Derek prefers his shaken, not stirred.
Tired of the new Stadium yet? Me neither. Let’s jump in.
With season previews abounding in New York papers these days, there’s no shortage of stories about the new Yankee Stadium. Last week, we enjoyed learning about the martini bar and other luxurious offerings that will come with the new Yankee Stadium Experience. Today’s story comes to us from Sam Borden of The Journal-News, and it focuses on the more practical aspects of the new Yankee Stadium.
In it, we learn about the Yanks’ approach toward designing this new stadium. They wanted, according to team COO Lonn Trost, to restore aspects of the old Yankee Stadium that were abandoned during the renovations in the early 1970s and keep other long-time attributes. For example, the eagles that currently adorn the stadium entrance will fit right in on the new stadium and will appear more like the 1923 originals which were removed in the 1970s.
Beyond beyond the cosmetics, Trost and Borden talked field dimensions and seating bowl configurations as well:
Home plate will be moved 20 feet closer to the seats; the black seats in center field, which were unoccupied and served as the “batter’s eye,” will be replaced by a large sports bar with black-tinted windows; the numbering of the sections will be revamped, meaning that now section 201 actually will be next to section 202, as opposed to the odd-numbers-in-right-field, even-numbers-in-left setup that currently exists…
Monument Park? It’ll be moved, too, though it’s actually moving back closer to where it was in the original park, when it was literally in deep center field in fair territory (players ran among the monuments on deep fly balls). In the new Stadium, it’ll be in center field again, but this time behind the wall…
Instead of being walled-off from the field, the concourses will be open, so that everyone will always be able to see what’s happening during the game. There also will be approximately 500,000 square feet of amenities for fans to enjoy, Trost said, in a “great hall” between the stadium entrance and the field level.
Contrary to what I reported yesterday, Trost said that the dimensions would stay the same. “The dimensions of Yankee Stadium were not going to change. They just weren’t,” Trost said, sounding a bit enthusiastic about measurements that have been in place only since 1988.
Borden wraps up the piece with a kicker about the attendance. We finally have a figure: Attendance at the new Yankee Stadium will be 52,326, down around 4000 from the current stadium’s capacity.
This I do not like. While it’s much better than what the Mets are doing — who decided cutting a New York sports stadium down to 44,000 was a good idea? — the Yankees are selling out every game in the Bronx. So their solution is to cut the number of seats? That doesn’t fly.
“We could have added more seats, but they would have had to just been higher and further from the field,” Trost said to Borden. “We didn’t want to do that. We wanted to make sure that each fan had a great view and could truly enjoy the new park as much as possible.”
And that, my friends, is selling a lie.
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