Cable Flap Scratches Yankee Games From TV Lineup

The Yankee Tavern in the Bronx has everything a Yankees baseball fan could want: huge, sepia-toned photos of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and other Yankee greats; big-screen TVs in every corner; even a pinstripe pattern on the tile floor to echo the famous uniforms.

Then there’s the location: Open the tavern’s door when the team is in town--as it is this weekend--and you can hear the roar from Yankee Stadium a block down 161st Street.

But owner Joe Bastone said the place would be empty on game days if he hadn’t shelled out $3,000 last month to have a satellite TV dish installed.

On the home turf of the Bronx Bombers, most fans can’t see the team on television because of a dispute between YES, the new Yankees Entertainment & Sports Network, and Cablevision, the cable company that up until last year had the contract to carry Yankee games.

Cablevision, with nearly 3 million subscribers in metro New York--including slices of nearby New Jersey and Connecticut--is balking at YES’s terms for airing Yankee games: a fee of about $2 per subscriber plus a requirement that the games be included in Cablevision’s basic subscription package, to reach the widest possible audience.

Cablevision offered to carry YES as a premium channel for those willing to pay an extra charge. But YES said no, so the standoff continues as baseball season enters its sixth week.

YES contends that Cablevision has lost as many as 50,000 subscribers to satellite TV since the dispute began. Cablevision puts the number at 5,400.

Regardless of who’s right, bars that cater to a sports crowd have felt pressured to get satellite hookups. The payoff is more walk-in traffic from locals who don’t get the games at home. Bastone is seeing twice as many game-time customers than a year ago.

At the Out of Bounds Sports Bar in suburban North Tarrytown, N.Y., by contrast, there is no dish and no Yankees, as the business undergoes an ownership change.

“Even my regulars are going across the street,” bartender Doug Tornello said.

There is another Major League team in New York, and its games are widely televised, but the Mets have always run a distant second to the Yankees in popularity.

The TV stalemate has been publicized as a personal clash between George Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ principal owner, and Charles F. Dolan, founder and chairman of Long Island-based Cablevision. But business is business, so the two sides are sniping away at each other in ads on their networks, in the courtroom and in the press, where Steinbrenner’s antics are catnip for New York’s feisty tabloids.

Enlisting star lawyer David Boies, who led the Justice Department’s antitrust case against Microsoft, YES last week filed a federal antitrust suit accusing Cablevision of trying to use its regional monopoly power to crush the fledgling network. The 52-page court complaint is a litany of Cablevision’s alleged anti-competitive sins, such as using acquisitions to reinforce its local dominance and lock up the TV rights to most of New York’s other pro sports teams.

(In a different context, it might be a kind of business behavior that Steinbrenner could admire, considering the Yanks’ venerable tradition of swooping down on financially weaker teams to pluck their best players.)

The lawsuit, Cablevision sniffed, is “entirely without merit.”

Fordham University law professor Mark Conrad is inclined to agree.

“This is a business problem, not a legal problem,” he said.

Both sides have their heels dug in so deeply, however, that experts don’t expect a resolution before All-Star break in July, if then.

Advertising man and Yankee partisan Joe Dell’Aquila is irate that the Yankees have gone dark at his home, just across the state line in Stamford, Conn. So far, the situation hasn’t driven him to drink, but when the pennant race heats up this summer, Dell’Aquila will probably head for a sports bar.

Because he lives in New England, nominally the domain of the Yankees’ arch rivals, the Boston Red Sox, Dell’Aquila’s Cablevision package carries a full slate of Red Sox games. But mindful of the Sox’ history of torment at the hands of the perennial champion Yankees, Dell’Aquila won’t deign to tune in.