The new Yankee Stadium
The veteran artist Charles Spurrier and I journeyed to the new Yankee Stadium for the first time last week to watch the Yankees play the Angels. As a boy, Charles used to make drawings of fans at Cleveland’s old Municipal Stadium in exchange for hot dogs and I attended many a classic tilt at the old Yankee Stadium, every year for exactly 50 years.
The theme of the new stadium could well be “It is not about the game,” so many are the detours and distractions, done in the style of Las Vegas, where the layout of the casinos is deliberately disorienting, so that you will quit trying to get back to your room and just sit down and gamble. During a late inning Yankee rally the other night, for example, 200 people waited on line to enter the Yankee Museum on the second deck, which is next to a museum of work by the team’s “official artist,” Peter Max!
The Stadium is laid out like an open air mall. Because ushers check you tickets, the time-honored practice of moving down to unoccupied seats, known as “flopping,” is prohibited, and little kids can no longer congregate in seats near the field during batting practice to catch foul balls or collect autographs (unless, of course, their parents shelled out thousands of dollars for these choice seats).
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