THE NTH DEGREED
AS THEY say in the square dancing and calendar business: “Circle the date!” May 14 in Yankee Stadium will be “National Shameless Greed Night,” otherwise known as the Derek Jeter Jersey Retirement game. A greater salute to runaway greed once could not have been imagined.
On May 14, four major elements will join hands to provide proof that what they have in common more than baseball is avarice, the relentless desire to suck every last nickel from the pockets of those foolish enough to remain fans.
1) Derek Jeter will return. When last regularly seen in the Stadium, he and business partner Steiner Collectibles were in the latter stages of selling everything Jeter might’ve touched or brushed against while he continued to be blindly heralded as the classiest of Yankees captains.
Even for the dark, dubious and often criminally scandalized memorabilia and autographs business, it got ugly. Having been paid more than $265 million to play for the Yankees plus tens of millions more in product endorsements and appearances, it wasn’t enough for Jeter.
The ugly spike hit its peak Sept. 22, the afternoon before a Yankees home night game and a week before Jeter’s final game, when a Manhattan theater was rented to hold a “Meet & Greet Farewell Luncheon” in “honor” of Jeter. It was one of the last acts in the everything-must-go liquidation sale as conducted by Steiner’s Derek Jeter Consignment Shop.
For $4,500, a fan could exchange a few words with Jeter in a side room then leave with one “limitededition Jeter-signed item.”
A secondary sell allowed a quickie photo with Jeter and an autograph for $2,500.
Throughout that Farewell Tour summer we heard reminders that Jeter was far too modest and classy to be comfortable as the focus of so much attention.
Was he modest or aloof? Was he classy or just couldn’t be bothered unless there was money in it?
2) The game after the ceremonies, against Houston, could have been, and should have been, a fabu- lous family/working-folks/sensible-fan Sunday afternoon game. But MLB, having pimped its scheduling authority to TV’s highest bidders, soon allowed the expected: ESPN tabbed the game for a late Sunday night start, thus a finish near midnight.
3) Regardless of when the ceremonies and game were to be held, the Yankees immediately jumped to try to out-scalp the scalpers. Bleacher seats, normally $16 each, were raised to $150. Faraway seats the Yanks usually sell for a swallow-hard $90 were hiked to $210, and so on and so up.
Only those with money to burn and choose to be bludgeoned can claim to be a genuine I-was-there Jeter fan.
4) This has all gone down — and continues to go down — on the watch of Yankees’ president/crown prince Randy Levine, who delivers arrogant lectures on good baseball business while, from Day 2 of the new Yankee Stadium in 2009, thousands of the park’s best, second-best and third-best obscenely priced seats have gone conspicuously empty as the Yankees announce laughable attendance figures.
With Levine at the wheel, unfiltered, untreated greed has turned new Yankee Stadium into an echocanyon, a monastic, one-and-done curio that brings to mind the old joke about the grasshopper that tells the bartender, “And at these prices I can see why.”
And on Sunday night, May 14, Shameless Greed Night, it all comes together.
What young Winston Churchill wrote his mother from Khartoum about Britain’s war in Sudan also applies to such greed: “You can not gild it; the raw comes through.”