AP Photo

New York City has been battered and bruised by the economic crisis, but now the Yankees are headed to the World Series. In a season at the team's new ballpark, built for $1.5 billion at the height of the city's real estate boom, David Samuels watches the effects of the collapse from the cheap seats in the right field.

“It’s going to get worse,” said the man sitting next to me at an afternoon baseball game in May at the new Yankee Stadium. The Yankees were playing the Texas Rangers, and my seat-mate was an ex-New Yorker named Ken O’Sullivan who had moved to Las Vegas, where he worked for the casinos until the bottom fell out of the economy. Now he was out of a job. 

The true proportions of the disaster, he continued, could be...