4/26/11 White Sox at Yankees: New Yankee Stadium

Let’s just say that I won’t be in the mood for Yankee games for a while. First, there were three people in line at 4:50 for a playoff game last year. This was the line at 4:45 for the center field gate:

I
really don’t get how that can happen. That wasn’t that bad as most of
them didn’t go to the outfield for batting practice anyway (why do you
show up this early then?) Then when I optimistically entered the stadium
for a day of working on fly balls:
 

Well actually that looks kind of nice but when you look further up as one does on Home Runs:
 

As
for toss-ups, normally Yankee player toss-ups are *very* (relatively
speaking) hard to come by as a wall of “here”s blasts as soon as the
player comes close to the ball but today it was just one fan. One kid
who seemed like a semi-regular by how the players recognized him, got
well over 50% of the toss-ups that went into the seats while I was
there.

Finally, Curtis Granderson stepped in and hit a fly ball
to my right. I ran to the direction it was hit in, descended two rows
after I saw it touch base and beat out aforementioned “kid” to find it
tucked between the pads of the seat for Ball #1 on the day.

I wanted to stayed a bit as Rafael Soriano went into the bullpen to try and get a toss-up from the ball left in the bullpen:

but as I had no spot at a rail gap in right field because of Ben Weil and Tony Bracco,
and there was a mostly righty group of Yankees coming up, I made my way
over to left field. Absoltuamently nothing. Two Home Runs and for some
reason the White Sox didn’t throw any of their warm-up balls into the stands. Had there been any I wouldn’t been able to move that much because when I got there the rail gaps in left-center had already been taken.

As the groups passed, more and more lefties came up to the plate. So when lefties came up, I went to both see how Jake Peavy was rehabing:

And at the same time waited for him to end and get a ball from Pitching Coach, Don Cooper:

as he was sitting on a bag of about twenty baseballs.

As I looked up to see the time to get an idea of when security would come and try to kick me out, I saw this:

Would I be able to escape the ticket checkers? Let me show you how in three easy steps:
1. Spot the guards coming from your left:

2. Escape to your… wait no there’s a guard to right:

3. Hope the guard to your right stops at a certain section

When they installed the second guard, they hoped he would make people just resign themselves to one side or the other and the guard stopped at a certain section and let the guys coming from left field get the people left in between them. This is the window where you would be able to just keep going left and out wait the guards but this security kept advancing until he met up with the left field guards. The result:

4. Get your ticket checked and be forced to leave.

Frus-tra-ting because of my false start to foul ground I wasn’t even allowed to go back and ask the other ballhawks if they could collaborate in getting me back into the field level seats. I tried going through the tunnel and asking them but apparently i wasn’t even allowed to stand in the tunnel leading to the section unless I had a ticket for that section.

5. Take a picture on the outside looking in:

Did not work. The Yankees have guards at every seat entrance (except for on the fourth level) well before the first pitch because they figure that if they charge so much for tickets than a person not sitting in their assigned tickets cost them that much more. Let’s do some math shall we? 137 entrances to the seats that have security guards (can we call it 140 for the sake of math) +1 supervisor for every ten openings+ 8 ticket checkers= 162 security guards for two hours before the game starts* even $6 per hour=$1,944 every game spent on security and I’m sure they make noticeably more than $6 per hour. That’s just the time from when the gates open until when the game begins.

7. Go back to your paid seat 5,000 feet from home plate:

After the fifth inning I got incredibly bored and frustrated that I was all the way in section 432a. So, I asked the invited if he had ever been to the Yankee museum. He didn’t even know they had one.

Some of the things I saw:

1. World Series Ring:

2. The whole room centers on a display of Don Larsen’s last pitch from his perfect game. There is Yogi Berra:

Don Larsen:

and in between the two is a display case which is shaped on the top by the vertical curvature of Larsen’s last pitch. This case contains baseballs from many (maybe all but probably not) of the Yankee’s past and current players:

They have autographs from players as far back as: