GaryMrMets
11-07-2005, 02:06 PM
http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/col/story/362878p-309101c.html
Math doesn't add
up in Ratner world
http://www.nydailynews.com/images/editors/headers_shootinglip.gif
http://www.nydailynews.com/images/columnists/lupica_m.jpg
They are the Nets of Bruce Ratner, and so it was perfect that on opening night of a new basketball season they would try to be masters of illusion in Jersey the same way they try to be over in Brooklyn.
Brett Yormark, the team's new CEO, told everybody who would listen that the Nets would have a packed house against the Milwaukee Bucks. Then maybe 15,000 people actually showed up. This is the same kind of math that tries to tell you that one basketball arena for Atlantic Yards, Brooklyn, surrounded by 16 high-rise buildings, is more about sports than luxury housing.
That is a different kind of sellout, and a real one.
When Yormark, who used to work as the president of corporate marketing for NASCAR, was called out on the number of empty seats by Mike Francesa and Chris Russo on WFAN on Thursday afternoon, he did exactly what Ratner's people do in Brooklyn every time somebody questions them on their fuzzy math — he turned it into a famous old country western line:
Who you gonna believe, me or your own lyin' eyes?
He talked and talked, like he was Brett from East Rutherford and didn't know when to hang up the phone. He talked about corporate tickets and tickets distributed and must have thought that was a way for him not to talk about how he tried to paper his house Wednesday night. Maybe what he should do is start up something like the Brooklyn Standard, a Ratner press release that tries to look like a real newspaper, as a way of getting his message out. Then he can say anything he wants to about attendance.
He can make 14,000 or 15,000 into a sellout anytime he wants to.
"There wasn't 7,000 no-shows," Yormark said on WFAN.
Wonderful. If it's 5,000 or 6,000, but not 7,000, you can spin that as some kind of triumph. The season is only a couple of games old and already you can see that Yormark is out to be Ratner's Employee of the Month. They are made for each other.
Ratner's new CEO in charge of selling the Nets tries to sell an arena that is three-quarters full as a full arena. Ratner tries to make a 22-acre project really sound like an 8.5-acre project because 8.5 acres is the size of the Brooklyn railyards Ratner wants to rebuild. Their vision statement, then, is that the rest of us are only supposed to see what they want us to see.
Almost from the start, they used the Nets to obscure our view of the rest of this project. Marty Markowitz, a borough president obsessed with bringing major league sports back to Brooklyn, a legacy-obsessed politician the way Michael Bloomberg was as he tried to build the Jets their stadium on the West Side, is the one who went to Ratner and told him to bring the Nets over from Jersey.
At this point Ratner, a smart real estate guy, saw a tremendous opening, saw a chance to do what guys like him have been doing for the past 30 years in America, which means using sports to make an absolute killing in real estate and development.
And away we went. Understand something, because a lot of people don't: This all started with sports. Doesn't happen without sports. It's not like the Nets were just a part of this plan. The Nets became the point man for this the way Jason Kidd is a point man for Vince Carter and Richard Jefferson.
Now a luxury-housing development is called an "economic" development. As Norman Oder continually points out at his TimesRatnerReport blog, Ratner originally promised 10,000 office jobs. As it stands now, the project would create space for maybe 2,500 or so office jobs. If you use NYC Economic Development Corporation's calculations, maybe a third of THOSE would be new jobs.
Al Sharpton keeps talking about "thousands" of jobs for minorities and is somebody else who has bought into Ratner's hype, and rolled over for him. We're still being told about 15,000 construction jobs. What that really means is maybe 1,500 jobs over 10 years. Roughly 35% of those go to minorities according to the deal Ratner signed with community groups. This is math that is practically, well, Yormarkian.
We were told that half of the units in what can only be called RatnerWorld would be "affordable" housing. This, too, is math from Nets' sellouts. Maybe it will be 30% in the end. This all goes on in broad daylight, as Ratner pays off enough homeowners in and around this proposed development to make himself look generous, though not as generous as the taxpayers, who will eventually pay a billion dollars towards the project.
A couple of Sundays ago I was standing in front of Engine Co. 219, Ladder Co. 105 on Dean Street, not so far from Atlantic Ave. It was a beautiful morning and people were on the street going for coffee or returning from church or walking children in strollers. This is supposed to be part of the neighborhood that Bruce Ratner needs to save.
I asked a young fireman who didn't want his name in the newspaper to describe how much of the street we were looking at goes if Ratner gets his way.
The guy swept an arm across this stretch of Dean Street like a teacher with an eraser cleaning a blackboard. "It all goes," he said.
In the name of progress. And the new math of Bruce Ratner's Nets.
***
Dick Cheney has even lower ratings than the World Series did.
After all the moves Isiah Thomas has made, the real future of the Knicks is built around two people:
Larry Brown and Eddy Curry.
The 65-year-old coach and the 22-year-old center.
We have always heard that New York fans will embrace rebuilding as long as they trust there is some kind of real plan attached to the rebuilding, and a real reason to hope.
Well, we're going to find out now, aren't we?
