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April 17, 2009
The Curse of the Bambini
Most people, or at least those with a passing interest in baseball, have at least some familiarity with "The Curse of the Bambino," which, according to legend, the Boston Red Sox brought upon themselves when they sold the highly touted young pitcher-outfielder Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees following the 1919 season, for $125,000.
To that point, the Red Sox had been arguably baseball's most successful franchise, winning the first World Series title in 1903, and five championships in total. The Yankees, by contrast, had never even won an American League pennant.
Following the sale of "The Bambino" to the Yankees, it took 85 more years before the Red Sox won another World Series, when they became the first team in Major League history to win a post-season series after having lost the first three games, defeating the Yankees for the pennant, four games to three, before sweeping the St. Louis Cardinals for the title. The Yankees, meanwhile, won 39 pennants and 26 World Series during that stretch, becoming America's most successful professional sports franchise.
But the Yankees' unrivaled success has come to an end, thanks to the Curse of the Bambini, better known as the children of the Bronx from whom the Yankees (aided and abetted by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg) stole Macombs Dam Park, on which the team has erected a new Yankee Stadium, with the help of hundreds of millions of dollars in public subsidy.
According to this new legend, the Yankees will never win a championship while playing in their ill-gotten ballpark. In an ominous sign of things to come, the Yankees — who doled out $423 million in new contracts to just three free agents during this past off-season, and who already had MLB's highest-paid player, the ever-popular Ster- A-Rod, on their payroll — opened their new gilded palace by losing, 10-2, to the Cleveland Indians, who, even with yesterday's victory, still possess the American League's worst won-lost record.
Cleveland, coincidentally, is home to real estate developer Forest City Enterprises, which hopes to build a heavily subsidized, eminent domain-reliant sports venue of its own, in Brooklyn, for the New Jersey Nets. Since Forest City purchased a controlling interest in the Nets, in 2004, the team's fortunes have declined precipitously, sliding from championship contention to also-ran status. Another curse, perhaps? Most likely, yes.
Back in the Bronx, the bambini, who reside in the nation's poorest Congressional district, and who suffer from some of the highest asthma rates in the modern world, have seen their beloved Macombs Dam Park, and its 400 or so stately trees, bulldozed in favor of a monument to greed. The old Yankee Stadium, which managed to draw in excess of 4,000,000 fans each season from 2005 to 2008, still sits across the street, perfectly serviceable.
The promised replacements parks, individually smaller and far less accessible than Macombs Dam Park, and which the city claimed would be open at the same time as the new Stadium, remain just a promise. Current estimates have the new parkland being ready in 2011, costing the taxpayers about twice as much as originally estimated, and don't hold your breath, which one actually needs to do in the Bronx's brownish air.
Meanwhile, the Yankees continue to advertise heavily for their Legends Suite seats, which are not, at $2,650 a pop, selling like hot cakes. That's $2,650 per seat, per game, or about one-fifth the annual per capita income for Bronx residents. It's not hard to understand why the new Yankee Stadium is cursed.
We offer our condolences to Yankee fans, who over the decades have gotten so used to winning championships that anything less feels like abject failure. Thanks to the Curse of the Bambini, no new World Series banners will grace the rafters so long as the Yankees play in this second edition of Yankee Stadium. Take solace, though, in the fact that modern sports facilities seem to miraculously become obsolete in a couple of decades; the curse could, potentially, be broken by the building of a new, 100% privately financed ballpark, built without subsidy, on privately owned land without the use or threat of eminent domain, or the complicity of government in the theft of public parks.
On second thought, you better resign yourselves to a long, long drought.
Posted by eric at April 17, 2009 3:54 PM