I got two tickets to the series against Chicago in September for ten dollars. Combined. Yay me.

Is Yankee Stadium closing? I admit I've been out of the loop.... haven't had time to watch much since the All-Star Game.

I already went this season! And was disappointed. For all of the hurrahs and ballyhoo, Yankee Stadium is kind of underwhelming.

Underwhelming is a nice way of saying \"########." It's Shea Stadium, except home to a better team.

A picture of Goose Gossage with no accompanying stupid quote. How odd.

Underwhelming is a nice way of saying "########." It's Shea Stadium, except home to a better team.

I've been to a number of parks, but never Shea or YS. I did miss a flight out of JFK last year and had to take a cab to LaGuardia in the early evening. From whatever highway we took right past it, Shea looked like a comical dump. I especially enjoyed the huge neon baseball players from the 70s.

I've been to Fenway 4 or 5 times, but not since 1999 (Tomo Ohka's debut!) I'm told they've fixed it up, but up to then, that place was a shocking piece of crap. The worst professional or major college football facility I've been in.

Shea has its flaws, but the giant glowing neon baseball players that cover the outside walls are the definition of class. It will be a sad sad day when those lights go out for good.

I don't know what Jeff K (and everyone else who complains using the exact same terms) is talking about.

What makes a stadium a dump? garbage? puddles? a smell? the architecture? junk laying around?



I had no idea Alex Balth wrote for SI, I stumbled across his blog exactly once, and sent him a note about a post I like (he responded with a nice reply).
I honestly assumed he was a regular normal fan guy, not a media fellow.

What makes a stadium a dump? garbage? puddles? a smell? the architecture? junk laying around?

Fenway pre-2000 had:

1) Tiny concourses behind the infield seats
2) Bad lighting in said concourses
3) Many standing puddles of brackish water on the grounds of those concourses
4) A distinct, though not overpowering, rank odor (probably from the water)
5) Cracks everywhere on the ground, IIRC on some of the pillars
6) Because of how small the concourses were, trash cans weren't as plentiful as should be, so as the game went on, more and more trash would mix with the standing puddles of water

When I say dump regarding Fenway, I mean that exact word. Shea just looked kind of like a worn-out piece of crap stadium with cheesy accoutrements (from the outside).

So are they more like an old house ,with quirks, that's uninhabitable without a full Norm Abrams renovation?
or a condemed shack that needs to be bulldozed?

More like the dorm room of two male college freshmen. At the end of the year, it may look horrible, but really all it needs is to be cleaned up and patched in some places. You're never getting it fully back to the way it was, though.

I've been to Fenway once and have two enduring memories:

1. Someone left a Brown Monster right smack in the middle of the men's room floor.

2. Manny Alexander hit a grand slam.

Maintenance at Fenway really went out the window the last 3-4 years of the Harrington administration. This is when the Sox were very active in trying to get a new park built, and it's never a bad idea to let maintenance on the old one slide to convince people of that. I remember going to a rainout in 2001 where the concourse flooded quite badly. Broken windows weren't getting fixed, paint was chipping. The place was falling apart, but by design, not from age.

I went in 03 and they'd taken 20 years off the place, and it's only gotten better since then. Fenway is probably as comfortable a park now as it's been for 50 years.

Shea has never been the same since they took down thos wonderful orange and blue metal squares down. Those were amazing (and not too rusty)

Yankee Stadium is kind of underwhelming.

Yea, I visited for the first time in 2006, and felt the same way. Same with Wrigley. I think maybe it means more to the hometown fans than it does to out-of-towners.

Yankee Stadium is kind of underwhelming.

Yea, I visited for the first time in 2006, and felt the same way. Same with Wrigley. I think maybe it means more to the hometown fans than it does to out-of-towners.

I was very annoyed when I discovered that you couldn't get Haagen-Dazs at Mount Rushmore. That joint should really do more to attract the casual history buff.

Yea, I visited for the first time in 2006, and felt the same way. Same with Wrigley. I think maybe it means more to the hometown fans than it does to out-of-towners.

