Today is opening day at Yankee Stadium, though it’s not really the opening day of the baseball season. And it’s not the real Yankee Stadium either.
As a New Yorker I am a Yankees fan, though I don’t follow sports very much. Even though the Yankees have done a lot of winning, they don’t always make it easy to be a fan.
My friend Scott M.X. Turner is perhaps the most knowledgeable sports fan among my many sports fan friends and he’s a Mets fan and committed Yankees hater. “Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for General Motors,” he once told me.
And it’s hard to argue against that idea. The New York Yankees have been a crappy citizen at almost every turn. No sports franchise has shit on its own fans as much as the Bronx Bombers do, and it can wear you down.
The Yankees, which is one of the richest sports franchises in the country and the world, managed to get millions in tax credits from New York City to build a luxury stadium that it didn’t need. The new stadium has three times the number of luxury boxes as the old stadium yet fewer seats for fans. It’s a worse stadium too. You can’t see the field from every seat. There’s even a very visible “moat” that keeps the rank-and-file fans far away from pre-game field access that used to be a staple of baseball stadium design. Want to get your kid a player’s autograph after batting practice and have them see the entire game from an in expensive seat? Too bad. It’s easy to buy an overpriced beverage though.
The Yankees used to play at a historic stadium that was not perfect but you could see the entire field from every seat: baseball stadium building 101. The Boson Red Sox are (of course) the most loathsome team in all of the world and represent the lowest form of life in terms of drooling, mongoloid-like ignorance on the part of its fans and players. Even the Red Sox didn’t tear down their storied stadium.
Ticket prices have skyrocketed too and the idea of being able to take a family to games regularly is just not a reality except for the wealthiest New Yorkers.
And those of us that were born Yankee fans can’t leave our team. My father’s family grew up in the Bronx and my Dad could walk to Yankee Stadium from his high school (his alma mater, All Hallows High School, saw some of its parkland athletic fields gobbled up by the new Yankee Stadium). Growing up in Yonkers in the late 70s and early 80s, I marveled at the exploits of Reggie Jackson. I got to see Mickey Mantle come out of the dugout in his own uniform to say goodbye to Phil Rizzuto and I screamed and cheered as Billy Martin kicked dirt on an umpire. Living in Connecticut in the early 1990s when the Yankees were doing poorly, my many Boston Red Sox fan friends would taunt my Yankee fandom, but I remained loyal. I was even living in the Atlanta area during the 1996 World Series and dutifully wore my New York Yankees hat to work every day to give them some helpful mojo.
The most revolutionary thing an unapologetic Yankees fan can do is to focus more on the minor league teams the team has. In New York, you can go to Staten Island and see a Staten Island Yankees game for a fraction of what it would cost to visit the new Yankee Stadium. It’s a good way to continue to be a Yankee fan but not get ripped a new one every time you go to a game.
