"Busting a stadium boom"

With each issue of my Sporting News magazine I receive every other week, come many stories, articles, and columns by some of the most prodigious sports writers in the country. One of these writers is Will Leitch, founder of the website Deadspin and a contributing author at New York Magazine. In this past week’s column, Leitch talked about the rise in “superfluous” stadiums being constructed throughout the country. Leitch mainly focused on the New York Mets new home, Citi Field in Flushing, New York City, and just across the city in the Bronx, the New York Yankees franchise’s complex, new Yankee Stadium. Both stadiums were designed to look like previous homes, Ebbets Field for the Mets and old Yankee Stadium for the Yankees, but Leitch argues that what both teams were really doing was creating “fake nostalgia”, going on to say that new parks really are simply “luxury box-laden, corporate-sponsored ATMs, minting money and exploiting our nostalgia,” rather than creating it. Leitch compared the nostalgia these teams were creating to “a time when the game was pristine and free.”

There have been 18 new major league baseball parks constructed since the year 2000, with three more teams currently in the running for a new stadium. Leitch summed it all up as being “insane,” and I completely agree with him. I don’t see much sanity in spending millions and billions, of dollars on fancy, new state-of-the-art parks when there are plenty of other areas in the other country more needing of the money. Leitch compares the existence of the new Yankee Stadium to the existence of the old Yankee Stadium, saying, “new Yankee Stadium cost $1.5 billion—with a good chunk of tax breaks too, while area public hospitals are squeezed and crime is up. At last it’s like the 70s again in the Bronx.” Reading this column reminded me of a documentary I saw a while ago about the building of new Yankee Stadium and the people in the surrounding neighborhoods who were affected. The documentary conveyed the distaste these people had for the new park and the documentary also showed the community park that was destroyed to create the new stadium.

My family can only be described as a sports family and we try to go to a baseball game every chance we get. But with the drastic rise in prices and the attractions that come with going to a baseball game, my family is finding it harder and harder to go and truly enjoy a baseball game. Even Fenway Park, which is the oldest stadium in today’s league, is upgrading their stadium, as well as raising prices yearly to keep up with the rapid rise in new-age stadiums.

Although owners and presidents of clubs are just trying to keep up with new technology and advancements by implementing them in their stadiums, this columnist seems to think, and I agree, that nostalgia cannot be created. Leitch sums it all up best in his final paragraph, “Baseball may very well be my favorite sport, but that’s because of the game, not the palaces in which it’s played.”