Neil deMause: The Website

My latest Metro New York op-ed (at 400 words apiece, they’re really more op-aphorisms) takes a shot at digging beneath the surface of baseball’s steroid scandal, or at least coming up with some new topics of conversation aside from whether the Yankees’ World Series titles are “tainted” now that Chuck Knoblauch may have been air-mailing throws into the seats with a juiced right arm:

A few items that were largely missed amid the acres of newsprint devoted to baseball’s latest steroid mess:

Did anyone really expect that the big names in baseball’s drug report would be a couple of aging pitchers? The steroid-abuser stereotype has always been that of an over-muscled batter, but the Mitchell report’s drift net snagged a lot of Ryan Franklins and Kent Merckers along with the Bondses and Cansecos… [read more]

The media frenzy over those Yankees hotel-room aliases continues, as I make two radio appearances tomorrow to discuss the pressing question of why Jorge Posada goes by “Ricky Ricardo”:

• Peter Greenberg Worldwide, syndicated/XM, 10:50 am Eastern
• The Roy Green Show, on Canada’s Corus Radio Network, 2:20 pm Eastern

And because apparently nobody can get enough of those Yankees hotel room aliases, here’s more on those Yankees hotel room aliases, this time in quiz form.

The first villagevoice.com reader to successfully identify all four mystery Yankees—heck, the first to even get three right, given that there’s very little rhyme or reason to these—in the comments section wins a prize.

The prize? A copy of the expanded edition of my book Field of Schemes, due out next spring, which includes an all-new chapter on New York’s recent stadium/arena battles… [read more]

More goodies from the Yankees’ document dump, though this time they’re more amusing than outrageous. Among the paperwork the team sent over to the city as part of its “stadium planning” claims is a crib sheet listing players’ hotel-room aliases:

Among the more notable monikers:

Pseudonym: Simon Phoenix
Real name: Mike Mussina
Interpretation: Either the bookish hurler is a big Demolition Man fan, or he just identifies with characters who unexpectedly find themselves out of place in the 21st century. There is no truth to the rumor that when Wesley Snipes blew a line reading, he snorted, “Who are they going replace me with?”… [read more]

If you thought last year’s news that the New York Yankees had billed taxpayers for their own stadium lobbyists was outrageous, then … well, that was outrageous, but this is pretty nuts, too: New documents show the team subsequently billed the city for all kinds of stuff and called it “stadium planning costs”:

Billing the city for the lobbyists he hired to push his new stadium (now taking shape across the street from the soon-to-be-demolished House That Ruth Built) was, it turns out, the least of George Steinbrenner’s chutzpah. According to documents obtained from the parks department’s archives via the Freedom of Information Law, the Yanks submitted to the city for reimbursement such “stadium planning” costs as a dozen crystal baseballs presented as a gift by the team, and bar tabs for Yankees execs—plus a whopping $9 million in expenses incurred the year after the team’s sweetheart-lease clause expired. And it’s become increasingly clear that city officials diligently looked the other way while this was taking place… [read more]

When the Yankees got permission to build their $1.3 billion stadium complex in a Bronx park, the city promised to provide interim park space for local residents to use until new permanent parks are ready. How’s that working out? About as well as the stadium deal itself:

At the new park, the old parking-lot gates turn out to be padlocked shut; those on foot can walk around them, but anyone in a wheelchair will be out of luck. Inside, a track skirts the edges of a single field shared by soccer players and a softball game. Where Macombs Dam Park was grass (often threadbare from the pounding of soccer cleats), here the turf is an artificial substance called tufted nylon that is a slick, plasticky green—”like dead Christmas trees,” remarks former Community Board 4 member Anita Antonetty… [read more]

The Mets mull selling bricks outside their new city-owned stadium. Guess who won’t be getting a share of the cash?

The Mets may be locked in a three-way battle for first place in the N.L. East, but don’t let it be said that they’re not looking to the future. Last week, the ball club sent out an online survey to “loyal Mets fans” (actually, anyone who had purchased seats via the Mets’ website) asking what they thought of a “new way to involve fans”: Engraved bricks with personalized messages that would be installed outside Citi Field when it opens in 2009. “As a Mets fan,” asked the single survey question, “would you consider purchasing a brick?”…[read more]

Most of last month for me was spent on one story, but oh, what a story. As I detailed at length in the April 11 Village Voice, most of Coney Island’s historical amusement district is at risk of being shut down and left vacant for years, as the result of a game of chicken between New York City and a developer who wants his land rezoned to allow condos on the boardwalk. Astroland is already slated to close after 45 years this fall, and if developer Joe Sitt goes through with his threats to wait for a friendlier mayoral administration, as I wrote, “Coney Island’s already diminished amusement district could spend years as a torn-up wasteland, leaving only the Cyclone, Dino’s Wonder Wheel Park, Sideshows by the Seashore, and Nathan’s standing amid a vast empty plain.”

In the weeks after my article ran (and a Save Coney Island protest that preceded it), Sitt began sounding conciliatory notes, allowing some store owners he had evicted to move back in - and, as I reported for the Voice’s Runnin’ Scared blog, even showing up at the reopening party of one of them and chowing down on sausages and beer. A local arcade owner, meanwhile, posted a mock tombstone presenting Sitt as a dictator signing the area’s “death warrant.” All of which can only be described as very Coney Island.

My one other piece of newsprint on the month was an op-ed in everybody’s favorite free paper (if you know what’s good for you), Metro New York, on some more appropriate ways of celebrating Jackie Robinson Day than having scores of players wear his uniform number. I’m sure Bud Selig has it taped to his computer monitor for future reference.

