So, it finally happened today. After fits and starts, stadium plans in Manhattan and New Jersey, and more than a decade of bickering, an ailing Steinbrenner scooped a shovel full of ceremonial dirt to show that the new Yankee Stadium, meant to be a replica of the old, original one, will soon start to rise. Yankees Will Break Ground for Their New Stadium - New York Times
I have mixed feelings about this whole thing. As a kid, as a Yankees fan, it was indoctrinated into me that Yankee Stadium was living baseball history. In fact, when I was growing up, the Yankees went through some rather lean years. We had Donnie Baseball, but Reggie left, Thurman died, Billy Martin was fired, Billy Martin was fired, and did I mention that Billy Martin was fired? So yes, the Yankees were a historically great team, and I don’t expect anyone to shed tears for my fandom, but it’s not like they were hoisting pennants while I was a kid. All I had was other people’s memories, and that park in the Bronx.
Being a Jersey brat, with parents that thought baseball was for lazy Americans, I was left to my own devices to attend games. Luckily, a few of the churches in town sponsored bus trips to games once or twice a summer. For $10 (later $20) we got round trip bus service, bleacher tickets, (sometimes Tier Reserved), and a three block walk through the war-torn Bronx (that would be the drug war) to the safe haven of the maddening Stadium crowds milling about River Avenue. The rest of the time, it was up to Phil Rizzuto on Channel 9 to keep me up to date on the game, and uh, whatever else was on his mind.
Then Steinbrenner got banned. For 3 years, he couldn’t touch the team. Three years during which we didn’t trade away prospects named Rivera, Williams, Jeter, Posada for guys named Ken Phelps. We finally had a farm system that hadn’t been pillaged for the Aging Slugger’s Pension Fund. We had manager, Buck Showalter, who was kind of dictatorial and mean, who managed to get the best out of a bunch of pretty spoiled athletes, while also alienating everyone around. Little did we know your team could pre-order World Series rings the day he quit or got fired. In ‘96, with Mattingly retired too early (my heart still breaks for him), we promoted the kids, hired a nice guy manager, and the run started.
Many people have written better accounts of that period, from 96-9/10/01, when we were invincible. I won’t try to add to their brilliance. But the points is, Yankee Stadium was alive again.
Today, it died. The new Yankee Stadium plans look alot like the original, before the renovation in the 70’s, when the Yanks played at Shea for two years. That’s cool. It will be a modern ballpark in an antique shell. That’s cool. It will have 10,000 less seats. That’s not cool. More luxury boxes– again, not cool. Tickets will be more expensive. Not cool. Parkland will be destroyed. The replacement parkland, though greater in acreage, will be on top of parking garages and in nooks, not wide open space like the current Macombs Dam park. Not cool.
As far as personal experience, the current Stadium, and I say this as a fan and half-season ticket plan owner, is awful. The crowds are dense and the flow around the park is badly designed. A full half of the Stadium promenade is closed to the public, thanks to lack of underground parking for players, camera trucks and crew. That means 50,000 people are squeezed into a plaza that could maybe hold 10,000 comfortably, which in turns squeezes everyone out to River Ave. Entrances are badly designed, security tries to be efficient, but invariably you feel like a hog in a chute. It makes no sense that there are 15 ticket checkers for 5 or 6 screeners. Those numbers should be reversed, since the ticket guy is just holding a scanner, but screeners have to inspect each fan before they can pass. The halls around the seats are practically catacombs. Narrow, low ceilings, claustrophobic, even when you can see the field from the doorways. The ramps inside are all hairpin turns causing pile-ups after every game. The place is basically a deathtrap.
But, another renovation could make it a thing of beauty and preserve the parkland, and preserve the fact that Ruth, Gehrig, Dimaggio, Mantle, Munson, Berra, etc., played there, on that field, in that park. After this Stadium is gone, Wrigley and Fenway will be all that links us back to the turn of the century, back to the original shrines of baseball.
The renovations I’d like to see though, are too minor in scale. Take down the outside wall, expand halls and aisles. Get rid of the stupid floating yellow step that makes getting around the Tier a nightmare. Create a ticketed outdoor area and an underground tunnel to the player’s lot so the whole damn side of the park doesn’t have to be closed off. The problem is, none of this does anything for revenue.
The new park will have fewer seats, increasing scarcity and prices, and more luxury boxes, creating whole classes of fans who will never have to wait in line for a hot dog or even watch the game in front of them, if they’d rather sit in the back of the suite and watch on the plasma tv. We fans broke attendance records every year for the past 10 years so that Steinbrenner could build a new park with ten thousand less seats? Please George, pay someone to dig up dirt on Gary Sheffield. The guy is filthy, and it’s obvious we could use another ban, although I guess it’s too late. Anyway, at this point, Steinbrenner is the Queen Elizabeth team figurehead– his son in law, Steve Swindal [great name] is the Vaseline in this act of penetration.
Yankee Stadium needs an update. But slapping an old facade on a brand new Stadium that will cater to the wealthy is nothing short of despicable. For me, going to a basketball game is out. I can’t spend $100 to sit in the rafters and watch the Knicks suck. Hockey? Never heard of it. Baseball is the egalitarian sport of my youth. The sport where any kid, with a little luck, could at least hit one good home run ball, once, even if they weren’t a good athlete, and think, for a second, that they were Donnie Baseball, George Brett, Kirk Gibson, because they could pay $3 or $5 to see them in person. The danger of getting to Yankee Stadium as a kid made it all the more welcoming (in a really strange way) once you finally got there. Though I don’t miss the danger, I do wonder who the new Stadium will be welcoming once it’s open. Kids from Jersey, at least my town, can’t afford $80 bus trips to the Bronx.
