Today, we are going to tell you every important number about the New York Yankees. Not one has to do with batting averages or home runs. Instead, we will talk about rent, murder and attendance. Then we will count the number of monkeys in New York.

Let us begin by discussing the rent that George Steinbrenner pays for Yankee Stadium to its owners and builders, the people of the City of New York.

1. Mr. Steinbrenner pays rent once a year, and his most recent check was for $715,066. That is the most he has paid in a decade and possibly ever. Here are the annual rents Steinbrenner and the Yankees paid for the last 10 fiscal years:

  	1985: Nothing            1990: $570,000
  	1986: Nothing            1991: $214,000
  	1987: Approx. $200,000   1992: $103,000
  	1988: Nothing            1993: Nothing
  	1989: Nothing            1994: $715,066

As you can see, the average rent paid by Steinbrenner during the last 10 years is $180,206. Let us now compare his average rent to those paid by other tenants of public spaces in the Bronx, namely, the people who occupy public housing projects.

  Housing Project      Tenants' Total         Tenants
                    	 Monthly Rent     Avg. Income

  Castle Hill          $514,188               $12,388
  Edenwald             $551,837               $13,687
  Morris               $450,043               $11,411
  Patterson            $433,214               $11,299
  Mitchell             $443,435               $11,518
  Yankee Stad.          $15,024            $1,721,744

If we may be so bold as to summarize this data: The millionaires in the Yankee Stadium pay in one year just a little more than working poor tenants pay in one week.

2. Recently, Mr. Clete Boyer, a fabulous third basemen for the Yankees 30 years ago, was quoted in the sports pages saying that, nowadays, he would not let his daughter come to Yankee Stadium. The area was too rough - unlike when he was a player, when the Bronx was a different place. Those were the days when kids played stickball in the streets, and slept on the fire escapes on summer nights, and women thought nothing of riding the subway at 2 in the morning. Alone, of course.

Of course the city was safer 30 years ago. But not a scrap of evidence shows that crime has kept the public away from Yankee Stadium. Mr. Boyer is participating in one of the great historical fictions: that colossal numbers of people used to come to the ballpark in the golden days.

People did not go to Yankee Stadium when ladies rode the subway at night by themselves. Not the way they do today.

For instance, Mr. Boyer played for the Yankees between 1959 and 1966, including five pennant-winning teams and two World Series championships. The average home attendance for Yankee Stadium during those years was 1.4 million.

Last year, when there were more murders in the city than all those years that Clete Boyer played, the attendance was 2.4 million - almost double what it was in those good old days. Not only that, the Yankees finished second, and were fading fast.

Maybe people in the old days were too comfortable sleeping on the fire escapes or riding the subways at all hours to bother going to Yankee games.

3. The only relationship between violent crime and Yankee attendance is a positive one: the more murders, the more people go to the games. In fact, as long as the team has good relief pitching, murder helps attendance.

Starting in 1951, and for the next 25 years - all through the days of Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle and Casey Stengel - not once did the Yankees draw 2 million fans. Sure, the team won pennants and World Series and had Billy Martin. The public stayed home. Even when Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth's home-run record in 1961, the Yankees still didn't get 2 million in the ballpark. (Just over 1.7 million came that year - when, by the way, the team also won the World Series.)

It was not until 1976 that the Yankees drew 2 million - the same year the newly renovated Yankee Stadium opened. The public had just spent $78 million to rebuild the park from scratch. All the sight lines were improved, at the cost of 10,000 or so seats. But even with less space in the park and more crime on the streets, the public has come in swarms. The place kept the classical facade and doubled attendance over the classic era.

Today, the nice new ballparks in Baltimore and Cleveland are built at a cost of hundreds of millions in mimicry of that same old-fashioned style - the same way, a wise friend points out, that the Bennigan's chain of bars tries to imitate the old neighborhood saloon.

Now we have a voice rising from the bar stool: Some guy with the Yankees supposedly described the "colored boys" from the neighborhood as "monkeys" hanging on basketball rims. Even with his millions in profit and nothing in rent, Steinbrenner says the poor neighbors are dragging him down.

New Jersey, here I come!

Except he has nowhere to go. There is no baseball stadium in New Jersey, and no money to pay for one. The governor of New Jersey just cut the income tax. That means to pay the bills in the local school districts, the property taxes will climb.

And the voters whose taxes are going up for schoolbooks will build a stadium for the biggest Cadillac welfare bum in history?

Anyone who believes that really proves the point: He has made monkeys of us all.