Yanks to skip Wang’s next start

That photo collage up there — click it to enlarge — shows the view I had yesterday afternoon. Mike and I were sitting in the Grandstand between right field and first base, and we had an excellent view of the mostly empty lower deck. I snapped those photos in the bottom of the first, and the seats never filled in.

For the Yankees, this was just another in a weekend series of disappointingly attended games. The official announced attendance on Sunday was 43,068, and most of that crowd was sitting in seats other than the most expensive ones behind the plate.

Already, bloggers and beat writers are having a field day with this latest development at new Yankee Stadium. Ross at New Stadium Insider compared the empty seats to Madison Square Garden and Pete Abraham’s first mailbag touched upon the issue as well.

The Yankees are seemingly ignoring reality. “We’re actually very pleased, based on the history of reduced attendance for the second game of the year,” Yanks’ President Randy Levine said to Tyler Kepner. “We significantly exceeded even the last year of Yankee Stadium.”

The only problem with Levine’s statement is that it’s not true. The Yanks drew over 48,000 for the second game at Yankee Stadium last year and just 45,000 this year.

In a short post, the Yanks Fan half of YFSF touched upon this issue as well. How can the Yanks, he writes, justify filling under 80 percent of their brand-spankin’-new ballpark in just its fourth day of life?

The problem boils down to Yankee economics. The Yanks have significantly jacked up the ticket prices while the country suffers through one of the worst economic downturns since the Great Depression. I wonder, though, if the current economy has little to do with it. Rather, I think the Yankees may have simply priced themselves out of the baseball ticket market.

Last year’s ticket prices — available here as a PDF — show expensive but not unreasonable prices. The seats right behind home plate now priced at around $1800 a game used to cost $250 for season-ticket holders and $400 for gameday seats. Tickets that used to cost between $85-$135 for season-ticket packages now cost $325 per seat per game. Those differences are not insignificant in any economy.

As the Yankees play out the season under the current pricing schedule, the team will have to reassess how it prices the best seats in the new stadium. The Yankees want to cater to the riches of the rich, but do those people want to spend their money on the Yanks? It’s hard to say. The team alleges that 80 percent of those seats are sold, but if 80 percent of them remain empty game after game, what benefit do the Yankees get?

For the rest of the year, the team has few options. They can’t lower their prices without spurring on a full-fledged season-ticket holder revolt. They could attempt to put some of these primo seats on StubHub via the ticket site’s auctions to better assess their market value. For now, though, we may have to get used to the shocking and discouraging views of numerous empty seats near the field level while the Grandstand and bleachers remain packed.

Much has been made of the way balls are flying out of the New Yankee Stadium, with Buster Olney going so far as to call it “a veritable wind tunnel that is rocketing balls over the fences.” In four games the Indians and Yanks combined for twenty homers, and everyone’s wondering why in the hell this is happening. Thankfully, AccuWeather’s Gina Cherundolo took a look at how the Stadium’s layout may be affecting things (h/t THT):

The old Yankee stadium had more stacked tiers and a large upper deck, acting like a solid wall in effect, which would cause the wind to swirl more and be less concentrated. The new Yankee stadium’s tiers are less stacked, making a less sharp slope from the top of the stadium to the field. This shape could enable winds to blow across the field with less restriction. In addition, the slope of the seating would also lead to a “downslope” effect in the field which, depending on wind direction, would tend to cause air to lift up in the right field. Fly balls going into right field during a gusty west wind would be given more of a lift thus carrying the ball farther out into right field.

The pictures above come from the AccuWeather article, and illustrates what they’re trying to say in meteorologist jargon. Ben and I had a good vantage point yesterday, and we noticed how balls hit to right and right-center field just seem to float up there for longer than usual. That certainly fit the “veritable wind tunnel” theory that Olney thinks is a good fit for describing the New Stadium, but the good news is that this problem might not last all year:

If the stadium seating tier shape is indeed the issue, games will only be affected during times with the winds are from a westerly direction and above 10 mph. This typically occurs during the spring and the middle to late fall. The calmer weather during the summer should lead to a smaller number of home runs. In the meantime, the home run derby may continue.

Well that’s welcome news. Of course the cat’s already out of the bag, so every time a homer is hit in The Stadium, it’s  because it’s a bandbox. A-Rod comes back in May and hits 35 homers the rest of the way to lead the Yanks to the postseason? It’s because he plays in a bandbox. Jorge Posada has a bounceback year and hits 23 homers? Bandbox. Austin Jackson hits a homer in his first game? Bandbox. David Ortiz hits two homers off a long reliever? He’s healthy and back in ’03-’07 form.You know how it goes.

Assuming the weather holds up, tonight will be the first night game played in the new digs, so we have yet to see how the place plays under the moon. No matter what the studies show, we need a much bigger sample than four games to see how this place really plays. But what’s life without knee jerk reactions?