(Last in a series.)
Attention Yankees fans, your team’s magic number is 380.
That’s how many days George Steinbrenner has remaining on the clock to reach a new stadium deal with City Hall before Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the city’s No. 1 Yankee fan, leaves office.
Faced with such a deadline and the prospect of dealing with a more hostile administration in 2002, Steinbrenner has now stepped up work on a stadium project and is certain to make the phone call to Giuliani in the upcoming months and cement a deal before the end of 2001, people familiar with the team’s plan told The Post.
And while Steinbrenner has threatened to move the team to New Jersey and had eyes on Manhattan’s West Side, the presentation The Boss will make before city officials will be for a new, more cozy stadium in The Bronx, most likely beside the current stadium, those persons said.
While conditions surrounding the plans have not been cemented and could change, Steinbrenner has had a number of potential stadium drawings completed. Each is for a new home of about 50,000 seats that will cost around $500 million. Nothing has been presented to the city yet.
The city has set aside a portion of a $600 million pool of cash, from delaying the expiration of the commercial rent tax. That money will have to go to help finance a stadium for the Jets, Mets, Yanks and a new Madison Square Garden.
The city, after not building a sports stadium for 36 years, might have to finance four stadiums over the next five to eight years.
A new home for the Yanks, because of their standing in the city and country, will be the most anticipated of them all. Steinbrenner’s drawings will form the nucleus of the presentation to the city. According to sources, the stadium drawings, a sort of short list of potential sites, includes a Manhattan and Bronx location and no New Jersey locations.
“This is a very complicated issue but I think every effort will be made to get a deal done before the end of next year,” a person familiar with the team’s thinking said.
Complicated doesn’t begin to explain the Yankees’ situation.
Steinbrenner, like many other sports teams owners, has been threatening to move his team from their home town if a new stadium was not forthcoming.
But these are the Yankees, the most valuable and popular sports brand in the world.
Moving them, even within the same city or borough, is not like moving the Raiders or the Expos.
Most Yankee fans and sports fans in general, for that matter, consider Yankee Stadium to be sacred ground.
That is why Steinbrenner has been very quiet on the subject. Even if he were to agree to stay in the city – something he hasn’t done even yet, in order to keep every last bit of leverage – he will have to come clean that a renovation of Yankee Stadium isn’t in the cards.
That’s because building a new stadium next to the existing House that Ruth Built is the least expensive plan on the boards. Also the most politically expedient.
Under any new plan presented next year, Yankee Stadium will have to be torn down. It seems as if there is little way Steinbrenner can emerge from this situation without upsetting someone.
Howard Rubenstein, a spokesman for the Yankees, refused to comment on the subject.
While stadium plans have been on the back burner for years, it is not as if The Boss has been sitting around idle.
The Yankees merged marketing operations with the New Jersey Nets, forming YankeeNets, and then went out and purchased the NHL’s New Jersey Devils. The ground-breaking deals netted Steinbrenner a nifty $100 million payout and gave the organization an opportunity to sell 12-month programming.
At the same time, Steinbrenner was cooking up an idea to form his own regional sports television network. He hired Harvey Schiller, a former programming whiz with Turner Sports, and gave him the green light to investigate such a network.
While other teams looked into such a network for themselves, including the Rangers and the Angels, others have backed away because their baseball brands lacked power and attraction. Not a problem for the Yankees. Steinbrenner is determined to launch his own network and place the Yanks, Nets, Devils and, thanks to this week’s deal with the NFL’s Giants, some pre-season football games on the channel.
This is the beauty of George Steinbrenner’s play for a new stadium.
While other team owners see only to the horizon and focus solely on a new stadium and the increased revenue it can bring in, The Boss operates from a totally updated playbook that has a new stadium and several teams operating in concert with a sports network.
Of course, The Boss has also been busy with the team on the field. You might have heard the team is the three-time defending World Champs.
Winning championships is all well and good and the center of any plan to grow the team, but the stadium issue will not sit on the back burner much longer.
There are 380 days and counting to get it done.