I haven't been to Wrigley either, but even with the dumpy qualities, I loved going to Fenway every single time. Not just the Monster or the scoreboard, but knowing that out there in that patch of grass, Babe Ruth played, Ty Cobb played, Carlton Fisk waved his arms, etc. Maybe it's being from Arlington, where the 1971 piece of crap stadium was replaced in the early 90s, so there's never been anything of that sort of history on the field I was used to looking at. Regardless, I thought it was awesome.

Uh, Andy, I was at Mt. Rushmore last summer and you can, indeed, buy ice cream of many varieties. It is doing its best to attract the casual history buff. As well as the clueless history buff and the fat, ignorant, arrogant idiot history buff.


Overheard at Mt. Rushmore:

"Which one is Kennedy?"

(another group altogether): "I think Kennedy is the one on the right."

"All park rangers are communists. Everyone knows that."

Sigh.

EDIT: If I were deaf, Mt. Rushmore would have been awesome. The sculpture itself is really hard to believe.


Anyhow, I like the old parks. The new ones are too comfortable and have far too many distractions. There should be a field, seats and a scoreboard. There should be a concession stand but it shouldn't be too easy to get to (the Nationals new park is doing well here). Any other features are unnecessary.

Anyhow, I like the old parks. The new ones are too comfortable and have far too many distractions. There should be a field, seats and a scoreboard. There should be a concession stand but it shouldn't be too easy to get to (the Nationals new park is doing well here). Any other features are unnecessary.

Especially affordable seats where you don't need binoculars. That's a bit too retro for my taste.

Especially affordable seats where you don't need binoculars. That's a bit too retro for my taste.

Don't forget: no obstructed views.

As a Mets fan in NY, I went to Yankee Stadium for the first and only time earlier this year. I too was struck by how ordinary it really is. It's just a stadium. It has a baseball team, concessions, mostly enough bathrooms, mostly enough parking, and easy subway service, just like two dozen other stadiums. Everybody builds monuments and banners for their past great players and championships won. NYY's just had more of them.

I also went to Fenway two years ago, and definitely noticed how out of the ordinary that park is. IMO, it's seriously deficient as a stadium, far more than either Yankee or Shea. It's really cramped in both the concourses and seating areas, and it's got serious problems with capacity and sight lines and parking and accessibility. Fenway needs replacement more so than Yankee Stadium does, and I predict that it will be within the next ten years, once Red Sox ownership sees the extra money coming in to both NY teams.

Finally, Shea is perfectly serviceable as a stadium. Replacing it is 100% a business and profitability move. More luxury boxes, corporate naming rights revenue, shrinking the capacity (let's face it, even at the team's best, it will never sell out 57,000 capacity regularly), renewed PR with the flacks who parrot the "concrete ashtray" label even though every stadium could be called that. I'm sad to see it go, I quite like the geometrical architecture of Shea, with the round stadium and symmetrical stands and field dimensions. But it's clearly in the best interest of the team for revenue and PR reasons.

Shrines
Wrigley
Fenway
Yankee Stadium
Chicago Stadium (Bulls/Blackhawks)

Dumps
Shea
Boston Garden

Your mileage can and will vary

But Karl. The Red Sox pay nothing for Fenway right now. Nothing. Zero. Nada. And they get as much from ticket revenue as the yankees do. There's no motivation whatsoever for the Red Sox to build a new park. The yankees' revenue edge is in having 17 million people in the metro area who might be in front of tv sets as opposed to 4 million or whatever the number is in metro Boston.

And I'll add one more voice to the chorus remarking about how generic yankee stadium seems. I saw it for the first time in 2006 and was disappointed at how lacking in distinctive touches the place was.

And, um, Boston Garden was torn down something like 12 years ago.

There's no motivation whatsoever for the Red Sox to build a new park.

Also, where in God's name would you put it?

And, um, Boston Garden was torn down something like 12 years ago.

And that smoking crater in the ground is a ####-hole!

The Red Sox pay nothing for Fenway right now. Nothing. Zero. Nada.

They wouldn't have to pay much for a new park either as they can deduct it from the revenue sharing.

