The beginning of the baseball playoffs offers the perfect opportunity to examine what has been a momentous season in the Bronx. Derek Jeter has become the clubs’all-time hits leader, C.C. Sabathia fell painfully short of a 20-win season and the Bronx Bombers returned to the postseason after a one-year hiatus. All this in a new stadium that has seemed like more of a challenge to fans and community residents than visiting teams to the Yankees. So, as the regular season ends, it is fitting that we mark year one in the “House that Neo-Liberalism built.”Neo-liberal values of law-and-order and social discipline are the name of the game in the new stadium. This system of top-down control works well in total institutions such as jails, psychiatric wards and concentration camps, but is less effective, and certainly less just, inside of a democratic society. In the baseball stadium, the crowd rules. Spontaneous affinity and the cultivation of a collective will are organic features of a baseball crowd. Thousands of people bound together by voluntary association attempting to will their team toward victory. Raucous cheering, open hostility to the opponent and even the occasional brawl between fans all serve to seal the social pact of fandom.
Organized against these democratic impulses are the forces of the market backed by the muscle of security. For many Yankee Stadium officials, the game is little more than an opportunity to encourage hyper-consumption. Over-policing ensures that the independent impulses of fans are tamed. From the minute one steps into the new Yankee Stadium, they are searched, prodded and cajoled into buying things, experiencing things and being awed by the lifestyle available to rich elites. It is difficult to resist the postmodern prescription that the New Yankee Stadium is some hyperreal spectacle. One can see the dirty fingerprints of the same neo-liberal planning which has mucked up much of our planet all over the new stadium.
Eviscerating the Indigenous
No neoliberal project would be complete without dispossessing the indigenous. Not surprisingly then, the construction of the new Yankee Stadium is a tale of community dispossession, the siphoning of state resources and sharp price increases. For decades now, Yankees officials have held the impoverished South Bronx community where the stadium is located hostage by cooking up far-fetched escape schemes for New Jersey or Midtown Manhattan. Each demand was designed to extract further concessions from the City government. Mayor Michael Bloomberg feigned resistance to the Yankees most recent proposal, while secretly attempting to forge an agreement for a free corporate suit from the Yankees. No corporate seats for Bloomberg, but the Yankees did walk away with up to $700 million in tax payer funds, including $27 million to tear down the old stadium. The community paid an even higher price.
Green space was the first community casualty. The site of the new stadium was the large, high-use Macombs Dam Park, a public park frequented by youth sports teams. Youth baseball in the park created a fitting backdrop to the old Yankee Stadium – the hopes and dreams of the youth ball field emanated out into its professional counterpart. Macombs Dam Park was a vital open space in a neighborhood dominated by massive court houses, a sports stadium and high-rise apartments. The community protested, but their elected officials did not, preferring the political expediency of agreeing with City Hall and Yankee officials. Vague, and as yet unfulfilled, promises to replace the park were issued.
Community organizers with the 4DSBxCoalition have recently launched a campaign demanding that the Yankees deliver on the promise of green community space and other parts of the Community Benefits Agreement. Yet the only remnant of this promise that remains is a map just outside of the stadium which indicates how space will be used after the demolition of the old stadium. The location of the replacement community green space? The roofs of a dozen parking garages for Yankees fans.
Fans of the Yankees have also been swindled. Seats in the stadium are fewer and more expensive. Field-level seat prices were raised as high as $2,500 per game. Displaced fans clinging to seats passed through generations were dispersed to the nether regions of the new stadium. Other fans were priced-out entirely.
Once the season began, the new pricing scheme revealed the stark class contradictions of the stadium. Corporations and rich individuals gobbled up premium tickets, yet often neglected to actually attend the game. Fans, jammed into every other crevice of the stadium, were justifiably enraged at the site of hundreds of empty field-level seats, each section guarded by security. They had unknowingly identified the very essence of neoliberalism. Scarce space could be purchased, reserved and protected regardless of whether the rich actually intend to use it. All utility – in both stadium seating and community green space - had been annihilated.
Cornucopia of Distractions
Strangeness multiplies immediately upon entering the new stadium. As a child on summer vacation, I often wondered why the Amish put their sense of moral purity ahead of the appeals of modern society. Walking into the main hallway of the new Yankee Stadium allowed me to confront everything that is wrong with consumer society. A horse drawn buggy would be preferable to the blaring images of the 1977 World Series. A slice of shoo-fly pie to the massively expensive Yankees Steak House or Sushi Restaurant.
Everywhere a fan turns in the new Yankee Stadium there is some kind of slickly designed distraction, each with only the slimmest connection to the actual baseball game. A stuffed monkey with a Yankees jersey, innumerable cups, mugs, jars, waste baskets with Yankee logos, even a Yankee swim tube. A seemingly endless supply of overpriced souvenir items melds with a bizarre assemblage of food – sushi, pulled pork, kettle korn - to form a blurry consumerist psychedelia wholly divorced from the human activity about get underway on the field.
