There’s No Place Like Home

You knew it was coming.  After losing his baseball home and suffering anxiety attacks worrying about the future, Josh Deitch spent an evening at the New Yankee Stadium.  He shares his thoughts.

Having passed through a spacious atrium brilliantly lit and rendered by natural light pouring through arched windows, I stare at a glass-encased stadium store and gaped at the seemingly never-ending expanse between ground floor and ceiling.  I ride an escalator transfixed by the bright colors of giant banners featuring the Yankees stars of the past.  On my left, an enormous Tommy Bahama bar emerges from over the horizon of the second floor.  I’m pulled back to reality by the voice of my father, “This is weird…”

I look back at him, the pristine, fully-stocked watering hole hovering over my shoulder, “Did you ever think we’d come to a Yankees home game and feel totally lost?”  There’s no answer.  It’s too late.  He’s lost to the void that is the New Yankee Stadium…and we haven’t even seen the field.

I could write 20,000 words on my initial experience at the new ballpark in the Bronx—the House That Ruth Certainly Did Not Build.  Between the LED display screen in centerfield that encompasses a country mile, the open-air concourses through which the wind violently blows, and the eerily perfect reproduction of the playing field, I wouldn’t know where to begin.  When my dad and I reached the second level, we just stood at a railing and stared out over our new baseball home.  We said nothing, just stared.

In the interest of time and my television-viewing schedule—I still have this week’s “Lost,” “24,” “Rescue Me,” “the Ultimate Fighter,” and “Smallville” to watch—I’m going to steal ESPN’s Three Up, Three Down gimmick to evaluate my experience at the House That Ruth Couldn’t Have Possibly Imagined, no matter how much he drank.

THREE UP

1.  The Concourses.  No question here.  In “Being John Malkovich,” John Cusack’s main character takes a job in an office situated on the seven and a half floor.  Everyone that works there walks around dark and narrow corridors claustrophobically stooped against a four foot ceiling.  Those scenes remind me of the upper deck passageways in the old Yankee Stadium.  Now, the concourses are wider and open onto the field.  Instead of being reminiscent of a drably lit, urine-soaked dungeon—granted it was our drably lit, urine-soaked dungeon—they offer a comfortable passageway to anywhere you want to go.  I spent an entire inning just walking the concourses.  If I had done that across the street, I might never have been seen again.

 2.  The Scoreboard.  To steal a phrase from Phil Rizzuto: Holy Cow!  The Scoreboard!  I don’t know how to begin describing the enormous LED screen that encompasses most of the Stadium.  It’s everything the Stadium is: gorgeous, top-of-the-line, and beyond over-the-top.  You need to see it to believe it.  It’s so enormous that the three-toed statue on the “Lost” island would say, “Damn, that’s a big screen.”  Let’s put it this way: the image clarity is so good that if the entire game were broadcast on the screen, I would never watch the live game.  I’d just get lost in Jorge Posada’s Adam’s apple.  That’s something you just don’t come back from.

3.  The Food.  You want a Johnny Rockets burger?  It’s there.  How about a craft-brewed beer from Pennsylvania?  No problem.  Name your food and beverage: steak and cheese on a garlic wedge? Yep.  Garlic fries?  Got ‘em.  Cold cut deli sandwiches?  Right over there.  Mutton?  Probably.  Hot dogs?  I’m not sure, let me check.  There was an entire stand devoted to sliders, ranging from traditional beef to buffalo chicken.  It reminded me of the baseball scene in “The Naked Gun,” when the camera keeps panning back to Captain Ed Hocken, who continually eats ballpark food gradually decreasing in credulity until he finally bites into an entire cake.  Ultimately, at the House Where Ruth Stocked the Refrigerator, nothing’s off limits.

THREE DOWN

1.  The Layout of the Scoreboard. Maybe it’s just that I need to get used to the new format, but there were moments when I longed for the light bulb scoreboard of old.  Across the street, game information, such as the line score and count, would be posted on the light bulb scoreboards.  As a result, their locations were fixed.  My eyes always traveled to the left-centerfield board to investigate the official scoring or the count.  Now, all that information dances across multiple LED screens.  In fact, the line score, which is typically found at the bottom of the ginormous centerfield screen, disappears whenever a highlight plays.  It took my father and I seven innings to realize that both the left and right field walls feature a light bulb scoreboard displaying the line score.  Also, the pitch speed, type, and pitch count are way too small.  And, not to nitpick, but the icon that signifies a rain delay on the out-of-town board looks like an alien from “Space Invaders.”

2.  The Yankees Middle Relief.   The Yankees’ relievers possess a 6.66 ERA.  Besides the earned runs allowed, 19 of the 45 runners inherited have scored.  Opponents hit .270 against them.  ‘Nuff said.

3.  The Prices.  There’s no denying how expensive this ballpark is.  In a trip to Yankee Stadium, estimates say that a family of four will spend $160.  BARE MINIMUM.  The aforementioned steak and cheese on a garlic wedge was priced at $15.  Beer sold for anywhere between $9-$12.  Apparently, the Bud Light sold at Yankee Stadium is brewed by Leprechauns and is specially imported from the magical land of Narnia.

Worst of all, though, are the premium ticket prices.  I’m not the first to write on this, but Steinbrenner and Sons, Inc. has priced out its die-hard fans .  For a franchise that has drawn over four million people over multiple years, it’s embarrassing to look down at field level on a Friday night and see empty row upon empty row.  In the Loge level, there was an entire section that went unpopulated.  As my buddy Andy put it, it looked like the Stadium was missing a tooth.  That’s not the image you want to project if you’re the New York Yankees.

AND SO…

It’s going to take me some time to get used to the new park.  Because they so faithfully reproduced the playing field, right down to the cross hatching mowed into the grass, the entire experience felt surreal.  There I was, sitting in the upper deck, watching the same field I have for years, the familiar chants of “Hip Hip Jorge” ringing in my ears, and it felt like home.  Then I’d look up and see that monstrosity of a scoreboard, and remember that, like Dorothy and Kansas, I wasn’t in the House That Ruth Build anymore.  As we left, my father described it perfectly: “It’s like a dream where everything’s the same, but at the same time, nothing is.”