Sunday, September 22, 2013

Yankee Stadium (vs. Citi Field) - 09/20/2013

Six teams, three ballparks, one month. It's that time of year.

It's a myth that New Yorkers are in some kind of Hatfields vs. McCoys death feud when it comes to baseball teams - plenty of us like both the Mets and Yankees. I'm more of a fair weather type when it comes to the Yankees, and I do prefer pitchers to hit, but I still want the Yankees to win. They're still a home team, and they've got history.

Yankee Stadium has always been tougher for me to get to than Shea or Citi Field, though; the last time I managed it was 1996. I don't remember much about that game except that Mariano Rivera pitched the 8th, setting up John Wetteland. It was the start of Mo's career and he was only just becoming known. Back then, nobody was even talking about a new Yankee Stadium; the history at the old one made it sacrilege to even think about it.

Well, last night I got to see Rivera close out a game in his final season, at the new Yankee Stadium. It was both a nice bookend and a neat transition to the new stadium for me.


This wasn't actually my first visit to the new building - I previously took some visitors my wife and I had from Japan on an off-day stadium tour. The tour takes you through the museum, monument park, the press box and clubhouse.

Monument Park.
Babe Ruth signed baseball in the museum. They have signed baseballs from about 90% of all the players who ever played for the team. I didn't get an overview shot of the museum because it's actually really small.
Panorama from the press box. It was a rainy day.
You get to see a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff, and you have the whole stadium to yourself. That said, it's a little strange walking through back alleys with no other fans around - I thought the stadium then felt kind of sterile and dead. Without all the people, any little flaws also stick out a lot more, and everything looks somehow uglier. The amount of plain concrete everywhere is a lot more apparent. I wasn't all that impressed. (The clubhouse was like the Rolls Royce of clubhouses, but most people never see that.)

Last night was the first time I got to see the stadium in its natural state - hosting a game. 41,000 fans showed up on a beautiful late summer Friday night to watch the Yanks fight for their playoff lives against the Giants. It gave me a good chance to compare the experience to Citi Field, the Mets' new stadium that opened at the same time, which I've also experienced both stuffed to the gills and more recently as a barren wasteland.


GETTING THERE
Yankee Stadium has to be a little unique in that the vast majority of people who go there get to it by public transportation. It's always been that way, and in fact it's ironically turned into a bit of a problem for the city, who helped finance the half dozen or so parking lots and garages around the stadium and are now finding the company that runs them unable to pay their rent. Nobody parks there!

If you can take the subway or Metro North, then Yankee Stadium's ridiculously easy to get to and is right next to the station. (Citi Field is just as close to the 7 line.) But if you do have to drive, it's a whole different story. Driving through the Bronx is like trying to navigate through a clogged shower pipe on a good day, not to mention the bridge tolls, not to mention the outrageous parking prices. I paid $25 to park in the furthest official lot from the stadium, almost a mile away, with a thoroughly confusing entrance and on the other side of the Metro North tracks. Citi Field parking is $20, but if you're early enough, that puts you basically at the door to the rotunda. You can pay more and get closer to Yankee Stadium, but $35 or more to park at a 3 hour baseball game is getting into the realm of highway robbery.

This is the scenic walk from the parking lot.
Apparently, roving golf gangs are a big problem near the stadium. Be careful!
EXTERIOR AND PUBLIC SPACES
Yankee Stadium and Citi Field both have an obvious front and back (not all baseball parks do). You don't have to enter at the front, but it seems assumed that most fans will. At Yankee Stadium, the front is along 161st St., where you'll find the team store, the Hard Rock Cafe, and the oddly empty "Babe Ruth Plaza" that's just a sunken hole in the ground surrounded by concrete:


The exterior is granite and limestone all the way around and has the feel of a federal government building - it's very staid and serious and looks completely unlike really any other ballpark I can think of. It is meant to invoke the pre-renovation original Yankee Stadium and it probably does a reasonable job of it. The word "stately" is appropriate. I hesitate to even call it a "ballpark" - it's too big.


