Rabble: Panos: Business and Baseball in the Bronx

Justin Panos wanderers into the Bronx…and meets the richest guys in town.

Tuesday morning.  Two commandeered planes-cum-cruise missiles smashed the twin towers to atoms and eddies of metal and poison dust.  Noble people rushed to unearth those who screamed below.  New Yorkers resolved to solidarity, not looting.  Mayor Guliani emerged as a moral leader who presence was ever felt at Yankees games as they headed into the 2001 playoffs.  Derek Jeter immortalised himself with his backhanded toss from an impossible angle to the plate to save a run against the Oakland Athletics.  Avoiding the sweep, the Yankees made it to game 7 of the World Series.  The heavens were seemingly smiling upon them.  The Yankees would lose that year to Arizona.  They were denied a four-peat, having won in 1998, 1999, and 2000.

Guilani, in the throes of a deep recession and on the heels of the NASDAQ collapse, was determined to give the Yankees public money for a new stadium that Steinbrenner had been calling for since his lucrative cable deal in 1989.  The Yankees had reclaimed the commanding heights of baseball and the end of the stadium that Ruth built was nigh.

...These are the breaks in New York.  The ancien regime of Tammany Hall still exists in an undigested form in Bloomberg’s New York.  The concept of the ‘honest graft’ still echoes throughout in every stadium deal tendered with public funds.  Yet the fans are still summoned despite the steadfast reduction of the wage-packet in the US since about the time of New York bankruptcy.  Any elementary look at New York will reveal it to be a place where the entertainment industry is owned by high rollers.  The enormous bankroll of the Yankees is as such not because they need to outbid other baseball teams, it is because they need to outbid the countless other things to do in New York City itself.  All other baseball teams are really playing their game of stadium and cable deals, merchandise peddling, real estate development, and ticket sales.  At the very least, and thankfully I might add, they play decent baseball.