Sternberg attended his first baseball game in 1965, Sandy Koufax at Shea, and three decades later tried to buy a piece of the Mets when Nelson Doubleday left his partnership with the Wilpons. “If you play ball in the schoolyard, you figured out a winning mentality because if you lose no one wants to wait 10 games for next,” Sternberg said. We both are raising families in Westchester now, but the Brooklyn in his voice, and his mindset and competitiveness are quite familiar. But my brother, Mike, is the same age and played some ball with him and – through sheer coincidence – ended up working on Wall Street with Sternberg. Stu is five years older than me, and I did not know him growing up. We went to the same junior high and high school, and played on all the same fields. I can attest to his New York bloodlines because they are my New York bloodlines. ![]() The New York connection, though, is the Rays’ owner. ![]() Tampa Bay, not exactly a dream matchup for a city obsessed with the Mets and Yankees. I would feel bad about this if Stu wasn’t so darn nice, a guy from the neighborhood that made good and for whom you can root. “I was fortunate that I found an industry (as a Wall Street investor) that I loved, that I was really good at, and that also allowed me to make a lot of money.” “Where I ended up in life, it could have been thousands and thousands of people who lived in Canarsie,” said Sternberg, who grew up about six blocks from me and ended up owning the Tampa Bay Rays. In other words, I could have been Stu Sternberg. But I could have learned the difference between a stock and a bond, and actually known what dividend meant when I used it in a sentence. I could not teach myself to grow a foot (no matter how much I tried). He was about to grow a foot on the way to Canarsie High, Georgia Tech and an NBA career that spanned three decades and four titles. He was only in the lineup because he already was 6-feet tall. 272 in Canarsie and the worst starter was John Salley, who lived two buildings over from me in the Bayview projects. Sure, I was the captain of the sixth-grade team at P.S. Look, I understand why I never reached the NBA. ![]() PHILADELPHIA – I should own a major league team.
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