NYY Stadium Insider
Here's a quick hit regarding the Yankees season ticket upgrade process. 
The ticket office has been promising calls for the past month, but they are finally picking up the phone and letting people know where they stand.
As always, they are first trying to pawn off "once in a lifetime" seats between the bases on the field level - $375 seats that no regular person can afford. From reports on message boards, it appears that the Yankees are making calls in seniority order, and they're already up to 1999.
Unfortunately, ticket holders with recent seniority shouldn't get their hopes up for a call in the next couple of days. The majority of Yankees season ticket holders jumped on board in the early 00's when it became nearly impossible to score playoff tickets.
So here we sit, just waiting to hear if we'll have a chance to upgrade our crappy seats in Grandstand section 428. Our hope is to move our seats a little closer to home plate, but remain on the half-season plan. We also might be willing to upgrade to a full season in the bleachers, but we have a feeling a lot of other people have the same idea.
Season ticket holders - what is your plan for upgrading? Are you happy with your current seats? Are you willing to cancel your season tickets if the Yankees sign Randy Winn don't upgrade your seats? Let us know in the comments!
You may have noticed that we haven't commented on the demolition of Yankee Stadium much in the past couple of months. As the destruction escalated, countless news outlets and blogs had it covered and we didn't really have much to add. While many people have agonized about having to see the structure toppled tier by tier, we made peace with the structure's demise a while ago. After all, baseball hasn't been played there for 18 months and the faster the old structure is gone, the sooner the kids of the Bronx get their park land back.
Of course, this comes with a caveat. While the old, post-renovation Yankee Stadium is hardly the original landmark structure that opened in 1923, there is a piece of it that deserves to be preserved. That piece is Gate 2 and by now, most people have heard of the efforts to save it. What you may not know is that those efforts have all but failed, and it is about to face the wrecking ball . The plans laid out by the guys over at Save The Yankee Gate 2 Committee seemed like a no-brainer, but the decision makers in New York City didn't agree.
As you can see in the video below, time is quickly running out.
Let's not allow Yankee Stadium to become the next Ebbets Field, Polo Grounds or original Penn Station. Join in the grassroots efforts to make a last minute save of Gate 2.
Every once in a while, we here at NYYSI like to check in with a Yankee Stadium attendance update (courtesy of our handy attendance tracker). These numbers obviously fluctuate based on competition, weather, etc, but our comparison is a straight game to game comparison vs. 2009. Nothing more.
Through 36 games in 2010, the Yankees have drawn 1,643,170 fans through the gates at the new Yankee Stadium. Through the same number of games in 2009, the Yankees had drawn 1,624,329 fans, so it looks like the addition of standing room only seats and the newly created "Championship Suite" have paid off to the tune of 18,141 fans, or a 1.15% increase in attendance.
That 1.15% looks like a paltry increase, but considering how close the Yankees are to capacity for every home game, its impressive to even squeeze that out. Most interesting is that we're probably looking at the peak of Yankees attendance numbers for the current Yankee Stadium. The team is in the second year of a new stadium, coming off a championship and is in first place - when will cumulative attendance be any higher?
Our conclusion? Even with increased capacity due to standing room only and cafe seating at Yankee Stadium, the team is unlikely to ever reach the four million fan plateau again - something that was a given at the old Yankee Stadium. "Four million" might just be a nice round number, but the fact remains: significantly more fans were able to see the Yankees in person at the old Yankee Stadium than the new one. We're saddened by this.
When we resume posting, we're hoping have some new material regarding poor construction at Yankee Stadium, beer selection at Yankee Stadium and some newly uncovered obstructed views at Yankee Stadium. Hopefully you'll subscribe via RSS, or check back in periodically.
Earlier today, we caused a bit of an uproar on Twitter when we observed that Yankee Stadium security workers were taking away sun block as fans entered the stadium. The fact that temperatures were soaring toward 100 degrees with bright sunshine made this something to talk about. Of course, there is more to the story.
Via the NY Post's Brian Costello (no link, he told us via email), when reached for comment, the Yankees stated that there are absolutely no policies against sunscreen at Yankee Stadium and that security must have made a mistake. However, regular visitors to Yankee Stadium know that this Yankees spokesman is wrong. Sunscreen in aerosol cans has always been banned. Or perhaps the aerosol ban was no longer policy and the security force really was doing a poor job.
Either way, it is easy to understand why an aerosol can of sunblock would be banned from a sporting venue or a concert. Those cans are heavy, and if thrown toward the field of play, can hurt someone. In addition, they bring with them an inherent fire risk, being highly flammable. You get the point: a ban on aerosol cans can be justified.
But here is the real problem: the Yankees don't budget enough money for their security company, SECURITAS. As a result, they get really cheap, poorly trained workers who pass along a message about canned sunblock and apply it to ALL spray sunblock. So there people were, being forced to throw away full bottles of sun block.
Interestingly, nobody was making a stink out of this policy as they entered. It seems that fans going to Yankee Stadium have adapted to the idiocy of the SECURITAS security force, similar to what airline passengers have done with the TSA. The only way this will be addressed is if people like us recognize how dumb it is when parents are forced to douse their children with spray sunblock out of a PLASTIC pump bottle and then throw away perfectly good sunblock that they could have used in the future. It's up to us to make sure that the Yankees clarify their policy in the near future and communicate it better, or adjust the policy altogether.
In official comments about securities issues, the Yankees will never blatantly spell out the underlying problem of poor security throughout the stadium, causing fans to be inconvenienced. We certainly hope that they take notice of issues like this and take action behind the scenes to correct the problems.
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