By all accounts, the Yankees had a very successful weekend at the gate. They averaged 47,988 fans per game and drew 143,966 over the weekend. Those figures represent the highest three-day total and best three-game average in the short history of new Yankee Stadium.

Yet, as the Subway Series unfolded, I couldn’t help but think about the 21,000 fans who didn’t get to see the Mets and Yankees in person this weekend. Prior to this weekend, the Yankees and Mets were averaging around 55,522 fans per Subway Series game at Yankee Stadium. Just once — a make-up game on a Sunday in June 2004 — did the teams fail to draw at least 54,978 fans.

On its surface, the low attendance numbers aren’t surprising. After all, new Yankee Stadium has a capacity that is 4500 seats fewer than the ballpark across the street did. What is surprising though is that the three games against the Mets weren’t up to that capacity. The Yankees didn’t draw the 52,325 fans they claim can fit into the new stadium, and even omitting the 2000 standing room-only tickets, they weren’t even within 2,000 fans of the 50,325 non-SRO capacity crowd.

Prior to the weekend showdown, Mark Feinsand published a short piece on this very issue. He wrote:

Through the first 29 games in the Bronx, the Yankees have had only one sellout in their new $1.5 billion palace, all the way back on Opening Day. Last season the Yankees sold out 58 of their 81 home games. Even that crowd was announced at 48,271, well short of the stadium’s listed capacity of 52,325. The team said that the remainder of the tickets had been given out as comps, so they didn’t count toward the official total…

“Since the price was dropped, sales have been good, combined with the fact the team has won,” a person familiar with the Yankees’ ticket sales said. “Sales have gotten better day to day. It (the price reductions) did work. Plus, the team is winning and that helps.”

The person added that 88% of all seats available to be sold for the entire season have been sold, though the remaining 12% presumably include many of the most expensive seats. Still, if Yankees-Mets can’t bring a full house, what series can?

The real issue remains, of course, the high-priced tickets. The Yanks won’t hit a capacity crowd until all of the luxury suites and all of the Legends Suites tickets are accounted for. We’re still waiting for that day to come this year, and if I had to bet, I’d put money those seats costing less next year.

For now, the Yankees continue on in the economic experiment in sports ticketing that is new Yankee Stadium. The seats for key series will be empty, and those of us who didn’t have the chance to buy tickets will just have to live with the jarring sight of empty Yankee Stadium seats when the Mets (and Red Sox) are in town.

On the eve of Opening Day at Yankee Stadium, I wrote a piece about the shape of the field at the new park. While team officials had long claimed the new field would have the same dimensions of the old, an overlay of the two fields proved otherwise. With flat fences dominating the left- and right-field power alleys in the stadium, I predicted a hitters’ park. Little did I realize what George had wrought.

The story of the offense is well worn by now. Home runs at the new park are on pace to challenge home run records. Fly balls into right field are sailing over the wall. It’s the wind currents. Yadda yadda yadda.

While we can’t really dispute the home run explosion anymore, the meteorologist at AccuWeather.com are sticking up for the wind. The weather is not to blame, says Tim Buckley. Rather, the fences are.

Buckley’s piece leads with the graphic below, and it’s hard to dispute his findings. In fact, I had been researching a similar piece to find out if the fences were impacting the game, and Buckley and his researchers basically did it for me. They examined “detailed schematics” of the two stadiums and concluded that the new park’s differences have “significant implications.” He writes:

In right field, the newfound homer haven, the wall structure is slightly different than the old park. The main difference involves curvature. The gentle curve from right field to center field seen in the original Yankee Stadium has largely been eliminated at the new stadium. This is due in large part to the presence of a manual scoreboard embedded within the wall. Losing this curvature has resulted in a right field that is shorter by 4 to 5 feet on average, but up to 9 feet in spots.

Not only is the famed short porch even shorter in the new stadium, but the walls themselves are not as tall. In the old ballpark, the walls in right field stood at a height of approximately 10 feet. At this height, it was difficult for outfielders to scale the wall and attempt to rob a home run over the fence. Fast forward to 2009, and the outfielders have been scaling the wall without any trouble. The result? The new outfield fences only rise to a height of 8 feet, adding to the ease hitting a home run to right.

Taking into account the dimensions of the field and wall height, AccuWeather.com has calculated that 19 percent (20 out of 105) home runs would not have flown out of the old stadium. If the first 29 games are any indication, 293 home runs will be hit by the end of the year at the new Yankee Stadium, just short of the record of 303 home runs hit at Denver’s Coors Field in 1999. If this is the case, as many as 56 home runs could be attributed to the size of the new playing field

As to the weather, Buckley sums it up: “There has been no consistent pattern observed in the wind speed and direction that would lead to an increase in home runs so far this year.”

Over the next few days, we’ll have more on the design choices that went into the new stadium and Major League Baseball’s reaction to it. For now, we seem to know the culprit, and it is as we predicted it would be in April. The fences carry some of the blame.

In the end, though, the question remains: Does it matter? Both the Yankees and their opponents are hitting in the same park, and if the Yanks’ pitchers are better, the Yanks’ bats stand to benefit. The fans love the homer barrage, and it makes the games never out of reach. I think we’ll all have to learn to live with a homer-happy stadium, and we’ll have to like it. After all, chicks and Mark Teixeira dig the long ball.

Click for full-size

Via UmpBump, we learn that MLB.com is now featuring the Yankee Stadium Home Run Watch. They post videos of the home runs every day, which you can already find under the team’s highlights. But hey, it’s all in one place, which is neat. And it comes with the current pace — which was brought down with yesterday’s one-homer affair. Will they break the Coors Field record of 303 homers in a season? Meh.

