Witnessing History: The New Yankee Stadium Experience

Yesterday began with such promise. It was a glorious day to take in a baseball game and it was my first time in the new Yankee Stadium. The building is such a different experience than the old stadium across the street. Instead of the narrow and cramped quarters behind the stands, you have wide concourses that have every manner of amenity you can think of.

You can view the field from pretty much anywhere in the park, even from the concourses that ring the stands. This stands in stark contrast to the old stadium, where your only views of the field were through the ramps up to the seats.

Then, there's the Great Hall, which fans congregated in and took in the whole experience.

Monument park was relocated as well. It now sits just beyond the center field fence, which is where the original monument park was located at the old Yankee Stadium before the 1970s renovation moved it to the left field location most people currently associate with the monuments. It's still not accessible during the game, and the pre-game line was huge and they cut it off more than an hour before the game.

As for the game itself, it began well enough for the Yankees. We knew that we were going to witness some kind of history, but we had no idea just what kind of history it would be. The Yankees took an early 2-0 lead on a Mark Texiera home run, but that was all the good news for the home team. The Cleveland Indians hit 20 unanswered runs, 14 in a second inning that broke all kinds of records at the new Stadium and in Yankee history for that matter. No team ever put up those kinds of numbers against the Yankees. Ever. It also set a major league baseball record for the most runs ever scored in the second inning.

The final score was 22-4 and the fans who stayed to the end truly were troopers. There was more fight in the stands than the Yankee pitching, which is getting taxed to no end every time Wang goes out and pitches.

One curious point that should be revisited later in the season is the fact that the stadium was packed with crowds except for the elite seats right between the bases - the box/luxury seats that appear to have been priced out by the recession and the overall costs for those seats. This is a game that should have been an absolute sellout, and it fell short. The score of yesterday's game notwithstanding, the game should have been a sellout. It wasn't.

That is perhaps the most troubling thing for the Yankees, besides their clear need for middle relief and to fix whatever ails Chien Mien Wang. They priced those seats too high, and now the team will go with those empty seats showing up on broadcasts night after night for the next six months unless they do something to get fans in those seats. Businesses clearly didn't see the worth of buying those field level seats, and now they're going empty. Even the Yankees admit that they may have overpriced the tickets, but that's not going to do them any good at the moment.

It doesn't matter how comfortable those seats are, and we moved from the terrace level down to behind home plate to see the end of the game. The pricing is going to be a big story as the season progresses.