The Longest Lines were at the ATMs at the New Yankee Stadium

I finally saw it - the new and improved Yankee Stadium with bigger, wider sides to accomodate for more stores to sell "stuff." Sigh. What was once a place where families could go to escape the pavement of New York City, has become monstrous homage to merchandising. The new-look Yankees are overpaid home-run hitters. Now I see how they are paying them. Each one of our tickets were $100 a piece. Four of us went. Now I see why much of the rest of the country has come to hate NY and it's overinflated cost of living and bravado.

The NY Giants and Jets are doing the same thing, but even worse to an extent with their Personal Seating Licenses (PSLs) - a one time buy in fee for the right to own your seats like an investment in a company through the stock market. However, it is not clear to me whether the ticket prices drop when the team starts losing. But let me get back to Yankee Stadium...

Besides the relentless and obnoxious in-your-face merchandising, it is my opinion that Yankee stadium was hastily designed. There are a number of noticeable flaws in it's design:

- The scoreboard is too big and too busy. The HD jumbo-tron is gorgeous, make no mistake about it. It's the clearest and biggest picture I've ever seen. It's 60 feet by 100 feet wide! The picture is astoundingly clear. Watching the instant replay on it was cool. However some might argue that it takes your focus off the action on the field. The scoreboard is surrounded with so many advertisements for companies like Budweiser, Utz and Delta, that you can't find the pitch count, outs, etc... There is so much to look at, that it took me almost a minute to find the pitch count. Then, once I did locate it in a tiny area to the left of the enormous screen, I kept having trouble locating it every time because that area is just, well, so darn busy! The MPH per pitch is located at the top of the screen, and the scoreboard by inning is too small and located at the bottom of the screen. The Ball/Strike count is located off to the left surrounded by advertisements. So basically, everything is spread out, rather than in one, quick, easy to see spot. By the time you locate the info you want in order to truly follow the game, your have missed the pitch on the field. That was really, really annoying for the $400 price tag to get in. It was glitzy, flashy, sparkly, and filled with digital graphics meant to awe you into believing $400 was worth it. They overdid it in this department. In my view, it takes away from the game, and makes the whole experience a bit too much techno-metro sexual for my taste. You can see a video with new scoreboard here: http://newyork.yankees.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20090414&content_id=4263702&vkey=news_nyy&fext=.jsp&c_id=nyy

- Poorly placed and sized signage/directions around the stadium. The hallways were teeming with patrons and the hallways need bigger, better placed signs. It was hard to locate the directions to the men's room.

- The men's rooms were very poorly designed. For a billion dollar stadium, you'd think they would have automatic flushing toilets right? Why would I want to touch that handle? And why is there only one entrance to the bathroom? There should be an entrance and an exit to the men's room with no doors, so you can enter and exit from either side. The door that was installed had no handle on the inside so we couldn't get out! We were locked in there, and had to wait until someone came in and pushed open the door from the outside. I'm not kidding you! They need to add some interior door handles for the men's rooms! Finally there were no air blowers to dry your hands. Instead, the geniuses installed paper towel dispensers 1 foot above the wet sink counter tops, so when you dispense the paper towels, they dispense out onto the wet counter top. Yankee Stadium must be wasting millions of pounds of paper towels because of the poorly placed dispensers.

- For the average Joe, it was way too expensive to have a good time! One beer costs $9.00. We're not talking Amstel Light or Bass Ale here, we are talking 1 normal plastic bottle of Bud Light. A 6 pack at the supermarket is $7.00. There were Yankees stores at every other gate (the gates were poorly labeled as well) and everything inside was approximately 25% more expensive than a store in a mall or on Main Street USA. The steak sandwich, which by itself (no sides came with it) was $16.00.

So in conclusion, the Yankees are now a baseball team with more razzle-dazzle than any other team in MLB. They may be in first place, but the only ones who care are those who either sit in the bleachers for $20 or watch the games from their couch or read about it the next day in the paper. There is nothing macho about this crowd. Instead, you find flashy bankers and middle aged men dishing out $20's to their kids to go consume overpriced food and merchandise. There were too many people getting up and leaving during the course of the game. Too many times I was asked to get up. No one seems to want to just sit and watch a baseball game at Yankee Stadium. Instead they bleed green the entire time due to a merchandising effort unlike anything I have ever seen. The Steinbrenner boys are certainly milking the majestic Yankee History for every possible dollar. The price is Yankee pride. How can I take pride in the Yankees when they are trying to sell me a 3"x 3" piece of "Yankee History" (dirt) with a few blades of grass on it in a box for the low-low bargain price of $80.00?

By the time the game was over, I could barely remember who had hit each of the 5 home runs in the game. But I absolutely do remember that the longest lines were at the ATM's. That pretty much says it all right there.