Neil deMause

The New York Post has revealed what it claims are the front-runners to buy a share of the New York Mets, but doesn’t tell us anything interesting about them. Armed with Google, I set out to rectify this:

This morning’s New York Post made it a lot easier to set up your office “Who’s going to end up owning the Mets once the Wilpons have to repay their Madoff money?” pool, by running a helpful list of rich guys who, it claims, are in the running to buy at least a share of the Amazin’s. Less helpfully, they’re all a bunch of upper-mid-level Wall Street guys you’ve probably never heard of unless you go in for Goldman/Citi slash fic.

So, in the interest of informed gossip, Runnin’ Scared herewith provides your crib sheet to the guys who may or may not be sharing the Citi Field owners’ box in coming seasons… [read more]

This week at Baseball Prospectus, I take a look at Bud Selig’s plans to add extra wild-card teams, and whether this will make baseball’s postseason any fairer, and its regular season any more meaningful:

Somewhere among the piles of spiral-bound notebooks stacked in my closet lies a short-lived diary titled “The Last Pennant Race.” It recounts the day-by-day events of the last two months of the 1993 Yankees season, of which pretty much all I can remember is, first, that the Yankees managed to tie the eventual champion Blue Jays for first place roughly three dozen times, but never managed to take the lead on their own, and second, that in one late-season game, Don Mattingly, presaging the Jeffrey Maier incident by three years, got credit for a key home run despite it being caught by a fan leaning so far into the field of play that he could have shaken hands with the second baseman… [read more]

For the latest installment of my Baseball Prospectus column “Payoff Pitch” (free to non-subscribers this week!), a brief history of baseball revenue sharing, and why it’s neither evil socialism nor, um, good socialism:

A little over a week ago, Yankees president and designated apoplectic pit bull Randy Levine decided to divert attention from his team’s pitching woes by going after a new target: Rangers owner Chuck Greenberg. Five days earlier, the Texas honcho had asserted that it was his team’s efforts to sign Cliff Lee that had stalled the Yankees long enough for the Phillies to enter the picture with their ultimately winning bid. Levine, hearing these as fighting words, lashed out by calling Greenberg a welfare case… [read more]

More on George Steinbrenner, the Great Philanthropist:

Poor dead George Steinbrenner doesn’t even have a grave to spin in yet, and already he’s being raked over the coals for his past sins.

First came Jim Dwyer’s recounting of The Boss’s legacy of egotism and abuse in today’s Times, which recalls how Steinbrenner shook hands with Ed Koch on a lease extension at the old Yankee Stadium, only to back out when he decided he’d rather keep all his cable boodle for himself.

Then at noon today, a group of South Bronx residents held a press conference at the new Yankee Stadium that Steinbrenner and his kids got $1.2 billion in taxpayer money for, demanding that the Yankees cough up proof that they’ve lived up to the community benefits agreement that team execs announced with great fanfare just before the city council vote on the new stadium plan in 2006… [read more]

I don’t plan on reading the coverage of the passing of Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, most of which I expect will hew to the “he was blustery, but he built champions” line. My defining memory of The Boss — aside from the three decades he spent whining about being forced to play in a renovated Yankee Stadium, ultimately leading to the $2 billion Catastrophe by the Concourse — will forever be the night in the late ’80s when my friend Emi helped hand out placards to fans in the right-field bleachers that, when held aloft mid-game, spelled out “F-I-R-E G-E-O-R-G-E.” (The Daily News ran the photo on its back page.)

When, not long after that, Steinbrenner was suspended by Fay Vincent for hiring a gambler to dig up dirt on one of his own players (Dave Winfield, who was suing Steinbrenner for reneging on contractually promised payments to Winfield’s charitable foundation), it was announced on the Diamondvision at Yankee Stadium, and the crowd let out a huge cheer.

The days of a Steinbrenner-free Bronx were limited — he was reinstated in 1993 — but it’s worth noting that those were extremely productive years for Yankees management, as with the impatient Boss sidelined the team was able to nurture Bernie Williams, Andy Pettitte, Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada, and others who formed the core of the team that won four World Series between 1996 and 2000. Steinbrenner will no doubt be remembered as the man who restored the Yankee dynasty, but to a large degree it was the rush of renewed consumer spending (and explosive growth of cable) in the 1980s and ’90s that made the revived dynasty possible. Steinbrenner did at least, unlike some other owners, pour these revenues into his own product, but it was GMs Gene Michael and Brian Cashman who, more in spite of The Boss than thanks to him, turned those riches into championships.

Nobody wants to speak ill of the dead, though, especially when the dead man’s relatives continue to control a powerful local business and political force. So we have Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. issuing this statement today:

“Today I join 1.4 million Bronxites, and Yankee fans across the world, in mourning the passing of a great man, ‘The Boss,’ George Steinbrenner. … While other baseball fans were jealous of this success, Yankee fans, like myself, loved him for it. Both the Bronx and New York City have lost a giant today—in baseball and in charity.”

Given that Steinbrenner’s foundation had a long history of stiffing Bronx community groups, even before his role as the Thief of Parkland, that may sound a bit much. But it’s accurate in one way: Like most giants, his approach to charity was that nobody was going to get their dirty paws on his golden-egg-laying goose.

In which I debunk the latest from my new favorite punching bag, the New York Times’ Ken Belson:

Following the Mets’ improbable come-from-way-behind win over the Marlins yesterday, the Shea Stadium Citi Field scoreboard blared the slogan “We Believe in Home Field Advantage,” along with the news that the Amazin’s now boast a sparkling 22-9 record in Flushing.

Now, given that the Mets continue to hover around the .500 mark, you can probably guess that they’ve been abysmal on the road (8-18 currently). When teams sport crazy home-road splits like this, you can look at it as half-full — they’re unbeatable at home! — or half-empty — they forget to pack their bats! Or you can speculate about the reasons why: familiarity with the ballpark’s quirks, jet lag, or blowing garbage.

Or, if you’re the Times’ Ken Belson, you can skip right over all that and claim that the Mets’ futility on the road is to blame for the team’s declining attendance at home. In a post Saturday on the paper’s Bats blog (named, presumably, because the alternative violated their style guidelines), Belson asserted, well, you really need to read it for yourself… [read more]

A newspaper report claims the Tampa Bay Rays could reap $40 million a year in added revenue from a new stadium. Does it pass the smell test?

For those of you who read the Tampa Tribune religiously — and who doesn’t? — you no doubt saw the long piece yesterday running down everything that’s wrong with Tropicana Field. Among the complaints: The luxury boxes have obstructed views of flyballs, the catwalks get in the way (whether of flyballs or of watching them, the author doesn’t seem clear), and the food concessionnaire is crappy — which may be the first suggestion that a team should build a new stadium just to get out of a concessions contract since Tim Naehring declared Fenway Park to be obsolete for its lack of chef’s salads.

But the more interesting tidbit is one that’s almost brushed over in the article: Citing unnamed “experts,” the Trib claims that “without the amenities and attractions found at modern ballparks, the Tampa Bay Rays are missing out on a potential $40 million in additional revenue… [read more]

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]

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]