This ownership group has been quite clear in their plans to keep Fenway. "For generations to come" has been the phrase. The Red Sox have also plowed huge piles of money into the renovation of the park, which doesn't make a lot of sense if there's any future plan to replace it.

Ten years is a long time, and the word of Larry Lucchino is a more complex thing than it ought to be, but I don't see any reason for the Red Sox to replace Fenway, and I would be very happy to wager that there will be no replacement Fens a decade from now.

Besides putting up the Monster seats and apparently fixing some of the infrastructure that the last group let go to hell, what else have they done?

I had no idea Alex Balth wrote for SI, I stumbled across his blog exactly once, and sent him a note about a post I like (he responded with a nice reply).
I honestly assumed he was a regular normal fan guy, not a media fellow.

Alex started with the blog, then Baseball Prospectus, then SI. He's a regular guy turned media fellow. Who is still a regular guy.

Especially affordable seats where you don't need binoculars. That's a bit too retro for my taste.

Don't forget: no obstructed views.

Subtract the few hundred obstructed view seats from the old parks caused by the poles, and then add on the many thousands of seats that effectively require binoculars because they took the poles away. The first row of the upper deck in the new parks is routinely further away from the field than the last row in those non-cantilevered parks.

Not to mention that the obstructed view seats only came into play during the rare sellouts, and were clearly labeled as such. The bottom line is that the tradeoff benefitted one group alone: The owners.

Which is fine, since they own the teams, but please don't swallow the propaganda that this was some sort of a net improvement to the stadium experience.

Alex started with the blog, then Baseball Prospectus, then SI. He's a regular guy turned media fellow. Who is still a regular guy.

And a [http://baseballanalysts.com/archives/2008/05/friday_fotos.php cool friend[/url]...oh, and swell author.

I aesthetically prefer stadia without poles, and I think you're exaggerating a bit (or you're losing your eyesight as you get old :) ) on the pains of moving the upper decks back. I watched Kenny Rogers' perfect game from halfway between 1b and the OF wall, at the literal very top row of tBiA, and I could see everything, including pitches, just fine.

I'm always amazed at how much the otherwise intelligent posters here have fallen for the owners' new ballpark propaganda.

Yes, cool friend... (grrr)

I've been to Fenway 4 or 5 times, but not since 1999 (Tomo Ohka's debut!) I'm told they've fixed it up, but up to then, that place was a shocking piece of crap.

To me, Fenway is beautiful and unique enough that the inconveniences (bad sight lines or uncomfortable seats or whatever) are almost beside the point. I regard any suggestion that it be replaced as insanity.

Yankee Stadium is a deadly boring stadium with a few trappings of tradition. These little details are nice and I suppose you can attach emotional significance to them, but they aren't enough to hide the fact that it is a dump of a cookie-cutter stadium. Appropriate that its most famous feature is a facade. It should be replaced.

Shea Stadium is a dump of a cookie cutter stadium with no apologies. It should be replaced.

Huh, I had always figured you looked like Rorschach, Repoz.

My father was there, and was disappointed greatly by lack of a Bobby Murcer tribute of any kind. I wager that if he had died a month earlier, the event planners would have set something up.

YES ran a package of him at Old Timer days past - the broadcast always mic'd him, and he always picked a Yankee from the active roster to be his "batting coach" with the goal of hitting a home run. Never got one, though.

Made me a bit misty.

I aesthetically prefer stadia without poles, and I think you're exaggerating a bit (or you're losing your eyesight as you get old :) ) on the pains of moving the upper decks back. I watched Kenny Rogers' perfect game from halfway between 1b and the OF wall, at the literal very top row of tBiA, and I could see everything, including pitches, just fine.

I had upper deck Sunday ticket seats at Camden Yards, towards the top but halfway between home and first, and while of course you can "see everything," the point is that the players are so far away it's like a completely different game. Not that Memorial Stadium was all that cozy itself, but I'm comparing CY more to the smaller parks like Connie Mack and Griffith, where for the price of an UNRESERVED ticket you sat in the ninth row behind the boxes in either the upper or lower decks, and were practically privy to the conversations on the field. This wasn't uncommon in most of the older stadiums, and comparing the sort of value you got in those to what you get now in the "retro" parks is like night and day, and that's beyond the question of the ticket price.

