Neil deMause

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]

By association, anyway: The terrific two-man team known as the Internets Celebrities have released their latest web video, an 18-minute film titled “Stadium Status” that looks at the machinations behind New York’s new sports stadiums and arenas. And I have a featured role helping to explain how the deal went down, though I’m happily upstaged by scenes of the actual IC crew playing catch (replete with dramatic Ken Burns-esque music) on the site of Shea Stadium, now the Citi Field parking lot.

The New York Times has already plugged the filmmakers, saying they “conjure up a world in which Michael Moore might meet Dave Chappelle.” You know, a world like 2004.

Madison Square Garden is closing for renovations — but only if you’re a girl athlete:

Proving the old line that the best way to find real news in the Times is to read the stories end-to-beginning, the Paper of Record offers up a classic buried lede in its article today about the upcoming renovations to Madison Square Garden. Round about the sixth paragraph, sportswriter Richard Sandomir reveals:

One of [Madison Square Garden's] properties, the Liberty of the W.N.B.A., will have to play home games elsewhere beginning in 2011. A possibility is the Prudential Center in Newark, where the Nets will play for two seasons before moving to their new home in Brooklyn.

That’s home games for three years, as that’s how long the $775 million-or-so plan to gut the World’s Most Famous Arena and build a new one inside its shell is scheduled take, in order to limit construction to summers and thus avoid inconveniencing the boy teams that play there in the wintertime… [read more]

I’ll be on 1010 AM CBS Sports Radio in Tampa Bay today at 4:05 pm, discussing the Rays’ campaign for a new baseball stadium. Tune in online if you’re not in the Tampa-St. Pete area; if you need a refresher course on the Tampa Bay stadium debates, you can start here and here.

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]

Can Mikhail Prokhorov’s business dealings with Zimbabwe derail his plan to buy the New Jersey Nets and move them to Brooklyn? Well, maybe:

It’s Day Three of the Great Zimbabwe Flap, and the rhetoric over a New Jersey Congressman’s challenge to Russian bazillionaire Mikhail Prokhorov’s purchase of the Nets is heating up. Prokhorov fired back at Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-My-Constituents-Don’t-Want-to-Drive-Through-Two-Tunnels-to-Watch-the-Nets-Lose) yesterday, calling the charges that he’d violated economic sanctions against Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe “erroneous,” and saying that “we have no dealings whatsoever with companies or individuals on the sanctions list.”[read more]

I went to a soccer game! Soccer match? Whatever, I went, and wrote about the experience and the New York Red Bulls’ new stadium (which is not, astute readers will notice, in New York):

The metro area’s soccer team named after an energy drink (the franchise is Red Bull New York, the team is the New York Red Bulls — if you think this is confusing, don’t even try to wrap your brain around the two competing Manchester Uniteds) held their first official league game at their brand-new stadium in Harrison, New Jersey, drawing a capacity crowd to the souffle by the Passaic. Your intrepid Voice reporter was on the scene, braving the frigid temperatures and a near-complete absence of familiarity with live soccer to see how the tristate’s latest new sports facility stacks up… [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]

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]