So I visited the new home of the New York Yankees for the second time last week, the first time for an actual ballgame. (My previous visit was for a pre-Opening Day batting practice.)
Suffice to say that familiarity didn’t breed any warm fuzzies for the place: Even with 40,000-odd fans making noise and a great game on the field (Robinson Cano grand slam, an Edmondsesque catch by Indians centerfielder Trevor Crowe), the place exudes all the charm of an airline terminal. Our seats, in the upper deck just past first base, felt slightly but noticeably farther from the field than the upper deck in the old Yankee Stadium (despite the new stadium holding 7,000 fewer seats), and the best thing you could say about the stadium design is that it’s functional; lacking either the history of the old stadium or the graceful sweep of its grandstand, there’s little to engage your eyes, making it all the more difficult to ignore the ADD-inducing cacophony of the giant video board in centerfield.
About that scoreboard: We arrived about an hour before game time, and for the bulk of that time, the video board — which at the old park would likely have been showing either beer ads or old montages of the likes of Thurman Munson — featured a Yankees “reporter” touring various parts of the stadium’s concessions areas: Have you visited the Yankees steakhouse yet? Or our new addition featuring “Spanish cuisine,” Wholly Guacamole? (Yes, I know guacamole isn’t Spanish. Presumably they meant “Spanish-speaking cuisine.”)
It took me a while before I realized what the experience reminded me of: the M&M’s store in Times Square. Just as there, every element of the new Yankee Stadium is carefully calibrated to be three things at once: 1) an entertainment in itself, 2) a product that you can buy, and 3) an advertisement for the overall brand. The only thing missing to complete the experience, really, was an 800 number for you to order your own versions of the suits worn by Yankees players in their scoreboard photos.
Yankees COO Lonn Trost, it turns out, was wrong when he called the new stadium “a five-star hotel with a ballfield in the middle.” What the Yankees have actually wrought is a theme store that happens to have a ballfield in the middle. Judging from the average tastes of American tourists, it’ll probably continue to be a big hit — Western capitalism has long since mastered selling our own dreams back to us — but it seems a lot to spend $25 a ticket and three hours of your life on.
Thanks for the Jon Langford link!
I have always wondered if the “theme store” (“mall park”) is not a horribly short sighted strategy. Sports fanship is all about identity and while you certainly mix identity and consumption, in the long run you need to create the passion necessary to make a long-term commitment to sports. Creating a pleasant commercial environment for an afternoon or evening is not conducive to creating the novelty/spectacle necessary to produce enough passionate sports fans long term.
With enough marketing and manufactured spectacle you can get people to go to the games but it becomes such an effort after a while it is not sustainable because year after year more stuff will be necessary to entice people to go to places with decreasing “organic” passion.
Neil,
I think that some parts of the text is missing:
Paragraph 2: “there’s little to engage your ______”
Paragraph 4: “In Times Square, when you’re buying ______”
And while I agree with your assessment I don’t know why you would have expected anything different; this is how all of the new parks are.
Thanks, typos corrected.
Yes, new stadiums all have this to some extent, but it felt much more blatant in the Bronx. Other stadiums at least try to pretend that you’re there to watch baseball, not just consume things.
New Yankee Stadium may just be the logical extension, but it’s an exceptionally unpleasant one.
I just saw this so am posting late…
the M&M store…hahahahhahahah! That’s the best! Except the M&M store is (sort of) fun.
Oh, a whole new meaning to the “M&M” boys…