Built by Ruth, Threatened by George

It is not considered wise at Yankee Stadium to wander out into the neighborhood after a night baseball game as one would at, say, Wrigley Field or Oriole Park at Camden Yards. Nor do New York City police advise parking in anything but officially sanctioned stadium lots, since in the surrounding streets a late-model parked car is considered somewhere between a curiosity and a provocation.

That’s the way it is in the 44th precinct in the South Bronx--where Yankee Stadium stands--as it receives more 911 calls than any other police precinct in the city. Yankee Stadium and its surrounding neighborhood have existed in a kind of uneasy truce, a largely white and affluent attraction in a largely Hispanic and poor community, each turning a blind eye to the other.

But this summer, the truce has been broken. Jealous of the extraordinary successes of the new community-oriented stadia in Toronto and Baltimore, New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner has become fixated with his team’s disappointing attendance and has decided that the neighborhood is to blame. Actual police statistics on crime in the area, however, don’t support that contention.

In meetings with city and state officials, Steinbrenner has announced he is considering moving the team when his lease with the city expires in 2002. He has entertained offers from the officials of the Meadowlands in New Jersey.

He has talked with New York Gov. Mario Cuomo about constructing a staggeringly expensive stadium in Manhattan. He has complained that the city has reneged on promises to build him more parking and improve the area.

Steinbrenner has gone so far as to issue the fans an ultimatum: attend or else. Saturday, as the “test” week drew to a close, his public-relations staff distributed a list of attendance figures from around the American League to reporters in the press box. The previous day’s Yankees win over the Angels, the sheet noted, a jewel of a ballgame on a perfect summer’s evening, drew 7,000 fewer fans than any other game in the league.

Steinbrenner, it should be clear, is not happy.

“The South Bronx is a very problematic area that has received a lot of very bad publicity over the years,” said New York public-relations guru Howard Rubenstein, to whom an unusually quiet Steinbrenner has referred all inquiries since the stadium flap began. “There is intimidation going on. The threat of vandalism is very real. . . . It is a problem, a public-relations problem and a substantive problem.”

Not everyone is convinced that Steinbrenner is serious about moving from the Bronx. The end of his lease, after all, is a full nine years away, and of much more immediate concern to Steinbrenner is gaining an advantage in his ongoing battles with the city over the terms of his lease and his demand for better access roads and parking.

Further, his claim that the fans coming to Yankee Stadium are at risk rings hollow, according to police. Even as a bluff, however, Steinbrenner’s threat to move from the hallowed Yankees grounds to Manhattan or--to the mortification of diehard Yankee fans--to New Jersey has turned into one of the most emotional New York sports issues of the summer.

“I would never go to New Jersey,” said Mike Marcel, 36, a 25-year Yankees fan from Trumbull, Conn. “Who cares about New Jersey? This is the house that Ruth built. Come on.”

“In the Meadowlands it would not be a Yankees game. It would be something else,” said Neal Dolan, 29, a doctoral student in English literature at Harvard University and lifetime Yankees fan. “It would be disconnected and alienating. It would be like going to church in a shopping mall.”

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Steinbrenner doesn’t blame the attendance drop on bad relief pitching or the lack of timely power hitting--two of the most conventional and, in the case of the Yankees over the past few years, pertinent explanations.

He blames the lack of good parking and the bad neighborhood.

The strength of Steinbrenner’s argument comes from the demographic breakdown of his fan base. New York Yankees fans are not, contrary to expectations, principally New Yorkers, accustomed to the distinctly urban setting of the Stadium and who come to games by the most convenient of routes--the subway. (For the price of a token, a fan can get from midtown Manhattan to Yankee Stadium in 25 minutes).

Only 19% of general-admission fans and 7% of season-ticket holders, the Yankees say, come by subway. Sixty-nine% of game-by-game attendees and 91% of season-tickets holders, meanwhile, come by car, most of them from suburban New York-Westchester County, Long Island, Connecticut and the adjoining New Jersey counties.

