The politics of ballparks
“Baseball is too much a sport to be a business and too much a business to be a sport,” Chicago baseball and chewing gum magnate William Wrigley Jr. once said of his beloved Cubs. It’s a quotation that Larry Lucchino, president and chief executive officer of the Boston Red Sox, drops frequently, and with good reason. One doesn’t become commander of Red Sox Nation without a firm grasp on the balance of economic, political, civic, and even psychic weight the team carries in its hometown. “It’s cliché to say we see ourselves as a public trust, but we do see ourselves as stewards to the city,” Lucchino told a crowd Tuesday (Dec. 7) at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS). Lucchino, a Yale-trained lawyer-turned-sports-management guru, has helped to push the idea of the American ballpark as civic focal point since the 1980s. His talk on “Ballparks, Politics, and Public Policy,” hosted by the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at HKS, drew...