Yesterday, Tim Marchman of Sports Illustrated floated the idea that New York City, this fine burgh in which we take up residence/store our office things, should get a third baseball team in order to help even the playing field. This is ridiculous on its face — as if the Yankees’ spending and market share could possibly be slowed by some weird new team — and would never actually happen, but hey, it’s the end of December, and baseball’s still months away, so … let’s play the no-chance-but-why-not-it’s-fun game?
The general consensus is that a new team — we’re calling them the New York Empires, and we’re giving them a gay shortstop who comes out to his teammates during the season — would eat into the Mets’ market far more than the Yankees’, and that’s surely true. (That’s meant less as an insult to the Mets and more a nod to the inevitability that is the Yankees, just so we’re clear on that.) But it’s still difficult to imagine a die-hard fan of either team ever switching over, which means the fans of this hypothetical new team would have to be Johnny Come Lately sorts who would just hop on the newest bandwagon if it meant they could wear a cool hat.
Thus: Brooklyn! Forget the Nets: Now this is an Atlantic Yards project we can get behind. Turning our Cobble Hill neighborhood into a pseudo-Wrigleyville, a fifteen-minute walk to the ballpark, would even make us waver, and we scream old Jack Buck radio calls when woken up in the middle of the night. They would have to have a second entrance for strollers.
This will never happen, in a million years. We still like the idea that a new team would try to capture the Brooklyn Dodgers spirit and end up with a stadium full of Bugaboos, chai lattes, and Maggie Gyllenhaal.