Zero-sum game

The Sox don't need our money to build a new park

No doubt about it: $160,000,000 for eight years of playing baseball is a lot of jing. Count the zeros -- that's $54,794.52 every single day, day in and day out, for the next eight years. That's what the Red Sox have agreed to pay Manny Ramirez to play left field -- and the operative word for Ramirez is "play." (Of course, that is $14,246.57 per day less than Alex Rodriguez is getting for his 10-year, $252,000,000 deal with the Texas Rangers -- so maybe Manny is a bargain.)

The operative word for Sox fans and non-fans alike, however, is "pay." And judging from the huge increase in ticket prices just announced by the team for the sixth consecutive year -- prices for seats in the grandstand increased this year alone by 43 percent -- the fans will continue to pay and pay through the nose. Ticket prices will only continue to rise, as will prices for souvenirs and food inside the park. But if you think this is bad, just wait until there's a new ballpark in the Fenway -- if you're a fan, there's a $10 hot dog in your future. (The Phoenix has editorialized against proposals for a new ballpark in the past; see www.bostonphoneix.com/archive/features/fenway.html.)

The Sox want us to believe this is all for the good of the fans and the people of Boston and Massachusetts. General manager Dan Duquette, who "successfully negotiated" the deal with Ramirez, put it this way in his letter to season-ticket holders: the price increases were necessary "in order to remain competitive with economic responsibility."

Duquette's and the Sox' (and the entire professional sports world's) notion of "economic responsibility" certainly resides in a far different universe from the one inhabited by the taxpayers of Boston. The Sox live in a place where they can with impunity offer a ballplayer $20,000,000 a year (and this is only the beginning -- wait for Pedro's and Nomar's contracts to be renegotiated) and in the same breath claim poormouth as they ask all the citizens of the Commonwealth to chip in with public subsidies and land-grabbing eminent-domain powers to build a new sports stadium in which to play. This is their view of "economic responsibility," one that attracts billionaires like Roger Marino to toy with buying the team for an estimated price of $500,000,000. Keep counting them zeros.

By all accounts, the 28-year-old Ramirez is a very good ballplayer, and getting him might really help the Sox become competitive (though they'll need more help on the pitching staff to remain so). And if he, or any ballplayer, can get that kind of payday -- well, more power to him. And Marino, from all reports, appears to be not only a decent person, but a poor guy who made it big on his own -- a genuine Horatio Alger story.

Marino is also experienced in the high-stakes world of professional sports: over the two and a half years that he owned the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey team, he lost almost the same amount each day as he would earn daily from the Sox. He quit when the total reached $45 million. Of course, if Marino wants to spend $500 million on the Sox, and if the Sox want to spend $160 million on Ramirez, and if a fan wants to spend $28.33 (the highest average ticket price in the league) to watch a game, that's their prerogative. This is what's called free enterprise.

But the money our state legislature has agreed to spend on behalf of the Sox (and the likes of Ramirez and Marino -- should he buy the team), along with the additional money Mayor Tom Menino wants the Boston City Council to cough up for the Sox, is the public's money. Now that we see how many zeroes the Sox can afford for a guy who can be counted on to get runs across home plate -- more money, as it happens, than the state agreed to pay toward the cost of building a new ballpark -- it's even more apparent just how obscene it is to use the taxpayers' money to underwrite the Sox' efforts to make it to the World Series.

Given all this, we have to ask: what is it that the members of the city council don't yet understand about how wrong it is for the Sox to ask for public funds -- let alone for them to receive any? Last week, during the first council meeting in which there was an opportunity to take an official vote on the Sox' plan, opponents failed to muster even five symbolic `no' votes on a future loan bill (which was the threshold needed to kill such a deal). How many zeros on taxpayers' checks will it take for our city officials to realize the immorality and illegality of what the Sox and the mayor are demanding?

We still believe that when Menino submits legislation to the council to release the funds he promised the Sox, the council will do the right thing and reject it. That said, the scene last week certainly raises the specter that -- as is so often predicted -- the council will cave to Menino's political pressure in the end. If that happens, count on more zeroes being added to the final cost.

What do you think? Send an e- mail to letters[a]phx.com.