Someday soon, let’s hope, corporate goniffs will discover that they can’t raise prices without risking failure, serious failure. Just as American auto- makers lost their futures to Japanese companies, so private American universities that are forever raising tuition will sometime find themselves unable to fill their seats. Prospective students will go to state universities or even Canada.
For now, may I hope that the new Yankee Stadium will suffer a setback? Whether fans prefer the new one, built across 161st Street from the traditional Stadium, won’t be known for a while. But I know from experience that the old one was good enough. (So was the public park that the new one replaced.) Most games sold out, even when the Yankees stumbled, as they often do.
What is known in advance is that the new Yankee Stadium is smaller and that tickets will become more expensive. When Rudy Giuliani was asked recently why the proposed new stadium (and the loss of McCombs Park) was never submitted to the voters, he frankly acknowledged that they would have turned it down. Given the unfavorable sentiment already building, I would suggest that if Yankee Stadium bis doesn’t attract enough customers, future schemers will be scared to try anything similar.
Long a Yankees fan, I might switch my allegiance to the New York Mets, were they not also building a new stadium across the street from the old one, albeit with less fanfare and yet only slightly further away from the planes that suddenly come over home plate from nearby LaGuardia Airport. That leaves us New York baseballists who lack automobiles with the option of minor league teams, the Brooklyn Cyclones and the Staten Island Yankees, both in smaller stadia and reasonably priced. They11 prosper until they too jack up their prices.