To bolster his case, Steinbrenner, through his spokesman, Rubenstein, last week released selected excerpts from two fan surveys conducted at his behest in 1989 and 1993. Four years ago, 24% of fans said they felt “very or extremely unsafe” in the Yankee Stadium neighborhood. This year, 52% said safety and security issues were a factor in their decision to attend fewer games.

Next on the list was parking, long a Steinbrenner complaint. Shea Stadium in Queens has between 14,000 and 16,000 parking spaces. Yankee Stadium has 6,000 and in the survey 42% of fans said that availability of parking was an issue in their decision to stay away from the ballpark.

Not everyone takes Steinbrenner’s complaints--and those of the fans represented in his surveys--at face value, however. Residents of the neighborhood point out that the Stadium, bounded on one side by a park, one side by a highway, one side by the Bronx Terminal Market and only on the east by a residential area, is something of an oasis within the South Bronx, cut off from the rest of the area.

“The neighborhood is okay here,” said Julio Sanchez, a longtime South Bronx resident who lives within a block of the stadium.

“When the game is finished, the people are all right. Steinbrenner’s wrong about it. He’s lying. Things don’t get bad until you get over there,” he said, gesturing to the neighborhoods on the other side of a nearby park.

Police statistics say the same thing. Seventy police officers patrol the stadium and immediate neighborhood on game days and neither last year nor this year have they reported even so much as a robbery of a Yankees fan in the neighborhood.

“There have been one or two assaults, but that’s always committed by a fan upon another fan and usually starts within the stadium itself,” said Lt. George Stamp, who commands the police department’s stadium detail. “If you look at who attends the games, it’s mainly white people, from within the tri-state area. These people are from the suburbs. (The fear of crime) is a perceptional thing. It’s not a fact.”

“I think there are a whole lot of issues that need to be addressed about Yankee Stadium,” said Matt Scheckner, executive director of the New York Sports Commission. “Is the neighborhood one of them? Yes. Is it the primary issue? I don’t think so.”

“I think he’s using the issue as a ploy to get what he really wants,” said Tony Cochi, 33, a longtime Yankees fan from Pennsylvania. “You know George.”

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What does he really want? Here Steinbrenner has been coy, declining to speak at all to the media directly after floating the crime and parking trial balloon. But the results of the scare he put into diehard Yankees fans have so far been obvious.

First, in the past few weeks Cuomo has talked seriously--in public and to Steinbrenner--about the possibility of building the Yankees a stadium on the west side of Manhattan between Penn Station and the Hudson River. The logistics and expense of such a stadium would be formidable.

It would, for example, have to be built over the top of an existing railyard, an engineering feat that would require first building a $200 million concrete platform (which is $60 million more than it cost to build all of Camden Yards).

But in that site, with the kind of high-dollar amenities possible in a new stadium, the financial return for Steinbrenner could be staggering.

“If they moved there the stadium would be a spectacle, it would be a destination point just as the SkyDome is a destination point,” said Scheckner. “It would be in an entirely different context. People would go for an entirely different set of reasons. They would do extraordinarily well.”

How well? Baseball experts estimate that each additional fan who comes to a baseball game nets the team between $8 and $9. If the Yanks in Manhattan drew as well as the Blue Jays do in downtown Toronto, that would mean another $20 million in net revenue for the team a year, not counting revenue from extra luxury boxes and club seats.

Even if that doesn’t happen, it’s clear that Steinbrenner’s gambit could win him substantial concessions from the city in the existing Bronx site. In fact, it already has. Two weeks ago, the city declared “Yankee Appreciation Day,” and terminated the lease of occupants of the huge and largely derelict 32-acre Bronx Terminal Market next door to the stadium.

“In addition to facilitating the rebirth of the market as a vital ethnic food-distribution center,” Mayor David N. Dinkins said, in announcing the decision. “the condemnation of the lease will also enable the city . . . to address the team’s needs for more parking spaces and a better environment near the stadium.”