Edition: U.S. / Global

NYC; Millionaires On a Field Of Diamonds

Published: May 4, 2004

NINETY-FIVE dollars is a lot to pay to watch a baseball game, even if the attraction is the New York Yankees, newly revived after a siege of on-field narcolepsy.

But journeys to Yankee Stadium have become sadly infrequent in recent years. And so, with a friend visiting from the Left Coast and looking for a rare treat, the decision was made on Sunday to bite the bullet and pay the eye-popping price for really good seats. What was it Barnum said about one being born every minute?

It was a well-played game, and the Yankees won. Still, the teeth ached from all that bullet-biting.

The $95 was just part of it. The team gets away with charging $7 for a beer and $4.50 for a hot dog. During the off-season, it raised ticket prices in some sections by a whopping 22 percent. Souvenir caps routinely sell for $25 and up.

You know the credit-card commercial that gets dewy-eyed about the ballpark experience being priceless? Hate to be the one to break this to you, but it definitely has a price. Frankly, it is hard to see how that statistical icon, a family of four, can go to a ballgame, pay for programs, eat pizza, drink sodas, maybe buy a pennant or a souvenir Derek Jeter shirt, and make it home without having to raid the firstborn's college tuition fund.

On Sunday, somewhere between the national anthem and the now-mechanistic playing of ''God Bless America'' during the seventh-inning stretch, thoughts turned to the ultimate destination of that $95.

Naturally, ticket revenues help pay player salaries, including the $16 million a year that the Yankees are giving their latest prize acquisition, the redoubtable Alex Rodriguez. If you count the $9 million or so that he also collects from his former employer, the Texas Rangers, Mr. Rodriguez earns an average of about $154,000 per regular-season game. That works out to $17,000 and change per inning, which typically lasts 20 minutes.

This, in a state whose Legislature sees fit, year after year, to freeze the minimum hourly wage at $5.15. No reflection on Mr. Rodriguez, but a minimum-wage worker would have to put in more than a year and a half of 40-hour weeks -- 82 of them -- to earn what he makes in a single inning. (You could also say that it would take this worker about a week to come up with the money that two of us cavalierly splurged on tickets.)

Relatively little of the $95 goes to a place that some feel deserves a larger share. That would be the municipal treasury.

Yankee Stadium is owned by the city. So is Shea Stadium, home of the New York Mets. Supervising them falls to the Department of Parks and Recreation.

The ball clubs pay rent. But the city is stuck with sweetheart deals from the past, including one blessed by a certain baseball-loving former mayor, that allow the teams to deduct planning costs and other expenses from their rent bills.

This has led to some interesting arithmetic. Perhaps nothing beat the time in the 1990's when the Yankees tried to get New York taxpayers to subsidize the cost of an engineer who supposedly worked 168 hours a week. Care to guess how many hours there are in a week?

TIME and again, city auditors have found both ball clubs resorting to what might be described in this age of steroids as performance-enhanced bookkeeping.

Last summer, the city comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr., announced that the Mets owed the city more than $4.5 million. The club, he said, had a tendency to overstate its deductible expenses and understate its income from luxury boxes, concessions stands and the like. Not surprisingly, the Mets challenged his figures, but he held firm.

The pattern with the Yankees is similar. In late January, the comptroller's office issued an audit concluding that the team had improperly inflated its expenses by nearly $483,000 in a single three-month period of 2002.

Even with legitimate deductions, the ball clubs are able to slash their city rent charges in ways sure to arouse envy in any New York tenant. In 2003, the Yankees used various expenses to lower an $11.4 million rent bill to one of $5.1 million. The less prosperous Mets managed to take a $5.8 million bill and turn it, poof, into one of $311,000.

If he wanted, Alex Rodriguez could just about cover that Mets tab with what he would earn in a doubleheader. Not that teams play many doubleheaders these days. Why let a fan get away with paying $95 only once when you can take him for it twice?