Stadium Mania:An Exercise In Nostalgia

Does it matter where the Yankees go? Surely one cause of the necrophilia of Brooklyn Dodgers fans-Jack Newfield springs to mind-is that the Dodgers were taken from them in the midst of a great decade, when they dominated the National League, wrested a World Series from the Yankees and (especially important in New York) basked in self-plaudits for playing Jackie Robinson. Excellence and liberalism could still co-exist then; today's Jackie Robinson would have to be a black ballplayer in a wheelchair.

But the Yankees have not been the Yankees for decades. Donald Kagan, Yale professor, scholar of Thucydides and the history of warfare, and lifelong Yankees fan, wrote an eloquent paean to their lost world.

The 1950's was "the last time the national game held its place as part of nature, timeless and regular as Newton's universe. In the beginning God created 16 major-league baseball teams, 8 in the National League and 8 in the American League. Baseball was played on natural grass and mostly in the daytime. Each team played every other team in its league 22 times a season, 11 games at home and 11 away; the 77 games at home and 77 away made for a perfectly symmetrical season. The Yankees ruled this world as the Olympian gods ruled theirs. The mighty Dodgers and Giants challenged their supremacy as the Titans and Giants challenged the Olympians, and to no more avail. The Yankees ruled with steadiness, serenity, and justice, and only the unworthy gnashed their teeth in envy and prayed for chaos to shatter the unwelcome order."

That was a long time ago-so long that a 43-year-old man cannot remember it. There have been a few championships for the Yankees since then, and the odd splendid player. But the gods have fled. I know this should not matter to the ideal fan, who is loyal to his team in lean years and fat. Think of Red Sox fans. Think of Cubs fans. But the Yankees were not any old team. The Yankees were not losers . Now they are, as often as not. Who would sell their soul to the devil to beat them?

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a fan of Donald Kagan's vintage but without his perfect pitch, wants to sell his soul to keep the Yankees here. The West Side stadium has been attacked by politicians and opinion-makers who never balk at big government in any other area-Bronx Borough President Freddy Ferrer, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert. I will not repeat their arguments. We did not always have stadium socialism, and we need not always have it. It is not clear that New Jersey voters, who perpetually groan at their own taxes, will be willing to take on one more mega-welfare case. The Mayor has bucked the trend on crime and civility; if he had bucked it on handouts to team owners, he might have set a new trend in the region and the nation as he has in those other areas.

Saddest of all is the way he proposes to pay for the Hell's Kitchen Bombers-with revenues from the commercial rent tax. This is the curve of tax immortality. He campaigned against the tax in 1993, correctly attacking its stifling economic effects; then, quailing before his budget numbers and lacking the fire of a true supply-sider, he kept it; now, nursing the visions of every other pyramid-building pol, he finds a use for it.

When the Mayor proposed to put the Yankees on the West Side, the cry of Manhattan favoritism rose from outer-borough New Yorkers. But surely it is favoritism of a sinister kind. There was a time when Manhattan was a place where people-well, worked. There used to be factories on the island (such as the Nabisco factory, now the Chelsea Market), and the tenements that housed the men who worked in them. There still are service industries of a thousand kinds, from brokerages to boutiques. But ever-larger swatches of midtown are being turned into theme parks and T-shirt stores. In Las Vegas, there is a casino with a model Manhattan. The real Manhattan is becoming that model. Our only growth industry, apart from Wall Street, is bread and circuses.

Bread and circuses generate employment and tax revenue, but the multiplier effect would be much higher on a couple hundred small businesses. We won't get those businesses, though, because the Mayor who turned the city around is fixated on the doubleheaders of his youth. Fred Siegel has pointed out that a traveler driving downtown from Los Angeles International Airport passes dozens of light manufacturing plants, while a traveler coming in from La Guardia passes about one. If the Mayor gets his way, that traveler might be able to ride in on a train that will zip through the new Penn Station (formerly the James A. Farley Post Office), and leave him off at the House That Rudy Built. But there still won't be any light-manufacturing plants.

The New York economy looks fine, and the budgets of both the city and state show surpluses. But this is an artifact of the market. When the boom ends, city and state will hit the wall of reality. William J. Stern lays out the story in the latest issue of City Journal , explaining with charts and figures that Gov. George Pataki's 1998-99 budget may be "the most fiscally irresponsible in the state's history," while Mayor Giuliani's budget, comparatively "a model of rectitude … still fails to come to grips with" the city's "deep, structural economic problems." Against this black backdrop was played the farce of Mr. Pataki's threatened vetoes, which the Mayor supported. After stuffing the hog, the Governor grandly offered to clean the trough. For both men, it was pure Presidential politics-and though they are both crazy, given the runtiness of the G.O.P. field, who can convince them?

Instead of pining for a nomination he will not get, or dreaming of a baseball team that is dead, the Mayor should turn his energies to the city's budget, tax load and economy. He did one impossible thing in his first term, why not another in his second? Let the Yankees become the Pine Barrens Yankees or the Jackson White Yankees or whatever. We can watch them on TV. And there are still the Mets.