PHILADELPHIA – I should own a major league team.
Look, I understand why I never reached the NBA. Sure, I was the captain of the sixth-grade team at P.S. 272 in Canarsie and the worst starter was John Salley, who lived two buildings over from me in the Bayview projects. He was only in the lineup because he already was 6-feet tall. But Salley had a secret weapon. He was about to grow a foot on the way to Canarsie High, Georgia Tech and an NBA career that spanned three decades and four titles.
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I could not teach myself to grow a foot (no matter how much I tried). But I could have learned the difference between a stock and a bond, and actually known what dividend meant when I used it in a sentence. In other words, I could have been Stu Sternberg.
“Where I ended up in life, it could have been thousands and thousands of people who lived in Canarsie,” said Sternberg, who grew up about six blocks from me and ended up owning the Tampa Bay Rays. “I was fortunate that I found an industry (as a Wall Street investor) that I loved, that I was really good at, and that also allowed me to make a lot of money.”
I would feel bad about this if Stu wasn’t so darn nice, a guy from the neighborhood that made good and for whom you can root. The World Series is Philadelphia vs. Tampa Bay, not exactly a dream matchup for a city obsessed with the Mets and Yankees. The New York connection, though, is the Rays’ owner.
I can attest to his New York bloodlines because they are my New York bloodlines. We went to the same junior high and high school, and played on all the same fields. Stu is five years older than me, and I did not know him growing up. But my brother, Mike, is the same age and played some ball with him and – through sheer coincidence – ended up working on Wall Street with Sternberg. We both are raising families in Westchester now, but the Brooklyn in his voice, and his mindset and competitiveness are quite familiar.
“If you play ball in the schoolyard, you figured out a winning mentality because if you lose no one wants to wait 10 games for next,” Sternberg said.
Sternberg attended his first baseball game in 1965, Sandy Koufax at Shea, and three decades later tried to buy a piece of the Mets when Nelson Doubleday left his partnership with the Wilpons. He purchased the Rays in May 2004, seeing an undervalued stock with potential both in the farm system and in the Tampa market.
Sternberg had the steely nerve to put two young men in charge of business (Matt Silverman) and baseball operations (Andrew Friedman), and together they navigated an organization to a moment when Sternberg could have a bunch of his old Canarsie buddies at the opening two games of the Series at Tropicana Field. It was a long way from their neighborhood softball team, the Backstreet Elite. It was a long way from 1269 Avenue M and East 105th Street, the house he finally sold last month, 50 years and one day after his parents originally bought it.
He owns the Tampa Bay team, but he is one of us. Not some rich kid on an inheritance, but the son of parents who owned a pillow shop on Flatbush Avenue. He has stickball and knishes in his DNA. He went to St. John’s by night so he could learn his Wall Street craft by day, working his way up, up, up. All the way to the World Series.
I know back in Canarsie we always felt kinship when those from the neighborhood made it big. Whether it was Peter Criss drumming for KISS or John Brockington (also out of the Bayview Projects) in the Green Bay Packers’ backfield or Howard Schultz (another Bayview guy) launching Starbucks and eventually buying the NBA’s SuperSonics. We told people who thought Lloyd “World” Free chucked in the NBA that they should have seen him at Canarsie High, where his range was anything from Sheepshead Bay in.
Even now I feel it, watching John Salley on “The Best Damn Sports Show” or seeing Stu Sternberg, a good guy from the hood, having the best damn time of his life.