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May 05, 2009
Latest Yankee Stadium feature: Riots!
As if the New York Yankees' new stadium weren't taking enough lumps, team employees yesterday managed to tell hundreds of fans that last night's Yanks-Red Sox game was rained out — then refused to let them back in once they learned otherwise. One fan was arrested and charged with assaulting an officer (a traditional New York charge that usually means "being assaulted by an officer"), while Yankees officials threatened to revoke the press credentials of a Daily News photographer who was taking pictures of the melee.
New Stadium Insider, meanwhile, suggests this trick: "The Yankees don't officially allow re-entry, but if you go to Gate 6 via the Great Hall, you can wait in line to enter the Hard Rock Cafe, which is open to the public. Since it is open to the public, the Yankees have to stamp your ticket on the way in, allowing you re-entry to the stadium once you are done with your meal." If this really works, it would be the first known actual use for the Hard Rock Cafe.
With Boston in town, it was also the Boston media's turn to take a crack at reviewing Yankee Stadium 2.0, and Boston Herald sportswriter Steve Buckley responded with a long column revealing that:
- Bill Madden hates the new place, but Keith Olbermann loves it.
- Buckley thinks the renovated Fenway Park is "a perfumed-up dump."
- "It really is amazing how much it looks like the old Yankee Stadium, only bigger. The field dimensions and outfield fences are similar, and the seats are Yankee blue. The upper deck is adorned with the same style of frieze that was a signature feature in the pre-renovated original Yankee Stadium, and the Jumbotron in center field shows strikingly clear pictures." (This last is presumably an upgrade to the original 1923 Jumbotron.)
- Continues Buckley: "While the place has been ridiculed as an ill-timed, out-of-place monument to American excess, let’s not forget that the Yankees are the greatest franchise in American sports history. This new stadium is a monument to that success." So that would make it an ill-timed, appropriate monument to American excess?