It’s getting harder and harder to look at Tom Kaminski’s pictures of the Yankee Stadium deconstruction without tearing up a bit. Kaminski — profiled this spring by The Times — took Chopper 880 for a spin over Yankee Stadium on Monday, and his photos are poignant. Work crews has nearly finished deconstructing the old field level box seat sections along the third base side.

In the Tier level, the seats behind home plate are on the way out as well. Those Tier Box sections right behind the dish were my favorite spots in the old stadium. From there, you could see the entire field of play unfold below you, and the seats were low enough to feel close to the action. Check out the full photo gallery here.

As the Yankees return home today, attention once again turns to the home run haven that is the new Yankee Stadium. While overall offensive numbers are not showing a marked increase at the new home, the total number of balls leaving the yard has skyrocketed.

A few days ago, Yanks GM Brian Cashman danced around the issue, and today, Anthony McCarron revisits the case of the home run-happy stadium. The gist of McCarron’s piece is basically that the Yankees are aware of the problem and are looking into it. They will not, however, comment publicly on any studies or solutions, and the team has told Populous, the new name for HOK Sports, to say nothing about it.

For his part, Brian Cashman again denied knowing much about the potential for change at the new stadium. While admitting that the ball is “clearly flying here more than it used to,” he could not tell McCarron why. “It’s not something I’m even thinking about,” Cashman said of any potential renovations to the new home. “Most of the home runs are launched, so I don’t know. We can’t move the subway line.”

Meanwhile, baseball insiders are blaming everything but the stadium. “I think we have a juiced-ball issue that can randomly happen year-to-year,” Cashman said. As home runs are up by nearly 90 percent at new Yankee Stadium and not nearly as much across the league, I find the ball theory hard to believe.

“I think the ball is wound tighter,” added Bowa. “I don’t have documentation to verify it. But the game is cleaner now — the steroids got guys more distance. Fans love home runs and now maybe you can keep homers in the game this way.”

On the flip side of the issue, meteorologists and architects have questioned the Yankees’ claims that the presence of the old stadium has impacted wind patterns in unexpected ways. “Anytime you have large buildings next to each other, you create wind conditions. But these are great, great big buildings. It really takes a lot to effect changes in wind patterns,” Ron Labinski, one of the architects who helped plan the new stadium, said to McCarron. Labinski suggested, albeit tongue-in-cheek, a big fan for right field.

Tom Kines at Accuweather, though, had more to say on the wind issue:

Added Tom Kines, a senior meteorologist for AccuWeather.com: “It’s not like the old Stadium is 500 feet higher or anything like that. I wouldn’t have thought of that as a solution.”

Kines believes the angle of the new Stadium’s stands — they are not as steep as the old park — causes westerly winds to push balls toward the outfield. Some have speculated that the open concourse — something the new Stadium shares with Citizens Bank Park — contributes to the wind, but Kines was unsure whether enclosing the concourses would change anything.

“Other than raising the fences or moving them back, which would both obviously affect seating, I don’t know what their options are, other than finding the best pitching you can get,” Kines said.

I’m currently working on a piece that will look at how many of the home runs hit at new Yankee Stadium would have been out across the street, and the numbers show a significant and meaningful change brought about by the straight wall at the new park. While the wind is a contributing factor, and while it sounds as though the Yankees will address this issue after the season, the simple fix may just be to curve the right field wall. After all, the stadium is supposed to have the same dimensions as the one across the street did. Right now, it does not.

One day before the new Yankee Stadium opened for regular season business, I issued a warning on the stadium. Using the above graphic, I looked at the walls and the lack of foul territory and proclaimed the park a hitter’s haven. Little did I realize how true my prediction would become.

In 23 games, the Yankees and their opponents have blasted 87 home runs at new Yankee Stadium. If that pace continues, the new stadium will witness 306 home runs this year. Last year, old Yankee Stadium served as witness to 160 long balls. That big of an increase doesn’t come about due to a statistical anomaly or coincidence. Something is clearly up.

Over the first few weeks of the season, seemingly everyone has come up with their own pet theory. We blamed the unangled walls for bringing in the power alleys by a few feet. The Yankees have blamed unanticipated wind patterns brought about by the continued presence of old Yankee Stadium. The problem, they say, will be solved next year when the old park is gone. Weather experts have blamed the wind flow and claim that we will see even more home runs over the summer.

Yankee officals, meanwhile, continue to deny that much is different about the new park. It’s becoming rather comical. Yesterday, Times reporter Tyler Kepner talked with Yanks GM Brian Cashman about the outfield fences and skyrocketing home run totals. Writes Kepner:

“I don’t have any answers about wind studies,” Cashman said. When I asked if he still believed the dimensions were the same as before, as some folks have disputed with visual evidence, Cashman said, “I’ve been told they’re the same. I know they’re supposed to be the same.”

Now, we’ve been pretty steadfast Brian Cashman supporters for the last few seasons. We staunchly stood by him through the controversial winter of the 2007, but this year, he hasn’t, in our view, done a stellar job with the roster construction in light of the team’s injuries. He and the Yankees also seemingly mishandled Chien-Ming Wang’s rehab.

These comments, then, seemingly continue a pattern of odd denial by the Yanks’ GM. He may have been told that the fences would be the same, but anyone who has watched Yankee baseball for more than, oh, two weeks could tell you that they’re different. We don’t yet know the cause; we don’t know the final outcome of the offense in the Bronx. We do know that pitchers are unhappy. It’s painfully clear that the new stadium is a hitter’s paradise, and if the Yanks care to even the field, they’ll address it in November. So why is Brian Cashman going out of his way to deny the obvious?