It’s taken me a while to get to this post about America’s so-called national pastime, which no one is playing right now, because there’s a blizzard in New York City (I hope it stops and melts and that airplane traffic normalizes, because we’re going there next week). Bob Herbert’s October 17 column in the New York Times really got to me, given its timing relative to the book price wars conducted by Target, Walmart, and Costco, among other purveyors of fine literature. Herbert strikes me, in general, as a voice of conscience, decrying ills and inequities in this country and elsewhere, recently to the point of sharply criticizing those that he’d hoped President Obama would fix or try to alleviate–and isn’t.
The column I’m citing, timed during the baseball championship games leading to the World Series, focused on the the fancy new baseball stadiums in New York, including the Mets’ new home named for its corporate sponsor, Citigroup, of federal rescue funds fame. Herbert makes the point that, even for many families not desperately hurt by recession and unemployment, a jaunt to these new palaces of sport is an expense worthy of considerable thought. Between tickets and concessions, baseball has priced itself out of the ballpark. Herbert, recalling his childhood when “even the scalpers’ tickets were affordable,” regrets that today’s youngsters of modest means have no access to America’s pastime, and people sleep on the street while one magnificent, luxury box-lined field after another opens.