And while the aesthetics of the poles themselves aren't a positive feature, since only about 2% of the views were obstructed, and since the reserved seats behind the poles were always the last to be offered for sale, I'm not sure what the real problem you have with them. They made the game a more enjoyable experience for the vast majority of the fans. I've had corrected 20-20 vision all my life, but you still enjoy the game a lot more when you're closer to the action.

Put it this way: If you could have experienced the pleasures of buying an unreserved seat that was the equivalent of the second or third most expensive seat in the house today, you wouldn't be dumping on the older parks for the lack of the amenities. This isn't "nostalgia"; it's simply realizing the difference between a game that you could afford to go to---and buy a very good seat---while barely thinking about the price, and an "event" where costs have to be carefully calculated, and which most people can only afford a handful of times a year.

What balances all of this garbage nowadays is one thing alone: the Extra Innings package, which is the greatest sports bargain in history. But that's a separate question.

I don't see much of a difference between outfield upper deck and infield upper deck. As I said, I didn't have any problems from IF upper deck, and it didn't seem any less like being at a baseball game than being in the bleachers. Now, if they charge more for IF, I would see that as a problem.

When I was a kid and we didn't have much money, when we went we sat in the OF bleachers at Arlington Stadium. When tBiA opened, my parents joined some others in splitting season tickets, with those being lower box. When I pay, I sit in the OF. So I don't have a ton of experience with IF upper deck, but I don't notice much of a difference at all in tBiA IF UD vs. other stadia I've been to.

If you could have experienced the pleasures of buying an unreserved seat that was the equivalent of the second or third most expensive seat in the house today, you wouldn't be dumping on the older parks for the lack of the amenities.

Now, now, I never did that. I said Fenway was a dump at one point, but that wasn't about seat arrangement, it was about crumbling infrastructure and dank pools of health hazard everywhere.

I don't mean to defend the move away from obstructed view other than on a personal level. I don't feel much affected in the new retro parks vs. the old gems, and if it means that potentially 2% of people now don't have a big column in their way, I'm cool with that.

I certainly won't argue either your point about skyrocketing ticket prices or EI making things net neutral. To be honest, when I'm back up in DFW for some reason and if my mom doesn't have tickets to a game from her split package, it never crosses my mind to shell out for an OF ticket. That's not money as much as it is, given her being 20 minutes away from the stadium, traffic and parking, and the length of an average Ranger game, going to a game is a 5.5 hour investment. That's a much bigger deal to me than pricing.

Besides putting up the Monster seats and apparently fixing some of the infrastructure that the last group let go to hell, what else have they done?

Redid the field, so that standing water issues are gone. Created substantial new concourse areas for more and more varied food choices. Put that rooftop restaurant on. Renegotiated the vendor agreement, so that food is actually edible and you can drink something other than Coor Lite or Bud Lite if you're a beer-drinking sort. Retrained or replaced the infamously non-responsive stadium personnel with people who actually will answer a question. Made sure that the concourses and bathrooms are clean. I've probably missed some things, but I only get to Fenway once or twice a year these days, compared to when it would be at least a dozen time.

They've done a lot of work, and it's a better ballpark than it was during the Harrington years.

Despite the issues that you raised, Jeff K., for me one of my favorite moments was when I took my friend N. to Fenway for the first time, back in the late 80's when it was at its worst. We got same day tickets for the second Ryan-Clemens match up. We had to enter early, and the look on his 45 year old face when we exited the concourse and saw the field was amazing.

I went to a lot of games at Memorial. If you lived in DC it was kind of a pain in the ass to get to, but I liked it.

To me, Fenway is beautiful and unique enough that the inconveniences (bad sight lines or uncomfortable seats or whatever) are almost beside the point. I regard any suggestion that it be replaced as insanity.

Just to note again, I agree with this. Even when I was horrified at the condition of the concourses, that all went away the moment I popped out of the tunnel halfway between home and first and saw the field before me. And that was my 4th time there.