HOW GOVERNMENT DEVASTATED MINOR LEAGUE BASEBALL
IT’S FAMILY SUNDAY FunDay here at Coney Island’s Maimonides Park, home of the Brooklyn Cyclones. For the low price of $18, enjoy the up-close views of future New York Mets stars and between-innings fan contests involving potato sacks. If the kids don’t wilt in the mid-July swelter, they can run the bases on the field after the game. It’s minor league baseball at its corny, affordable best.
Seven miles away as the seagull flies over the mouth of New York Harbor, the scene at Richmond County Bank Ballpark is considerably bleaker. Gawky weeds shoot up through the neglected infield dirt and mangy outfield grass where the Staten Island Yankees once roamed. Just over the chain-link fence in right field sits an overflowing dumpster. The sliver of real estate past left field was supposed to be a walkway to a billion-dollar Ferris wheel; now it’s a shady homeless camp dotted with flat-tened cardboard. “Let’s not eat here,” a mom says to her picnicimpatient 6-year-old.
The divergent fate of New York City’s two minor league ball-parks, like too much of life in the five boroughs, is a cautionary tale about what happens when government and business promiscuously canoodle. The city spent $71 million on a picturesque stadium on the Staten Island waterfront (Maimonides cost $55 million) that after a two-decade run now stands empty, and it’s reacting to that calamity by throwing a fresh new $8 million toward cleanup costs in the hopes of luring baseball back.
Not for the first or even hundredth time, people elected to be caretakers of taxpayer money are discovering the ironic lie behind the most famous line derived from the overly nostalgic baseball film : “If you build it, they will come.” In fact, when governments become landlords, sports businesses, no matter how deep their pockets, start acting like tenants: always eyeing the exits for a potentially better deal. If you
