Root, root, root for the Tigers

Well it's finally Opening Day today (though not for my Red Sox, for that I'll have to wait a day), and we'll kick things off this afternoon in the Bronx, where the Yankees host the Tigers at the new Yankee Stadium. I'll of course be rooting for the Tigers, because I always root against the Yankees, but this time around I've got a pretty good reason why you should too:

On Thursday, the New York Yankees begin their regular season at Yankee Stadium, a gleaming $1.5 billion behemoth that opened in the Bronx in 2009 as the new home of one of the richest franchises in sports.

But next to the stadium is a lingering eyesore – a protracted construction project that was supposed to have been transformed into three public ball fields months ahead of opening day. Instead, some coaches and neighborhood residents say, it remains a joyless Mudville...

The city promised to build the fields, which are starting to take shape directly across 161st Street to the south of the stadium, to replace others that were bulldozed in 2006 to make way for the stadium.

The razed fields, in Macombs Dam Park, were the only regulation baseball diamonds nearby, and were home to neighborhood pickup games and youth leagues, and to teams from schools like All Hallows High School, a parochial institution several blocks away.

“We’ve gone five years now with no ball fields here,” said Sean Sullivan, 55, the principal of All Hallows and a coach of its baseball team, which has spent five years scouring the city for home fields. “They took the parks away from my kids, and now our team is a bunch of gypsies.”

The team, which played part of its 2009 season in Staten Island, is still searching for a site for its league opener on April 7.

The fields were originally to be completed late last year, as the centerpiece of Heritage Field, a 10-acre park where the former Yankee Stadium stood. But the groundbreaking was delayed until last June, and city officials now say the fields will not open until fall 2011.

“They built the new stadium in record time, but building replacement parkland for the community is literally dragging,” said Helen Foster, who represents the neighborhood on the City Council.

That's pretty weak. Admittedly, the majority of the anger is directed at the city and not the Yankees, and that's probably fair. Having lived in New York for several years (and worked in the shadow of Ground Zero), I recognize how ridiculous that city can be when it comes to political boondoggles getting in the way of projects (see Freedom Tower, Second Avenue Subway).

And in fairness to the Yankees, they don't seem to be completely blind to the blight they've caused:

A Yankees spokeswoman said the team donated $10 million to the parks replacement project in 2010, and gave $5.6 million worth of donations – including ballpark events, tickets and merchandise – to various Bronx organizations. The team also helped provide buses for local schools, including All Hallows, in 2009, she said.

But really, that donation might sound great to us common folk for whom $10 million is a lot of money, but it's a pittance for the Yankees, especially in comparison to the $1.5 billion price tag of the building that caused this problem in the first place.

The team's annual revenues (pre-revenue sharing) are pegged somewhere around $600 million, which means that the $10 million they donated to the parks project is roughly the equivalent of a couple of playoff games (which they would've gotten back had they not choked against the Rangers in last year's ALCS). In other words, it's a rounding error.

With the weight that the Yankees are clearly capable of throwing around in the Bronx (they got the ballpark project started and finished in a hurry, didn't they?), there's clearly more they can be doing to fast-track this process. But they've got their ballpark built, and they now seem not to really care about the neighborhood around them. So as a result, fields that were supposed to look like this (a year ago):

Instead look like this today:

Now, I'm not saying any of the other 29 teams in Major League Baseball wouldn't do just about the same thing in similar circumstances, so maybe my position here is unfair (it's certainly far from unbiased). But today, when you watch the Yankees playing in their $1.5 billion playground, just keep in mind what's going on across the street, and the Little League teams without a home for their Opening Days. Maybe for one day, you'll feel like booing the Yankees too.

[New York Times]