Neil deMause: The Website

It’s Wednesday, so it must be time for the annual speculation about moving a third MLB team to the New York area:

Normally, the Tampa Bay Rays complaining that their home stadium is a dump wouldn’t be news here in New York, given that 1) people have been complaining about Tropicana Field since before the Rays even debuted there in 1998 and 2) the Rays only enter New Yorkers’ radar in the odd seasons when they threaten to break through the Yanks-Sox oligarchy in the A.L. East.

All that changed this week, however, when Peter Gammons, former star of ESPN and the $20 bill, mentioned in his MLB.com column that “there are smart people in the Major League Baseball offices wondering if there’s hope of even discussing a potential move of the Rays to New Jersey or Southern Connecticut over certain protests from the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox and Phillies.”… [read more]

More than you ever wanted to know about the fate of Brooklyn’s last surviving big-league ballpark wall:

The saga of the last surviving Brooklyn ballpark wall just keeps getting murkier and murkier. The latest news: Con Ed, which since the 1920s has owned the Gowanus property that once was a series of ballparks named Washington Park, tells the Voice that it is going to tear down part of the brick wall that runs along Third Avenue — but debate still rages over whether that section is a historic baseball artifact or just, you know, a wall… [read more]

Years after first weighing in on the Washington Park controversy, I get to revisit the question of just whose ballpark wall is still standing in Brooklyn:

After all the hoohah over the last surviving remnant of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ home before Ebbets Field, it turns out that the wall in question isn’t actually so much a Dodgers wall after all. “I can say with absolute certainty that this wall was not part of Washington Park prior to the Brooklyn team’s departure [in 1912],” historian and Brooklynpix proprietor Brian Merlis declares in today Daily News. “It’s still an historic wall, but there’s no evidence … that it’s the original wall.”

This will come as no surprise to readers of the BrooklynBallparks.com site (run by my Field of Schemes colleague David Dyte), which for years now has been quietly laying out evidence that the windowed brick wall running along Third Avenue between 1st and 3rd Streets in Gowanus was built in 1914, after the Dodgers’ departure, when Washington Park was reconstructed to play host to the Brooklyn Tip-Tops of the Federal League… [read more]

This has to be a new record of some kind: Quote given at 3:45 pm EST; quote appears on web at 3:58 pm EST.

More revelations about the Atlantic Yards arena deal, plus some hint of how the Nets themselves will fare in Brooklyn:

Uberdeveloper-turned-Nets-owner Bruce Ratner better have some good meds, because this is rapidly shaping up to be a month of rapid mood swings for him and his Atlantic Yards project. While Tuesday’s granting of a desperately needed investment-grade rating for the Nets arena bonds must have been a sigh of relief for Ratner, since then he’s been pelted by less-good news that promises to take chunks out of his wallet:

• The record-setting $20 million a year naming-rights deal agreed to by Barclays back in 2007 turns out to be worth only $10 million a year and change… [read more]

Attempting to make sense of yesterday’s court ruling on Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards arena project:

So is the long-heralded arrival of Atlantic Yards finally at hand, or what? According to the front page of today’s Times (echoed on its sports page), the answer is yes: Following yesterday’s appeals court ruling, which dismissed challenges to the state seizing private land for the Nets-arena-and-other-stuff project, “a cloud of uncertainty that has hung over Atlantic Yards for more than a year had lifted,” writes development reporter Charles Bagli, while rookie Nets beat writer Jonathan Abrams calls the ruling the “last major hurdle in the groundbreaking process.”

When and whether the bulldozers will actually pull up to Freddy’s, though, remains murky… [read more]

The wrecking ball (or rather, the backhoe) has arrived at Yankee Stadium:

While the World Champion Yankees are fighting their way through lower Manhattan traffic this morning, a more somber ceremony is taking place in the Bronx, where the demolition of old Yankee Stadium has now begun in earnest. WCBS Radio helicopter pilot Tom Kaminski snapped a photo of a backhoe tearing into the left-field bleachers on Wednesday, and another yesterday that shows the center-field bleachers (aka “the black”) partly collapsed into debris… [read more]

With a horde of reporters wandering around the Bronx looking for World Series stories, it’s probably inevitable that some of them would wander onto 161st Street and ask local merchants how business is going what with the new stadium next door. Answer: not so hot.

It’s officially a meme: The New York Times, following in the footsteps of WNYC and WCBS-TV, has an article today on how business at stores on 161st Street has cratered after the new Yankee Steakhouse and Baseball Stadium opened this year. A sample of the Times’ contribution to the genre:

While working in his father’s souvenir shop up the block, [Saeed Alawy of Pin Stripe Collectibles] recalled, there was no time to fold the T-shirts before selling them. Customers were lined up three and four deep at the counter yelling out orders and tossing wads of bills.

“They were throwing the money,” Mr. Alawy, 47, said.

Over the course of an hour on Monday, just 13 shoppers wandered into Pin Stripe Collectibles and Mr. Alawy made only four sales, for a total of $107.

One could nitpick that there wasn’t actually a game in the Bronx on Monday, but the other reports indicate that it’s a problem even on game days: The Yankee Tavern’s owner told WCBS that his business is off 20 percent this season, while the Concourse Card Shop’s is down by half… [read more]

Thoughts on tonight’s Game 1 of the World Series:

With the World Series starting tonight — if this rain ever stops, and if Jay-Z’s opening act finishes in time for the game to start before midnight — the media is scrambling to fill air time and column inches, especially since the Phillies tripped up that promising return of the prodigal Joe storyline. One tried-and-true angle: Tell people how to take the subway to the game… [read more]

The Nets may be moving next year, but it’s not to Brooklyn:

Rumors of the Nets moving to Newark to join the Devils are as old as Jason Kidd’s knees, but hoops-by-the-Ironbound may finally be a reality, as early as next season. After the Newark Star-Ledger reported yesterday that unnamed team sources were saying the Nets would consider a temporary relocation to Newark while awaiting their new Brooklyn digs, today’s Bergen Record followed up with actual quotes from a real person — or as real as you believe “New Jersey’s economic czar” to be — saying that talks are underway between the state and the Devils to ease a Nets move… [read more]