A Diamond In The Ashes

Was it another touch of "historical aura"? The glory Yankees were outwardly clean-cut, although the team's percentage of roisterers and midnight ramblers didn't depress the league average. Reporters questioning club officials about a rumored fistfight or curfew breakers were told, "You don't want to write about that." Especially when the club was winning, a writer could be made to feel somehow treacherous if he tried to dig beneath the glossy surface. Until Jim Bouton's Ball Four was published, for example, the myth of Mantle as a Moses in a Wheaties box was prevalent. It took a Yankee.

"It's all so beautiful that it's a little embarrassing," says one baseball official, talking about the new park, not the short haircuts. "So many exquisite touches. You'd think the city could have done a little more for the neighborhood outside the Stadium, like it said it would."

It will take at least a grand jury to fully explain the process by which New York decided to take over and renovate Yankee Stadium, but we can assume that the coalition that swung the deal was basically the same as the groups that have saddled other cities with publicly funded ball parks for privately owned teams. Regardless of what city you are in, those concerned with property values, labor supply, tourist income and public relations seem to believe that their town cannot be truly major league without a big-league baseball team. In metropolises like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, the requisite number is two.

The rage and sorrow in New York when the Dodgers and Giants left for California in 1958 were as real as that of any scorned lover. The Times' Arthur Daley, tears in his eyes, answered thousands of grieving letters; but his own wounds were deeper than those he tried to soothe. In those days we actually believed that a team was "ours" to be supported and forgiven as it championed our town. The local reaction to the New York franchise shifts began with the cry: How could they betray us just for money and sunshine? Eventually it changed to the cuckold's lament: we weren't city enough to hold them! The city swore it would never lose a team again.

Four years later the Mets were created with the promise of a municipal stadium built and operated under such favorable conditions that the club had most of the advantages of ownership with few of the expenses or responsibilities. In 1971 the Yankees indicated that they might be lured away if the city did not do at least as well by them. I thought it was a bluff at the time and would have liked to have told the Yankees to do the same thing that Mantle had suggested to me, but Mayor John V. Lindsay, Abrams and their colleagues fell over each other declaring Yankee Stadium an essential element in the city's chemistry, a bastion against the white middle-class migration to the suburbs, an anchor to the rehabilitation of the Bronx. Then comptroller and now Mayor Abraham Beame mildly suggested that the "need for another stadium should be balanced against the needs for housing, schools, libraries, hospitals and other facilities," but he apparently was able to balance those needs, because, when the day of decision arrived, he fell into step behind Abrams, who pranced into the Board of Estimate chambers wearing a Yankee cap. Only Garelik, the cop, scowled and voted no.

"Yankee Stadium may be a landmark—it marks some wonderful memories," said Garelik. "What I object to is not the retention of the New York Yankees, but the fiscal irresponsibility of sinking millions of dollars into the half-soling of an old shoe that, when completed, will still be an old shoe."

Garelik's most radical counterproposal, that the money be used to dome and AstroTurf Shea so it could serve as the home for all four New York teams—Yankees, Mets, Giants, Jets—was instantly hooted down as impractical. But during one of the years Yankee Stadium was being rebuilt, the four teams lived together at Shea in relative harmony.

Garelik's main points still hold up. He called the original $24 million price tag "ludicrous" and predicted the final cost would be triple the official figure; with annual debt service counted in, Garelik's prediction will be conservative. And he declared that, after all was said and done, New York would still not have a multipurpose, multiseason stadium to match the new facilities in other cities.

Who's the bad guy? The reports of alleged high-level political corruption in the Bronx seem to point inexorably toward Yankeeland. Some have suggested mundane courthouse graft. But others do not see crime. They blame CBS, which, they say, could never have unloaded its losing subsidiary, the Yankees, without a viable ball park.

Or could it be that the city administration actually believed that baseball was critical to the life of the city? "That's why we couldn't let the Yankees leave," says Abrams. "Can you imagine if the Yanks win the pennant? Can you imagine the electricity, the impact on the city? Not only in real dollars, but in spirit. We're in a psychological crisis, decisions are being made every day to come to New York, to leave New York, to invest in New York. Can you imagine the Yankees and the Mets in the World Series?"