Because right out of the box, with 13 of the first 19 games on the road, the Knicks might start out with a record of 5-14. The way the Eagles have looked lately, the Cowboys scare me more than anybody in the NFC East.
Here's my Mets wish list as they come out of the blocks for the wheeling and dealing season:
Billy Wagner.
Catcher.
Cleanup hitter.
We can go from there.
I always got along just swell with Theo Epstein, and have been a great admirer of his talent, and his work ethic.
But I also believe he is wildly more ambitious than a great big chunk of the Boston media wants to believe he is.
Epstein is 31 and he was the youngest general manager when he got the job, and then he was the boy wonder who finally helped the Red Sox win a World Series for the first time in 86 years.
Now I believe he wants to be the youngest CEO in baseball.
In Boston, that would eventually have meant being a younger Larry Lucchino, not just the current Red Sox CEO, but Epstein's mentor.
In some way, I believe John Henry, Boston's principal owner, finally had to choose between them, and chose Lucchino, who has done more than anybody to make the whole operation as successful as it is.
I don't believe there was a breach of trust here.
I don't believe a lot of the truth-and-beauty stuff I heard from Epstein at his press conference the other day. I think this was about ambition.
At halftime of the Knicks' game on Friday night, I watched that new feature from Ed Lover, called "In the House." And I'm just going to assume that in the future Lover will do better than asking Chris Rock what it's like to be this famous.
I know Shaquille O'Neal will survive his sprained ankle, but I'm not so sure you can say the same about Stan Van Gundy.
After Dr. Gregory House and Larry David playing Larry David, my favorite character on television is Alan Shore on "Boston Legal."
When did Quentin Richardson stop being a basketball player and start being a 3-point shooter?
The most underrated player in the whole Yankees' organization right now might be Steve Swindal, the old man's son-in-law.
Having said that, I still think any Yankee organizational meeting should be a PayPer-View event.
I still haven't gotten any kind of timeline on how the Los Angeles Dodgers turned into a small market team.
I always wanted Antonio Davis on my team.
Apparently, those online poker games don't sufficiently ring A-Rod's bell.
The Red Sox, I am told, admire Doug Melvin (he helped build one of the best farm systems in baseball with the Brewers) more than somewhat.
How long would Charlie Weis' contract extension have been at Notre Dame if he'd beaten USC, that's what I'd like to know.
If the Eagles don't make it back to the Super Bowl, your NFC representative is going to be one of these four teams:
Giants.
Falcons.
Seahawks.
Cowboys.
Interesting, right?
That new show "The Ghost Whisperer," where Jennifer Love Hewitt gets to talk to the dead?
Next week she's going to talk to the Jets' playoff chances.
Originally published on November 5, 2005
Math doesn't add
up in Ratner world
http://www.nydailynews.com/images/editors/headers_shootinglip.gif
http://www.nydailynews.com/images/columnists/lupica_m.jpg
They are the Nets of Bruce Ratner, and so it was perfect that on opening night of a new basketball season they would try to be masters of illusion in Jersey the same way they try to be over in Brooklyn.
Brett Yormark, the team's new CEO, told everybody who would listen that the Nets would have a packed house against the Milwaukee Bucks. Then maybe 15,000 people actually showed up. This is the same kind of math that tries to tell you that one basketball arena for Atlantic Yards, Brooklyn, surrounded by 16 high-rise buildings, is more about sports than luxury housing.
That is a different kind of sellout, and a real one.
When Yormark, who used to work as the president of corporate marketing for NASCAR, was called out on the number of empty seats by Mike Francesa and Chris Russo on WFAN on Thursday afternoon, he did exactly what Ratner's people do in Brooklyn every time somebody questions them on their fuzzy math — he turned it into a famous old country western line:
Who you gonna believe, me or your own lyin' eyes?
He talked and talked, like he was Brett from East Rutherford and didn't know when to hang up the phone. He talked about corporate tickets and tickets distributed and must have thought that was a way for him not to talk about how he tried to paper his house Wednesday night. Maybe what he should do is start up something like the Brooklyn Standard, a Ratner press release that tries to look like a real newspaper, as a way of getting his message out. Then he can say anything he wants to about attendance.
He can make 14,000 or 15,000 into a sellout anytime he wants to.
"There wasn't 7,000 no-shows," Yormark said on WFAN.
Wonderful. If it's 5,000 or 6,000, but not 7,000, you can spin that as some kind of triumph. The season is only a couple of games old and already you can see that Yormark is out to be Ratner's Employee of the Month. They are made for each other.
Ratner's new CEO in charge of selling the Nets tries to sell an arena that is three-quarters full as a full arena. Ratner tries to make a 22-acre project really sound like an 8.5-acre project because 8.5 acres is the size of the Brooklyn railyards Ratner wants to rebuild. Their vision statement, then, is that the rest of us are only supposed to see what they want us to see.
Almost from the start, they used the Nets to obscure our view of the rest of this project. Marty Markowitz, a borough president obsessed with bringing major league sports back to Brooklyn, a legacy-obsessed politician the way Michael Bloomberg was as he tried to build the Jets their stadium on the West Side, is the one who went to Ratner and told him to bring the Nets over from Jersey.
