Printer-friendly

Contact Author

May 5, 2004

The Return of Swamp Thing

Could Bringing a Team to New Jersey Work for MLB?

by Neil deMause

It's the pipe dream that won't die. Last month, New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority chief George Zoffinger reiterated what Andrew Baharlias first reported in this space back in February: He was looking into luring a major league baseball franchise to the swamplands of New Jersey.

"It's gone from something I didn't think was possible to something that actually could happen," Zoffinger told the Newark Star-Ledger. "Jerry Reinsdorf told me that baseball is interested in the Meadowlands because we are building a family entertainment center and bringing mass transit to the site."

Leaving aside whether anyone should take seriously statements made by the guy who said he was moving the White Sox to Tampa, on the face of it the idea is a no-brainer. In terms of market size, the New York metro area is mind-bogglingly huge, dwarfing every other market in American baseball. Even splitting the market in half (OK, more like 65/35) the Yankees and Mets each have enough TV-rights firepower to blow away the rest of the league at free-agent time. You could put a team in Jersey and three more in Brooklyn, and each of the six area franchises would still have a larger populace to draw on than the likes of Milwaukee or Cincinnati.

The problem is...well, one problem is that George Steinbrenner and Fred Wilpon would form a lynch mob of lawyers to chase any interlopers off into the sunset. But we'll come back to that. The more immediate problem is that our hypothetical swarm of New York-area franchises would have to form a stickball league. Because while the tri-state area, as it's known to meteorologists, may be rich in population, it still has just the two baseball stadiums, Yankee and Shea.

New York City currently has its hands full with requests for sports facilities. At last count, the Jets, Nets, Knicks, Rangers, Yankees and Mets were all lined up, with the total taxpayer bill due to run well over $2 billion if everyone's dream home gets built, and New Jersey sports czar Zoffinger has said in no uncertain terms that his state won't be forthcoming with public cash. So let's ask a different question: Are the riches to be had in the New York area so great that it would make sense for a small-market team with a lousy lease--not to name any names, but say the Florida Marlins--to build their own damn stadium in order to stake a claim on the Big Apple's bounty?

For starters, we need to know how much a new New Jersey stadium--let's call it Joe Piscopo Park--would cost. According to Zoffinger, Janet Marie Smith, the woman behind Camden Yards and Fenway's Green Monster seats, said she could build him a new stadium for $300 million, but that seems laughably low. The new parks in Philly and San Diego each cleared $400 million; the Cardinals are spending $387.5 million (about a third of it belonging to St. Louis taxpayers) on their new stadium; the Twins are talking half a billion and up, though much of that is for a retractable roof. In New York City, where you can't even buy bottled water without taking out a home equity loan, the estimate on the new Mets and Yankees monoliths that have been on the drawing board since the late Mattingly epoch is $800 million apiece. For New Jersey, in New York's sphere of labor influence but with cheaper land costs, let's split the difference and assume a low-end price tag in the neighborhood of $500 million.