Shut Out in the South Bronx

[Woodmonkey]

Three weeks ago, Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared that the All-Star Game, to be played Tuesday at Yankee Stadium, would put the revival of the South Bronx in the national spotlight. Major League Baseball seems not to have gotten the memo.

Planners for the event overlooked the neighborhood where it will take place. The game itself, the legends game and the Home Run Derby are taking place in the South Bronx, since that is where the stadium is, as well as the new one being erected. (It is being built, by the way, on parkland taken from young people in the area, who now have to hunt for other playing fields.)

Otherwise, baseball is treating the South Bronx as an inconvenient location. An All-Star concert, parade and fan events are planned for Manhattan.

The Yankees have long disappointed the Bronx community, which hoped the team would do more to create jobs. But the team doesn’t run the All-Star Games. That’s Major League Baseball, which is wrong to take the locals’ love of the game for granted.

There are some 1,000 youngsters in Little League in the South Bronx. They are overwhelmingly Hispanic — Puerto Rican, Dominican and, increasingly, Mexican. They represent the nation’s fastest-growing population, and none of them have a prayer of seeing their All-Star heroes. A few free seats, given by lottery, would have earned a lot of good will at little cost.

At least the All-Star parade could have been routed down the Grand Concourse, where Babe Ruth and other wealth once resided. Its rebirth has brought back flowers, trees and elegant prewar and new buildings, including the resurging Bronx Museum of the Arts.

All that would have gone a long way to correct the image of a place best avoided, set during a 1977 World Series game when Howard Cosell announced to the world that “the Bronx is burning.”

The South Bronx deserves another look, not the snub it got from baseball’s executive suite.

The Source