Please excuse my serious and sour tone.

This Monday marks the start of the regular season for the New York Yankees. They’ve played their last two exhibitions games in the new stadium and are ready to put their big money player on the hill down in Camden Yards versus the Orioles.

This off-season the Yanks did a lot to beef up their starting line up. They signed two of the biggest names in pitching and signed the most sought after first baseman in recent memory. They also managed to put up a cathedral of a baseball field and jam it full of over the top restaurants, martini bars and luxury boxes. While adding these big names to their rosters and as they constructed a building that shows a behind the scenes in depth look of the Steinbrenner’s wallet, they also managed to lie to and steal from the community that plays host to their franchise.

Although I am about as big of a Yankee fan as can be, I am a Bronx boy first. It is where I was born and raised and is still the place I call home today. So you can see how it is easy for me to feel offended by their, to quote Community Board 4 member Anita Antonetty, “how dare you object to this-we’re the Yankees” attitude.

The Yankees have, sigh, lied to the Bronx community and have taken taxpayer money they most certainly did not need. I’m sure if you have read any local papers in the last 6 months you would have seen how atrociously conniving the Yankee organization was in their completion of this stadium. You could look at anything from the price at which they have bought the land (they claimed to have bought the land under the new stadium at a fair market value of $275 per square foot while the Daily News has found that city assessors have said that land on a dozen blocks around the site was worth an average of less that $25 a square foot. It smells like 2 week old cod to me too), to the blatant lie of creating 1000 jobs for Bronxites, to the lack of recreating even a single yard of the park space they robbed from the community.

The parkland is really the hardest to digest probably because it should have been easy for the Yankee organization to not screw it up. The first question that begs to be asked when talking about this is why haven’t they knocked down the old stadium? It was reported in a Norwood News editorial that the city has said the Yankees needed their old offices while constructing the new stadium. What? The Yankees are too good to rent space in another building or use trailers that children all across the 5 boroughs are forced to use as classrooms? And aren’t most of the big money people of the administration in Florida for the off-season anyway?

I know that it’s easy to ignore people’s complaints about tearing down trees and digging up parks. It’s forgivable for you think that its just some tree huggin hippies out to stir up some trouble but in this instance that’s not even close to what’s going on.

The journalist Jordan Moss makes it clear the outrage that should be felt by local Bronx citizens when he writes “perhaps the grandest monument to the city’s unforgivable heist of green space in a community struggling with asthma and other public health problems, is the old Yankee Stadium, which still stands despite city promises it would be razed to make way for new baseball field, so local kids can start running bases again.” (Norwood News). The standing stadium has also been said to remain up as a tribute to the memory of the great Yankee past–talk about really liking the reflection in the mirror.

Listen I love the Yankees and I love baseball but what the team has done to the community just isn’t right, in fact its disgusting. I hate to start off the season on this sour note but it needed to be brought up before any baseball was officially played. I promise that I’ll go back to writing about baseball when the season commences tomorrow but I’m embarrassed by how my favorite sports team has treated MY community.

They have made a lot of promises and haven’t come up with their end of the deal. There are many things the Yankees are doing lately that are shady. And I don’t really have the expertise to comment on many of them, like the taxpayers dollars being used, or the Community Benefits Fund that they organized that seems to have been handled illegally and completely botched.

What I can tell you is that the Yankees tore down Macombs Dam Park to build an unnecessary stadium and while doing so promised the community $800,000 in cash for each year the park wasn’t replaced (2 years we’re looking at 1.6 million or a fraction of CC’s new salary) and $100,000 dollars in sports equipment plus hundred of home-game tickets annually for the next 40 years. The community not only hasn’t seen that money but we haven’t seen even a foot of parkland being built. And I’m not expecting any tickets in the mail if you know what I mean.

You have to understand that this is a very dense community with not a lot of space. This community is going to go through their second summer with out a park; a park that is invaluable to the community that suffers most during the hot summers. If you’ve never experienced a summer in a Bronx apartment for even 2 hours consider yourself lucky. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be 12 years old in the summer living in a hot apartment with no park to go to. If your reading this and rolling your eyes then take a look at a freakin’ map and see how far a kid has to go to play some catch now that the Yankees have stolen their park.

It’s disgusting and shows that the Yankees really could care less about how their actions affect the community that hosts them. George Steinbrenner has been quoted as saying that he built this stadium for the fans and the people of New York. I’d like either of his two sons to climb up to the 6^th floor of any apartment that lines the Grand Concourse between 155^th and 165^th street, go to a bedroom of any apartment on that floor and have him sit there for 30 minutes. I want him to feel how hot it is and then I’d want him to ask himself how a Luxury Stadium with conference centers, a Hard Rock Café, and expensive tickets helps a kid from the Bronx kick a soccer ball around or play catch.

The Yankees should be ashamed of themselves and if and when that parkland is built I think an apology is in order. Sorry for the tone back with more baseball later.