I have a bunch of other stuff in the works for coming weeks, including my debut as a judge for World Hunger Year’s Harry Chapin Media Awards (I think I’m allowed to reveal that, anyway). Watch this space for further developments, and see you next month at the free Television show in Central Park.

Okay, looks like that New Year’s resolution didn’t go all that well. I may switch to a more continuous-blog format for this page shortly; in the meantime, here’s a two-month recap of my doings and whereabouts:

I usually start things off with the articles I’ve written, but then, it’s not every month that I testify before Congress. On March 29, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Domestic Policy (chaired by Rep. Dennis Kucinich) had me in to testify on a panel discussing public funding of sports stadiums. The hearing lasted three and a half hours, and also included community activists, sports economists, and an IRS official who looked creepily like Bud Selig - you can see it all via C-SPAN’s website, or read our written testimony on the subcommittee’s site.

Back in the written world, I’ve been focusing on stadiums a fair bit as well, it being both legislative season and the start of baseball season. For Baseball Prospectus I took a look at the status of the four new stadiums (and one renovated one) approved last year, as well as the new deals the Oakland A’s and Florida Marlins hope to cut this year. (Both subscribers-only, sorry.) I also made my long-awaited return to the pages of the Village Voice with a look at the details of the new Yankees and Mets stadiums to see just what New Yorkers are getting for their $720 million in state and city tax money. (Hint: It’s not better views from the cheap seats.)

I also tried my hand of late at the ever-popular pastime of concocting new baseball statistics, introducing MP/MWW to evaluate which teams got the most bang for their payroll spending buck, ROPE to gauge their return on player investment (not very good, as it turns out), and BAD and BADr to find the most wasteful player contracts of all time. Murray Chass, forgive me.

Other of my writings in the last two months include: a look at the cost overruns that are threatening New York City’s #7 subway line extension (for the newspaper City Hall); a report on the city’s individualized medical/psychological care system for welfare recipients that costs $200 million and doesn’t provide individualized care; coverage of the anticlimactic groundbreaking for Brooklyn’s controversial new Atlantic Yards project; and a report on how the city proposed to switch a pair of two-way streets to one-way in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, and ended up faced with an angry mob that charged it was all part of a plan to making it easier for fans to speed to the controversial new Atlantic Yards project (last three all for the Voice’s Runnin’ Scared news blog). Also, for the transit news site Streetsblog, reports on Mayor Bloomberg’s plans to create a “sustainable” New York for 2030, and a UCLA professor who thinks “market-rate” parking meters are the solution to midtown traffic and parking woes.

Finally, to top off a busy bimonth (quadrifortnight?), I dropped in on a fascinating lunch talk by several ’60s activists featured in the great oral historian Jeff Kisseloff’s equally great new book, Generation on Fire, and wrote about it for In These Times magazine. If you like the article, read the website; if you like the website, buy the book. Actually, just buy the book anyway - it’s worth it alone for Gloria Richardson and Bob Kellner’s recounting of their time at the front lines of the civil rights movement, which is a sorely needed antidote to revisionist crap like “Mississippi Burning.”

Coming up next: I’ll have a long piece in the April 11 issue of the Village Voice, so check their website starting on the afternoon of the 10th. After that, I have a bunch of irons in the fire, so stay tuned to this site for more news of the world around you and its trip to hell in a handbasket.

Oh, and donate to WFMU! It’s not too late, and it’ll get you into heaven. I promise. I know a guy.

In a perfect world, I’d have spent the whole of January wrapping up the manuscript of the new edition of Field of Schemes. (Note to Rob at U of Nebraska Press, if by some chance you’re reading this: Any day now, really.) Instead, the world stubbornly refused to stay still, which meant I had to take time out from revisiting Boston in the summer of 2000 to focus on current events:

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as you may recall, keeps promising he’s about to release details of how he plans to fight poverty. In his State of the City address, he revealed that the city will start aggressively helping eligible residents apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit for the working poor - though he’s not doing the same for food stamps, which should make even more sense from a fiscal perspective, but perhaps not if he’s concerned about only aiding the “deserving” poor. And speaking of helping people to money, the mayor also snuck into his capital budget, with no public notice, plans to funnel as much as $226 million in added city money to new homes for the Yankees, Mets, and Nets - all “deserving” recipients, no doubt. (Both of these stories appeared on the Village Voice’s Power Plays blog, which has just been redesigned and renamed Runnin’ Scared - bylines are still missing from the stories, you’ll note, but that should be fixed soon. I hope.)

I also have two articles in the January edition of City Hall, a newish newspaper focusing on New York City politics with a seriously unfortunate name for anyone trying to report for it. (”Hello, is this the mayor’s office? I’m calling from City Hall. No, I’m at City Hall. Yes, I know you’re at City Hall, but I’m with - never mind, I’ll call back.”) My topics for this month: How New York’s new governor, Eliot Spitzer, plans on dealing with the numerous megaprojects planned for the metro area, and concerns that he’ll start with the ones where funding is easily available, regardless of what’s best for the state; and another look at Bloomberg’s poverty-fighting plans, such as we know they are.

No baseball writing for this month, aside from a couple of posts on Baseball Prospectus’ Unfiltered blog. I have a bunch of stuff in the hopper for next month, though, which should make for a nice run-up to my debut in the BP annual, and the upcoming revised paperback edition of Baseball Between the Numbers. I’ll also be making a couple of public appearances at BP book events in the NY/NJ area on March 22 and March 24, so mark your calendar if that’s the sort of thing that floats your boat.

That’s about all for this month, and I see a Vin Scelsa archive with my name on it. (The Yo La Tengo appearance is especially recommended.) Until next month, try not to do anything to drive walruses into extinction and turn Nebraska into a desert.