April 18, 2005

Yanks leak stadium clues

When a big business like a baseball franchise wants to generate some favorable press coverage, it has a tried-and-true ace up its sleeve: Identify a sympathetic reporter, then provide them with a "leak" of the information you want to appear on the front page. If all goes well, in the excitement over getting an exclusive, they'll happily repeat any claims you make - and no one will be able to say otherwise, since you're the only one who knows what your plans look like.

That's just what the New York Yankees did this weekend, with Daily News reporter T.J. Quinn providing a two-part look at the team's plans to raze Yankee Stadium and replace it with an $800 million structure in a public park across the street. Quinn's prose was breathlessly effusive, describing the new stadium design as "designed to dazzle," with "the old frieze hanging from the roof like copper lace" and the limestone exterior providing "the view Babe Ruth had when he went to work in the house they built for him."

Reading between the Yankees' p.r. lines, there was some new news here, but it was harder to ferret out, and still leaves many questions unanswered:

• The new stadium, which would be built atop what are now Macombs Dam Park and Mullaly Park just north of the current Yankee Stadium, would consist of an outer shell designed to look like the original Yankee Stadium exterior, with a modern stadium structure inside it. The space in between would be filled with a "Great Hall" that might be better described as a great mall, as it would, according to the News, contain "five to six times more retail square footage than the current stadium."
• The field dimensions would remain the same as in the current stadium, but the seating bowl would be much different: just 50,800 seats as opposed to the current 57,000-plus; and, writes Quinn, "in the current stadium, roughly 30,000 seats are in the upper decks, with 20,000 below. The new park would reverse that." Since it's nearly impossible to fit 30,000 seats on a single deck without resorting to Woodrow Wilson-era seat widths, presumably this counts all the luxury and club-seat levels as "lower-deck" - which means the cheap seats in the upper deck would effectively be cut by more than a third.
• Quinn also neglected to mention any of the interior dimensions of the grandstand - the only illustration doesn't shed much light - but given that Yankee Stadium currently offers one of the closest upper decks in baseball, it seems likely that a new park would provide much more distant sightlines for those in the cheap seats.
• As was reported last summer, the Yankees would pay for the entire construction cost of the stadium, now estimated at $800 million. (Actually, as was also reported last summer, about 40% of the cost would actually be borne by the other 29 MLB teams, thanks to a loophole in baseball's revenue-sharing plan.) The city and state would be responsible for $300 million for a new commuter rail station, new parking garages (which, according to Quinn, the public would keep revenues from), and other infrastructure, presumably including replacing the parkland that would be demolished to make way for the new stadium.
• About that parkland: Though earlier plans had been for the current stadium to be demolished and replaced with an above-ground parking garage with ballfields on top, the News now reports that "the city will take over the old stadium (which it owns), knock down part of the outfield bleachers and possibly part of the grandstand and find a commercial use for the remaining building." Since state law requires that any removed parkland be replaced by an equal amount of new green space, it's unclear how the new Yankees plan would compensate for the removal of the heavily used Macombs Dam and Mullaly Parks.

Much else is unclear about the Yankees plan, including how the city and state's $300 million would be funded, what legislative approvals would be necessary, and whether the Yankees would receive such hidden subsidies as using their own property taxes to pay off stadium bonds. The News reports only that the Yankee management hopes to have a memorandum of understanding with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg by "around May 1"; as has been made clear by the Nets case in Brooklyn, this would only be a starting point, mostly interesting because it would finally give the public a chance to scrutinize the plans more directly, unfiltered by the Yankees' p.r. machine.

And speaking of the public, Quinn writes: "Perhaps best of all for the parties involved, there is no significant opposition to the project." It may not be "significant" yet, but the natives are certainly getting restless.

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