It also looks more cohesive than the working class, somewhat unfinished look of Citi Field (which is beautiful in a different way and also appropriate to its team), but you wonder if you're supposed to bow your head and say a prayer before entering it. Or maybe get permission from the Chairman of the Federal Reserve.


Yankee Stadium's answer to Citi Field's rotunda is the "Great Hall" along 161st St. It's huge - probably the largest interior space I've seen inside a baseball park. And you're just bombarded with Yankees imagery from the moment you enter. You will never, ever forget that you're in the home of the Yankees at this stadium, and that's the way it should be. This is one thing the Mets need to learn from their crosstown rivals.

They just need to stick some stained glass in those arches for the full effect.
Looking the opposite way in the Great Hall. The Hard Rock Cafe and team store are beyond the far wall.
The Great Hall at night, from the balcony on the suites level. (just above the Hard Rock Cafe sign).
SEATS AND SIGHT LINES
We sat in the front row of section 309, which is the third deck in right field (my wife wanted to see Ichiro!), just above the electronic advertising board that goes around the stadium. There's a 400 level deck above the 300 level (it looks connected but isn't). I was kind of surprised by how high this was. It felt about like the last row of the top deck at Citi Field does - and we had two entire decks behind us! The top of the upper deck must be about like the top of Shea Stadium.

Open this up for a little better view.
The stands at Yankee Stadium are definitely a lot bigger than Citi Field - you lose perspective in photos, but it's immediately obvious in real life. Citi Field has the feel of a small market ballpark (in a good way - it's got "intimacy") whereas Yankee Stadium feels like it could host an Olympics. This isn't just apparent visually but audibly too - you can hear every crack of the bat and every umpire call from the last row of the upper deck at Citi Field, but I could not hear anything from the field whatsoever at Yankee Stadium.

I was worried about seeing the scoreboard from where we were, but it seems like the stadium's designed in such a way that you can probably see it from anywhere in the stands (except the bleachers), including the last section in the outfield. It's pretty clever how they managed that. One thing they didn't quite manage is unobstructed views of the outfield itself - in row 1, you do have the glass and railing in the way, although it's not as bad as the first row of the equivalent section at Citi Field (which can also be blocked by the stairway).

The view when sitting back normally in row 1. You can lean forward a bit and mostly get around this.
The weird thing is despite being bigger, Yankee Stadium can feel a little claustrophobic at times, almost like the game's indoors. I think it's because the design of the outfield area makes it feel like a fully enclosed stadium, even though it's not. At Citi Field, there's a little more outside world coming through in between the scoreboards, and it feels more open. Neither stadium takes any advantage at all of the city views they have, though, which is a lost opportunity. I like to be able to see out over the walls of the park.

Ah, I love that moment when the sun shines just right on the scoreboard.
On the plus side, the Yankees do not blast music out at you every 15 seconds like the Mets do. Even when they do play something (like Rivera's "Enter Sandman"), the volume is something less than ear-splitting. The Yankees are a much more traditional team - for them, baseball is meant to be played in hushed tones.

FOOD, CONCESSIONS AND TEAM STORE
We ate at the Hard Rock Cafe before the game, as we did on our earlier tour. Their prices aren't any different than at any other Hard Rock Cafe (except for beer) and come on, you're not really going to do any better for stadium food. Big difference eating there on a game day, though! We got there before 5PM and already had to wait about 30 minutes. They'll text you when your table's ready so you can wander around or go buy stuff at the team store in the meantime, which we did. I bought a hat ($15) and program ($10), and looked at some other merchandise to compare it to Citi Field - I was surprised to find that in most cases, the Yankees charge less than the Mets. For example, a numbered/named replica jersey is $135 at the Yankees store, vs. $140 at the Mets store. Yankees T-shirts cost $30, vs. $40 at the Mets store. This is all wrong!

(Mets programs are $5 cheaper, though.)

You can also stand outside and have a beer while you wait, which we also did:


Oh yeah! Local beer - by way of LaCrosse, Wisconsin. (So... not local beer.)

