Dude, I Gotta Pay More for Yankee Stadium?

The New York baseball teams' new stadiums open in 2009.

Admittedly, I don't know a lot about the financial terms of either stadium. But considering that team owners and Major League Baseball generally bully cities into publicly financing the bulk of these private enterprises, I'm sure that the Mets and Yankees are getting some sweet deals from New York City, particularly in the development of the neighborhoods surrounding the stadiums (eminent domain!).

Earlier this week, the Yankees asked for another $350-400 million in tax-exempt public bonds:

About $941 million in tax-exempt public bonds have already been issued for the $1.3 billion stadium that the Yankees are building across the street from their current ballpark in the Bronx.

You gotta love that a big business like the Yankees are exempt from paying so many taxes.

The official request goes to the IRS. The new Yankee Stadium has already maxed out its public bond options, and they need IRS approval to go after more. If the Yankees get their way, the Mets would also be eligible to benefit from the new IRS rules.

Everyone knows I love baseball, and Shea Stadium has long been an industrial wasteland of a ballpark. Of course, that's also part of its charm. But as I've watched the new Mets stadium go up, I feel the excitement, even if the new Citi Field goes so far as to use that Citibank red umbrella logo shape in the stadium lights.

But public financing for private profit is fucking bullshit. The Yankees and the Mets are two of the most valuable franchises in sports. And the Yankees, especially when considering their partnership with English football club Manchester United, must be the most valuable sports franchise in the world. Both teams can pay for their own fucking stadiums. But of course, they won't.

A couple of months ago David Zirin, who writes about where sports and politics overlap and about whom I've raved in the past, wrote a stellar piece about the new Washington Nationals stadium (pictured above for your reference), from which I pull this gem:

This isn't just taxation without representation. It's a monument of avarice that will clear the working poor out of the Southeast corner of the city as surely as if they just dispensed with the baseball and used a bulldozer. This is sports as ethnic and economic cleansing, as Hurricane Katrina, as Shock Doctrine, as Green Zone. Fittingly... President George W. Bush came out to throw the first pitch.

Boy, I tell you, this request for more public bonds to build the new Yankee Stadium smells about as good as the entire city during a heatwave.