Out of Wright Field: Let Them Watch YES

Are Corporate Boxes the new Bleacher Seats?

The New Bosses: Hal and Hank Steinbrenner

The first trip I will undoubtedly take to the new Yankee Stadium hangs over my face with forboding, like the queasy look on that girl you took home on St. Patty’s day. You’ll get what you want in the end but let us talk like adults and say straight away that the process of getting there is going to be messy and require more work than you may have planned. I love the old Yankee Stadium and have many great memories of being inside the park. I’ve partied in the bleachers, squinted from the far corners of the stadium and watched a whole cadre of Dominicans lighting Cubans after the final game of the ‘96 World Series. I guess this is where the problem arises for me. The whole place is burned into my consciousness and I fear that the new stadium simply won’t have the space for riff-raff like me.

The new stadium has a smaller total attendance, cuts the bleacher seats in half and provides a massive boost to the number of corporate suites. The details of this plan leave me cold, but that’s generally how it is on the outside. It seems that the rooms full of Great Gazoos making the decisions for the Yanks don’t have much concern for the common man. If the seating skews heavily to the corporate side how are we the people supposed to compete?

Baseball games have become very expensive; almost prohibitively so. This isn’t news to anyone I am sure, but an increase seems out of order. Going to see the Yankees is a bit like a rite of passage here, and the men in control seem to want less of the average New Yorker (i.e. fans), while they do back flips trying to pack the stadium with corporate types that may or may not even care about the team. I get it, from a business standpoint it makes much more sense to fill the place with deep pocketed “Kings of the Universe” to steal a line from Tom Wolfe, but how much neglect are the fans really willing to take in the name of business. The business of the Yankees is to be a vital part of the city as a whole, not a meeting place for Wall Street.

So here we are with another column about how the poor fans can’t afford to see their team and how those that own the teams and the stadiums simply don’t care. “Let them eat cake” has become “let them watch it on YES.” However, I’m better than that. The real question is what will happen with the corporate seats now that many corporations are tossing around less dough than a pizza place. In case you haven’t heard, the economy isn’t doing well. In fact, it looks like it had a threesome with Chris Brown and Ike Turner at a free PCP party. So now that they have no money, and we have no money…who the hell is going to buy these seats?

Major corporations around the country are tightening their belts and some of the heavy hitters of the New York financial world are under a fair amount of scrutiny. Well, as much scrutiny as a stacked system allows them to be under. We’re shoveling money to them and they seem to think that it’s coal, burning it up like the building will turn into a locomotive and chug away from their problems. It won’t happen. The problems will only get worse and there isn’t much of an end in sight at the moment. If the nation as a whole bitches in unison every time a banker thinks about buying a golf ball, I can’t imagine them letting season tickets to the Yankees in a sweet corporate box get paid easily with federal bailout money. Also, what are they doing at a game while the world burns? (Even I can’t resist and it hasn’t become an issue yet…)

If it comes to the point that these unscrupulous money changers can’t afford to pay for a really nice meeting room in the Bronx, those seats should be raffled off to the public or provided at a reasonable price. All ticket prices have gone up, and making the real fans scramble and save to try and catch a glimpse of their children’s heroes is simply unfair. The people watching the games at home, the ones that show up to the parades and cry when they lose, should be there in force. The management of the Yanks should have enough heart to see that, business be damned. The city has already paid $200 million in public funds for the stadium; they should be able to squeeze in a few people that funded the damn thing.

To solve the problem, I feel that the boxes should be raffled off to families offered as a token of good faith that the Yankees still love their fans. The Steinbrenners should let their public image thaw and provide something that would make anyone smile when they see it in the Post the next morning: the image of a regular family crowded into a cushy corporate suite while some kids from an outer borough smile over a pile of pigs in blankets far too large for them to eat. If they won’t sell the seats, maybe this time, they really could give us some cake.

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