At this point Ratner, a smart real estate guy, saw a tremendous opening, saw a chance to do what guys like him have been doing for the past 30 years in America, which means using sports to make an absolute killing in real estate and development.
And away we went. Understand something, because a lot of people don't: This all started with sports. Doesn't happen without sports. It's not like the Nets were just a part of this plan. The Nets became the point man for this the way Jason Kidd is a point man for Vince Carter and Richard Jefferson.
Now a luxury-housing development is called an "economic" development. As Norman Oder continually points out at his TimesRatnerReport blog, Ratner originally promised 10,000 office jobs. As it stands now, the project would create space for maybe 2,500 or so office jobs. If you use NYC Economic Development Corporation's calculations, maybe a third of THOSE would be new jobs.
Al Sharpton keeps talking about "thousands" of jobs for minorities and is somebody else who has bought into Ratner's hype, and rolled over for him. We're still being told about 15,000 construction jobs. What that really means is maybe 1,500 jobs over 10 years. Roughly 35% of those go to minorities according to the deal Ratner signed with community groups. This is math that is practically, well, Yormarkian.
We were told that half of the units in what can only be called RatnerWorld would be "affordable" housing. This, too, is math from Nets' sellouts. Maybe it will be 30% in the end. This all goes on in broad daylight, as Ratner pays off enough homeowners in and around this proposed development to make himself look generous, though not as generous as the taxpayers, who will eventually pay a billion dollars towards the project.
A couple of Sundays ago I was standing in front of Engine Co. 219, Ladder Co. 105 on Dean Street, not so far from Atlantic Ave. It was a beautiful morning and people were on the street going for coffee or returning from church or walking children in strollers. This is supposed to be part of the neighborhood that Bruce Ratner needs to save.
I asked a young fireman who didn't want his name in the newspaper to describe how much of the street we were looking at goes if Ratner gets his way.
The guy swept an arm across this stretch of Dean Street like a teacher with an eraser cleaning a blackboard. "It all goes," he said.
In the name of progress. And the new math of Bruce Ratner's Nets.
***
Dick Cheney has even lower ratings than the World Series did.
After all the moves Isiah Thomas has made, the real future of the Knicks is built around two people:
Larry Brown and Eddy Curry.
The 65-year-old coach and the 22-year-old center.
We have always heard that New York fans will embrace rebuilding as long as they trust there is some kind of real plan attached to the rebuilding, and a real reason to hope.
Well, we're going to find out now, aren't we?
Because right out of the box, with 13 of the first 19 games on the road, the Knicks might start out with a record of 5-14. The way the Eagles have looked lately, the Cowboys scare me more than anybody in the NFC East.
Here's my Mets wish list as they come out of the blocks for the wheeling and dealing season:
Billy Wagner.
Catcher.
Cleanup hitter.
We can go from there.
I always got along just swell with Theo Epstein, and have been a great admirer of his talent, and his work ethic.
But I also believe he is wildly more ambitious than a great big chunk of the Boston media wants to believe he is.
Epstein is 31 and he was the youngest general manager when he got the job, and then he was the boy wonder who finally helped the Red Sox win a World Series for the first time in 86 years.
Now I believe he wants to be the youngest CEO in baseball.
In Boston, that would eventually have meant being a younger Larry Lucchino, not just the current Red Sox CEO, but Epstein's mentor.
In some way, I believe John Henry, Boston's principal owner, finally had to choose between them, and chose Lucchino, who has done more than anybody to make the whole operation as successful as it is.
I don't believe there was a breach of trust here.
I don't believe a lot of the truth-and-beauty stuff I heard from Epstein at his press conference the other day. I think this was about ambition.
At halftime of the Knicks' game on Friday night, I watched that new feature from Ed Lover, called "In the House." And I'm just going to assume that in the future Lover will do better than asking Chris Rock what it's like to be this famous.
I know Shaquille O'Neal will survive his sprained ankle, but I'm not so sure you can say the same about Stan Van Gundy.
After Dr. Gregory House and Larry David playing Larry David, my favorite character on television is Alan Shore on "Boston Legal."
When did Quentin Richardson stop being a basketball player and start being a 3-point shooter?
The most underrated player in the whole Yankees' organization right now might be Steve Swindal, the old man's son-in-law.
Having said that, I still think any Yankee organizational meeting should be a PayPer-View event.
I still haven't gotten any kind of timeline on how the Los Angeles Dodgers turned into a small market team.
I always wanted Antonio Davis on my team.
Apparently, those online poker games don't sufficiently ring A-Rod's bell.
The Red Sox, I am told, admire Doug Melvin (he helped build one of the best farm systems in baseball with the Brewers) more than somewhat.
How long would Charlie Weis' contract extension have been at Notre Dame if he'd beaten USC, that's what I'd like to know.
If the Eagles don't make it back to the Super Bowl, your NFC representative is going to be one of these four teams:
Giants.
Falcons.
Seahawks.
Cowboys.
Interesting, right?
That new show "The Ghost Whisperer," where Jennifer Love Hewitt gets to talk to the dead?
Next week she's going to talk to the Jets' playoff chances.
Originally published on November 5, 2005