Somers Author Calls for Yankees to Refocus on Fans
Somers resident Mike DeLucia is on a mission.
The lifelong New York Yankees fan is fed up with how corporate greed has ruined America’s favorite pastime and taken the joy out of rooting for his beloved pinstripes. The high school English teacher expresses his displeasure and solutions to refocus the game on the fans in his new book, Boycott The Yankees.
“I’m doing this to save the team. I’m trying to get real fans back to Yankee Stadium,” DeLucia said in a recent interview. “We can try to make this stadium resemble the old stadium. The only way you can do that is by lowering the prices. There’s a lot of people who have given up on the Yankees. Those are the people I want to bring back.”
DeLucia grew up in the Throgs Neck/Pelham Bay section of the Bronx and played baseball on streets, parks and empty lots in the borough. When he stepped up to the plate in Little League, he imagined he was Mickey Mantle.
“I didn’t play baseball because of the Yankees. I loved baseball, but I loved baseball better because of my allegiance to the Bombers,” DeLucia states in his book. “So my inspiration for this book grew from the fervent core of both my distant and not-so-distant past. Twenty years ago, I could never have imagined that I would one day write a book calling for a boycott of the New York Yankees. Writing those words is uncomfortable to me because they sound blasphemous.”
DeLucia said he started pondering writing a book taking the Yankees to task after he walked into the new Yankee Stadium in 2009 and noticed the right field bleachers had been relocated.
“I was really disappointed,” he said. “I also did not like the feel of the new stadium. The feel is just gone. It doesn’t have the same energy. As the year went on it just bothered me.”
The cost of tickets, food and parking at the new stadium, along with players, such as Robinson Cano, complaining $25 million a year wasn’t enough to play baseball, inspired DeLucia to put his thoughts on paper, which he began in 2014—a journey that ended with him publishing the book himself after some prospective publishers wanted to control it.
“I never thought it would be a lucrative thing like I’ll quit my job,” he said. “This is more of a labor of love. It’s a public interest story. There’s a lot of people out there like me. The real fans are fading away from Yankee Stadium.”
Besides relocating the bleachers and cutting ticket prices in half, which would place the Yankees just below the Major League Baseball average, DeLucia is calling on the Yankees to have monthly fan appreciation days where all tickets, concessions and parking are half off. He also recommended creating a section of 10 to 15 box seats near the first base line be part of a lottery system where tickets are sold for $20 each.
Meanwhile, DeLucia is asking people to visit his website http://boycotttheyankees.com and sign a petition. Once he generates enough interest, DeLucia hopes to plan a rally at the stadium to ensure his message his heard loud and clear.
“Our money funds everything. We have to mess with their money,” he said. “Without us they have nothing. Financial warfare is the only way to get to these people.”
Rick has more than 40 years’ experience covering local news in Westchester and Putnam counties, running the gamut from politics and crime to sports and human interest. He has been an editor at Examiner Media since 2012. Read more from Rick’s editor-author bio here. Read Rick’s work here: https://www.theexaminernews.com/author/pezzullo_rick-writer/