Smart piece in the Wall Street Journal about (squandered) public funding of Major League baseball parks, one notable exception being the lyric little bandbox in the Fens.
The Green Monster Goes It Alone
Baseball fans will be tuning in for Tuesday’s All Star Game, but as taxpayers they should be fuming. Nearly every one of the teams represented has gone to its local government and asked for hundreds of millions of dollars to build a gleaming new stadium.
One of the few exceptions: the Boston Red Sox, who have taken Fenway Park, which turns 100 in 2012, and transformed it into one of the most fan-friendly ballparks in the country. Moreover, they’ve mostly done it within the historic confines of the original ballpark, kept ticket prices affordable and haven’t taken a dime of taxpayer money.
What the Journal report doesn’t say:
There’s no way in hell the Red Sox are getting actual dollars from the City of Boston (although the organization has been allowed to annex adjoining streets), so the owners sort of had no choice but to foot the bill themselves.
Still, there’s no question that Fenway is a far better ballpark than it was ten years ago, not to mention a far better location than its potential replacement on Boston’s forever underdeveloped waterfront.
But taxpayer dollars?
Is to laugh.
Campaign Outsider 
Well he did quote Lucchino saying “We knew the perils of asking for public money,” but that’s as close as he came to acknowledging the sensitivity of the area to public funding of private enterprise.
The report also says “they’ve kept ticket prices affordable”, without noting that the Red Sox have consistently had the highest ticket prices in baseball, year after year for the past decade.
As far as I’m concerned, that’s how it should be. Have the people who use the product pay for the product and don’t soak the taxpayers to fund your private business. (Gone unnoted in the Steinbrenner rememberances was the staggering sum he extorted out of the NY taxpayers for the new Yankee Stadium – almost half a billion dollars.)
Yeah, Bloomberg has been downright profligate with taxpayers’ money – not just for the Yankees, but the Mets too.
Hasn’t Rush Limbaugh been describing Steinbrenner as the ultimate capitalist, at least according to mediamatters.org? How can that be if the taxpayers of NYC are underwriting some of his expenses?
Good question, Laurence.