Reisman: Rockland teacher fights Yankee 'greed'

The New York Yankees are wallowing in a state of mediocrity.

While the Yankees are still a sports brand synonymous with platinum-plated success, the franchise has a good chance of registering its first losing season in 21 years. Things could miraculously turn around, but that does not seem likely.

The team in the South Bronx is old, injury prone and deadly dull.

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With a bulging payroll of $228,733,730, the Yankees are second only to the Los Angeles Dodgers in terms of their generosity to their players — and it costs almost twice as much to watch the Yankees play.

According to Forbes magazine, a pair of tickets in L.A. cost $55.10 on average. At Yankee Stadium, it’s $109.40. Only the Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox, which happen to be two very high-performing teams, charge more than the Yankees.

Add in the inflated cost of parking, hot dogs, soda and other stuff, and pretty soon the cost of going to a game starts to look like the monthly rent.

Mike DeLucia, a Clarkstown South High School English teacher, says the Yankees aren’t worth it.

Ordinary middle-class fans, he says, are badly abused. They are victims of runaway corporate perfidy and greed. The owners lie. The overpaid players are spoiled. Even the new Yankee Stadium, which opened in 2009 at a cost of $1.3 billion, is an antiseptic, soul-sucking disappointment.

DeLucia, 55, says fans need to fight back, and the only way is economical warfare.

His strategy is neatly summed up in the title of a passionate, self-published manifesto, “Boycott The Yankees — A call to Action by a Lifelong Yankees fan.”

The Yankees, DeLucia writes, “must stop scamming their fans who work damned hard to put food on the table, to put their kids through college, and to put a few pennies away for retirement — ordinary people who must be concerned with the bottom line every single day of their lives.”

We’ve heard this one before, usually in the form of empty threats expressed by callers to sports radio stations.

But DeLucia believes this time could be different.

In a phone interview Monday, DeLucia said he was starting an actual “movement” designed to galvanize fans to act. The organizational blueprint is the book, which can be ordered by going to his website, www.boycotttheyankees.com. The site also sells merchandise like “Respect the Fans” T-shirts (23.99) and “Boycott the Yankees” coffee mugs ($12.99).

DeLucia said an incident involving a popular Liverpool, England, soccer team should put a scare in the Yankees. When the owners of the soccer team jacked up the ticket prices, 10,000 fans staged a walkout. The prices were later reduced.

“So, it’s about organizing,” DeLucia told me. “Let’s do something about this because the Yankees — they can’t do anything without us. They need our money. They need our cable TV subscriptions. They need us to buy their stuff. All they have to do is take care of us, and we’ll be at the stadium again.”

DeLucia, who lives in Somers, said he hasn’t been to a Yankee game in five or six years. Yet it’s clear that, despite his anger and frustration, he remains a fan steeped in pinstripe nostalgia.

He writes wistfully of growing up in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx where, as a Little League player, he pretended to be Mickey Mantle. He recalls how his father became enraptured with the Yankees because of the heroics of Joe DiMaggio.

When catcher Thurman Munson was in a plane crash, DeLucia writes, “We all cried…”

And when his own son at the age of 5 briefly switched his allegiance to the Toronto Blue Jays, DeLucia told him, “You have to sleep in the yard.”

At times, DeLucia seems to mimic the emotional contradictions of a jilted lover. For instance, he hails the squeaky-clean Derek Jeter’s entry into “God’s inner circle,” then chastises the multimillionaire star for failing to adequately compensate a fan who retrieved the ball that signified his 3,000th base hit.

He asserts his belief in capitalism, but then suggests a way to artificially curtail player salaries that kind of gets lost in the weeds.

Nevertheless, he will get a chorus of agreement from many readers who are just as fed up over players who measure “respect” by the size of the contracts they are offered. Here, Yankee expatriate Robinson Cano is treated to a well-deserved drubbing.

DeLucia lists a number of ways the Yankees can “right the wrongs.” These include reduction of ticket prices, monthly fan appreciation days and sending people on all-expenses paid trips to away games.

DeLucia said it was no accident that his book comes just as the Yankees are experiencing a downturn. Attendance last year was the lowest since 2000, and there are noticeably empty seats this year.

Maybe the boycott is already on, confirming, if nothing else, that DeLucia is hardly a lone voice crying in the wilderness.