To Get Playpen, They Toy With a City’s Loyalties

You all know Fenway Park. That funny little ballpark in Boston with that inviting left-field wall only 315 feet from home plate. The Green Monster.

You know why it’s there? Because in 1912 when Fenway Park was built, it was unthinkable for a municipality to condemn even a section of a city street for a private business. If they wanted to build a ballpark, they had to squeeze it into the confines of existing city streets.

So, they did. Left field was a pop-fly home run because Landsdowne Street still runs behind it. And Fenway Park, capacity 33,356, remains the smallest park in the big leagues.

Now, contrast that with the news the other day that the city of San Francisco just voted to build a $525-million stadium and mall complex for the San Francisco 49ers, a private corporation, because they are afraid if they don’t, the team will bolt callously to some other community.

There would be no shortage of such communities. The medicine shows of old never peddled their snake oil any more cynically than these hucksters. Have franchise, make offer.

Know what the city of Boston would have said to the owners in 1912 if they had threatened to move the Red Sox out?

“Go ahead! Don’t slam the door on your way out.”

In 1922, the New York beer baron, Jacob Ruppert, who had bought the New York Yankees to promote sales of his suds, was evicted from the Polo Grounds by the parent owners, the New York Giants.

Did he threaten the city with departure? No. He bought 240,000 square feet of land across the Harlem River from the Giants and built his own magnificent Yankee Stadium, which became “the House That Ruth Built” (or, given its 290-foot right-field fence, “the House That Built Ruth”).

Today, we have the spectacle of the modern-day New York Yankees threatening to move to New Jersey if they don’t get a new billion-dollar playpen built for them on Manhattan’s elegant West Side.

In 1946, when the owner of the Cleveland Rams, a Long Island grocery magnate, Dan Reeves, wanted to move his franchise to Los Angeles, he not only did not demand the community build him a stadium, he had to beg it to let him rent the Coliseum. The commission there restricted use to college “amateur” teams. L.A. didn’t want the Rams, it had the Trojans and Bruins.

L.A. never has built a facility for any sports franchise. When Walter O’Malley moved west with his Dodgers, the city deeded over Chavez Ravine to him in return for Wrigley Field, a lopsided exchange, to be sure, of 300 acres of prime downtown real estate for a rundown ballfield, in a rundown part of town, which at the time had a whorehouse for a neighbor. But he did build his own ballpark.

And why did O’Malley move? Because he couldn’t get the borough in Brooklyn to condemn property for a ballpark there, even though he had the New York Legislature pass an act enabling such condemnation.

But that was then, this is now.

Look what’s happening: Franchises leave one town after another, then move on to a better deal elsewhere--the Cleveland Rams-Los Angeles-Anaheim-St. Louis Rams, or the Oakland-L.A.-Oakland Raiders, the Baltimore-Indianapolis Colts, the Cleveland Browns-Baltimore Ravens, and so on.

It used to be, “My town can lick your town.” Ballplayers didn’t even wear numbers. They were part of Our Town, not soloists, not traveling mercenaries. Community identification with the athletes was all-important.

They trifle with this concept in their zeal for a deal. They discount loyalty. “Show me the money,” is their watchword too.

Where does it end? With franchises double-parked and motors running? With uniforms with the town’s name removed and “To Whom It May Concern” stenciled on instead?

The municipal shakedown is endemic. They threaten San Diego with removal of the Super Bowl if it doesn’t shape up and fix its stadium. They slip out of town in the dead of night in Baltimore when they can’t get a new deal.

What does the community get out of it? Cracks in the sidewalks, probably, because the money to fix them has gone into building sporting edifices. Rampant crime, apparently, because the money to deal with it effectively is not forthcoming.

People who regularly vote down school bond issues rush to the polls to approve millions for diamonds or gridirons. In a few weeks, Seattle voters will be asked to vote “Yes” on a $300-million stadium for the Seahawks, who will then play seven or eight games a year there, and the voters will be asked to pay for personal seat licenses or luxury boxes to view them. You pay part of the team’s cost of doing business but you’re not an owner, just a customer.

Milwaukee is building a new domed stadium for baseball. Raleigh, N.C., spends $122 million for an arena to lure the Hartford Whalers hockey team south.

The Cincinnati Bengals get a new publicly funded $180-million stadium. The New York Mets want a new $350-million domed ballpark built with government help, although their “old” one, Shea Stadium, was built for them only in 1964.

The Houston Oilers--probably with a two-season stopover in Memphis--already have bolted for Nashville, where a stadium is being built for them.

Perhaps the most depressing news is, the Boston Red Sox are making noises that they want to get out of Fenway Park. This time, they’ll probably not only want Landsdowne Street condemned for them but a stadium to be built.

But you know what the irony is? In the years of runaway new ballpark building, they put up about a dozen new symmetrical, antiseptic ballparks with no character whatsoever to them. And they made the game so boring that, when they started to build new ballparks in recent years, they deliberately built eccentricity into them. Camden Yards, Jacobs Field come to mind.

So, I say, they had the right idea in more ways than one in 1912. Who says we have to subsidize the sports business?

Let me ask you something. Who did more to put this town on the map, Charlie Chaplin or the Los Angeles Rams? C.B. DeMille or the Los Angeles Lakers? Clark Gable and Greta Garbo or Billy Wade and Steve Bilko? Who brought in more cash, more tourists? Movie studios made this town, not sports franchises.

Think anybody put up a bond issue to lure them here? Anybody promise you a rose garden if you’d move here?

We let ‘em put “Los Angeles” on their chests and bank on our loyal, parochial support and promotion. They ought to be paying us.