Honestly, I don't really have a problem with the prices the Yankees charge for anything inside the stadium. Even the concession stands seemed somewhat cheaper than at Citi Field. A regular beer was $6 (though $11 if you add the souvenir cup, which I stupidly did). At Citi Field, beer is $8.25. Ice cream was $5 for a waffle cone (which holds a lot of ice cream); at Citi Field, it's $6 for a smaller cone. It's New York, and I understand everything is going to be expensive - I just think Citi Field goes a little too far.

I remember reading that same thing about Yankee Stadium when it first opened, so maybe they've reduced their prices. Now it's Citi's turn.

I will say that on the terrace level concourse, which serves both the 300 and 400 decks, there aren't enough concession stands and the lines snake all through the pathway, which makes walking the concourse itself feel like wading through molasses. The terrace level has the feel of an old-school stadium - you're not going to find anything special to eat, and you're going to miss an entire inning looking for the one concession that sells what you want and then waiting for your ice cream and diet soda. The only beer up there seemed to be Bud and Bud Light (I gotta believe they have better beer somewhere in the stadium), and it tasted watered down. Mmmmm, watered-down Bud Light - yum. Citi Field has a big craft beer stand on the equivalent level, and just better concession food in general. You just pay more for it.

This is the concourse near our seats. Not much going on up here, just a few concessions here and there. This was well before the game, so it wasn't very crowded yet.
THE FANS
I gotta say, New York has the best sports fans of anywhere I've been. We're not rude, we pay attention to the games, we by and large do not leave early, and we're not constantly and annoyingly trying to move around like the fans at some stadiums I could name. The fans at both Yankee Stadium and Citi Field are pretty similar in all those ways, as you'd expect from teams that play in the same city.

The two differences are a) the Yankees bleacher bums, which is something the Mets don't have, and b) the national and international crowd that the Mets don't attract like the Yankees do.

There were many, many Asian fans at the game last night, as there probably always are - no doubt mostly because of Ichiro, but the people behind us were actually Chinese and we heard some Koreans too. The Yankees did have a little ceremony before the game for Ichiro to celebrate his 4,000 major league-level hits, which the team is recognizing as a real statistic, so that may have drawn a few more Japanese fans than usual.

They gave him a crystal pitcher or some such, and he gave the MLB Hall of Fame the jersey he was wearing at the time of the 4,000th hit.
The Yankees just have that international cachet that the Mets don't, which always makes me kind of sad for the Mets. The Mets need an Ichiro of their own. Daisuke Matsuzaka just doesn't put butts in seats like Ichiro does.

And probably about 30% of the stadium last night was occupied by Giants fans, which was kind of offensive to be honest. New York fans are actually way more tolerant than they're reputed to be and nobody's ever treated as unwelcome in my experience (and yes, the Giants were once a New York team... before 1957), but it's just wrong to go into another team's stadium en masse and start booing the home players, singing "GIANTS" when it's "root root root for the HOME TEAM" and chanting "Let's Go Giants" chants throughout the game. That's kind of like a houseguest that doesn't flush the toilet, clogs up your drain with hair and spills toothpaste all over your sink because he's "making himself at home".

Well, at least we kicked their asses on the field. That shut 'em up.



Overall I'd still give the nod to Citi Field, mostly because it makes the game feel more like something you're participating in rather than something you're meant to stand back and admire. It's also just a lot easier to drive to and park at, which, for better or worse, is the way a lot of people in the outer boroughs (and beyond) get around. Yankee Stadium's like your high school's statuesque prom queen who you're too intimidated to even talk to. Citi Field is like the cute girl with glasses in science class who texts you out of the blue that she has a crush on you. There may be certain ways I wish Citi'd be more like The Stadium (pricing, team branding, lower volume, putting good players on the field), but they're superficial and can be fixed if the Mets just make an effort. But Yankee Stadium will always be Yankee Stadium, like it or not.

It's a nice problem to have two world class stadiums to visit now, in any case.

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About This Blog

This is increasingly not a blog about Alphabet City, New York. I used to live in the East Village and work on Avenue B, but I no longer do. Why don't I change the name if I'm writing about Japan and video games and guitars? Because New Yorkers are well-rounded people with varied interests, and mine have gone increasingly off the rails over the years. And I don't feel like changing the name. I do still write about New York City sometimes.

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