies at every game.

I am happy that Richard Brodsky, my local state assemblyman and one of the smartest people in politics, is ruffling Yankee and Bloomberg feathers with his ongoing investigation of this scam. Brodsky doesn't need to invent targets when the city, the state, or an organization as massive as the YO is this blatant. Mike Lupica, an excellent old-time reporter for the Daily News, writes about Brodsky and what the Yanks are doing with our money and our land. And, folks, it IS our money -- and it WAS our parkland -- that the Yankees took.

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