Contradictions abound. For instance, whatever noble currency is built up by the new Yankees museum is abruptly negated by the fire-sale of history underway in the main hall. The private company Steiner Sports operates a stand in the hall which offers
pieces of the old Yankee Stadium for sale. Piece-by-piece, seat-by-seat, and blade-by-blade of grass offered up for a cash payment. The right-field wall, $2,500. Two chairs from the upper deck, $1,500. A clump of grass, $150. Derek Jeter’s locker was sold by Steiner for a reported $100,000. Perhaps only an Amish-informed sense of transcending worldly desires can save a baseball fan from this brutal orgy of commercialism.The Philadelphia Problem
The stadium also confronts fans with a Philadelphia problem. What makes the new (2004) Citizen’s Bank Park in Philadelphia so striking is not the variety of concessions nor its obscenely homer-obsessed dimensions, but its openness. A fan feels invited into the open spaces of Citizen’s Bank. The space allows the crowd to casually congregate and watch the game from a variety of perspectives. Fans flow through the stadium relatively freely and naturally.
Key to creating this environment is the design of the main seating decks. The upper deck is foisted on a platform underneath which there is a large hallway. The hall is lined with the usual assemblage of souvenir shops, food stands and bathrooms. The innovation is that the stadium designers installed standing room spaces just above the lower deck. There is a small shelf where fans can place food or drinks or even just lean on, while watching the game standing up. There are no tickets here. People freely associate; moving fluidly from their standing spot back to their seats. Conversations develop quite easily in the standing-room seats.
The new Yankee Stadium appropriated this design from Citizen’s Bank. However, a combination of greed and paranoia about freedom of movement motivated the Yankees to privatize the standing room seats. Metal barriers are installed in front of the lower deck and seat numbers assigned to each standing location.
Of course, the Citizen’s Bank designers understood a bit more about the natural flow of the crowd. On a recent trip, I observed dozens of Yankee fans moving toward the standing-room locations. Each one was turned away by one of the hundreds of private security guards employed to police space. The weary security guard explained, perhaps for the millionth time, that the location required a ticket for admission. As a result, any number of fans stood lurching, some on tippy-toes, over the metal barrier attempting to catch a view of the game. Frustrated, they eventually moved back to their assigned seat. So much for Philadelphia freedom.
Freedom or an Interesting Illusion
The stadium is flooded with security guards. Each aisle in each section is guarded by someone – most often a fairly bored mid-20s African-American male who has clearly been instructed to stand with his back to the field and not watch the game. The mental torment of security guards is only one, unintentional, outcome of the policing strategy at the New Yankee Stadium.
What the guards are, in fact, protecting fans from is other fans. The obvious motive for restricting fan movement is to insure the class privilege of the denizens of the field-level seats. However, this was the policy even at the old stadium. The new security policy extends the logic built to protect rich fans to all parts of the ballpark. No one, regardless of the price of their ticket, can move. You must produce a ticket when attempting to enter any section of the stadium. It is total lock down.
Such heavy policing serves to curb all sorts of movement including the formerly venerated “7th inning rush.” Around the 7th inning of a blowout game, hordes of people would descend from the upper decks into lower section seats for a rare close-up look at their baseball heroes. Nothing formalized, just a part of the moral economy of a sports stadium. A temporary reversal of privilege in the baseball world order. Any fan attempting this today would be immediately pounced upon by an army of security guards.
The security policy goes deeper than just quelling this kind of stadium mini-insurrection. It seeks the micro-enforcement of rule of law in the stadium by force – actual force or the public display of the potential to use force. This process is intended to curtail the creativity, self-organization and disorderly chaos that made Yankee Stadium such a wonderful, and dangerous and exciting place to see a baseball game. Fans can no longer freely circulate – possession of a ticket is the sole item which legitimizes movement. In the end, micro-policing in the stadium reflects broader policing trends in society. Similarly, people’s freedom is often exchanged for a few trinkets or an interesting illusion.
Another Path for Baseball? Society?
Baseball is a beautiful game. For much of American history it served as a marvelous escape from the humdrum of work and family. Unlike most other sports there is no time clock in baseball. Hope, therefore, truly springs eternal on the ball field – a team can always come from behind and win, no matter what the score. Fans can play a necessary emotional role in such moments. Perhaps, when the time comes to inspect our society in search of democratic foundations, the essence of what is good about baseball can be reborn.
The new Yankee Stadium is designed to negate this essential goodness. Born with the original sin of community dispossession, the stadium is an over-policed, commercial happy zone which just happens to host 81 baseball games a year. So, for now, at the baseball stadium, as well as in society, we struggle against neoliberal attempts to control where we move, what we consume and how we experience happiness. Essential to such resistance is retaining the spirit of unruliness inherent in the baseball crowd. Doing so may allow us to transform the new Yankee Stadium from a site for neoliberal discipline into a target for a democratically informed non-compliance movement. In the process, we may just save a sport which has brought happiness to millions.***
Billy Wharton is the co-chair of the Socialist Party USA and editor of The Socialist and the Socialist WebZine. His articles have recently appeared in the Washington Post, the Indypendent, Dissident Voice and the Monthly Review Zine.
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