Neil deMause: The Website

I was interviewed about stadium shakedowns by John Miller of National Review Online (yes, you read that right) a week or so ago, and it’s now available online. I don’t remember what I said, so tune in and then tell me!

The new stadiums for the Mets and Yankees are a year away from completion, and they’re costing less and creating fewer headaches for local residents than expected. Just kidding!

When Mets and Yankees fans arrive for the start of the new season, the teams’ past and future will be on display side by side—and not just Pedro Martinez and Johan Santana or Andy Pettitte and Joba Chamberlain. At a record-shattering price tag of more than $2.5 billion, twin homes for New York’s ball clubs are being readied for their 2009 openings—and in the Bronx in particular, the repercussions are affecting not just the city treasury but the local neighborhood… [read more]

Don’t believe anything you read on the front page of the New York Post, no matter how amusing the headline is:

Today’s front-page Post “exclusive” reports that the Yankees and Mets are in “secret talks” to buy the remnants of Yankee and Shea Stadiums so the teams can sell off the scrap to souvenir-hunting fans. In the story inside, memorabilia expert Mike Heffner raves about the value of New York baseball relics, speculating that in the case of Yankee Stadium, “Each brick could sell for $100 to $300. I doubt we’d have any trouble selling every seat in the house for as much as $1,000.”

Even given the low bar for tabloid exclusives, not much of this is news… [read more]

Barely two weeks after I wrote about the rising public costs of the new Yankees stadium, those costs have risen yet again:

Baseball may be a game of numbers, but this is ridiculous: Sports fans (or just concerned taxpayers) who opened their morning paper today could read that the city cost of building new parks to replace those obliterated for a new Yankees stadium had risen 48% to $190 million, and also 122% to $288 million. It’s enough to make WXRL seem easy to understand by comparison.

The explanation, it turns out, is that it depends on what you mean by “parks”…

Just got word that Field of Schemes: The Next Generation (ed. note: not the actual title) is now shipping from Bison Books’ website, notwithstanding the official release date being a month away. This edition has all the stadium-swindley goodness of the original FoS, plus four new chapters and annotations to the original chapters that make the whole thing clock in at a hefty 400-plus pages.

For more on this, visit fieldofschemes.com. And if you’re a potential book reviewer, radio producer, or bookstore that might want to host a speaking/signing, drop me an e-mail. (Bookstores, you might want to get one of your staffers to send the e-mail; I know how hard it is for brick and mortar to type.)

It’s been a while since I’ve had an excuse to do a new tally of the public costs of the Yankees and Mets deals, so I was pleased to see New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg put his foot in his mouth about the stadiums last week:

On his weekly radio show Friday, Mayor Bloomberg was asked why the city was subsidizing stadiums for the Mets and Yankees. His response: “The city and the state, to my recollection, each put in $75 million” for each new stadium — a mere fraction of the total cost. “It was a really good deal,” he added.

For a data-crazed mayor, Bloomberg can be awfully loose with his numbers… [read more]

I’ve also put up a new spreadsheet of the public/private cost calculations underlying this article, for those interested.

The New York city council debate over whether to continue Madison Square Garden’s $11-million-a-year exemption from property taxes - which was supposed to end in 1992, but somebody forgot to write that into the legislation - has not exactly covered either side in glory:

t was a strange scene even by City Council standards: representatives of Madison Square Garden testifying last week that they should get to keep their perpetual tax exemption because the city is throwing so much money at its other sports teams — more than $1.3 billion, by their count — that the Knicks and Rangers might as well share in the boodle.

Arguing that “all the other kids are getting one” isn’t exactly new for sports teams in search of public subsidies; Rudy Giuliani, after all, once asserted the Yankees needed a new, city-built stadium to let them compete with the (no guffawing) Baltimore Orioles… [read more]

I’m going to be on KPFA-FM in the Bay Area tomorrow morning at 7:30 am, discussing the proposed San Francisco 49ers football stadium in Santa Clara. Those out of reach of KPFA’s signal (like me) can listen live via the station’s Internet streams; it looks like the shows are archived as well, so I’ll post a link here once that’s up.

UPDATE: The segment was postponed thanks to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, and will now air Friday morning at 7:30 am Pacific instead.

UPDATE #2: The show is now online. (Scroll ahead about half an hour to hear my segment.)

The wheels of academic presses grind slow but fine, but I’m very pleased to announce that the newly revised and expanded edition of Field of Schemes is scheduled for release by University of Nebraska Press/Bison Books on April 1. (Pre-ordering will begin a few weeks before that, from the publisher’s website. This edition is the culmination of more than a decade of research, with four all-new chapters covering the latest stadium shenanigans in New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, plus annotations updating the book’s original chapters to the present day.

In other words, please buy early, and buy often. If nothing else, the added heft will make the book a fine projectile for hurling at your favorite local stadium apologist.

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]