My friend Matt wanted to know if I was interested in doing a baseball game this weekend, as his beloved Chicago White Sox were playing in Yankee Stadium.
I looked up Yankee Stadium’s new seating plan. Yankee Stadium is one of several baseball fields that offers vaccinated and non-vaccinated sections. Well, since Matt and I are both vaccinated (and we both have the Excelsior Pass app in our wallets), I figured, what the hell, let’s do this.
Oh, look, here’s some seats right along the first-base line. They’re not bad, and according to the stadium website, they’re the cheapest tickets in the park. Only $375 for a pair of tickets.
You read that correctly. To go to Yankee Stadium … at a minimum … would cost us $375.
That’s not including food (which ain’t cheap), souvenirs (you gotta buy a game program and maybe a T-shirt), and travel (last I checked, Yankee Stadium wasn’t within walking distance of Albany). So figure we’d most likely spend over $500 when the day was done.
Ugh.
Eventually Matt and I both agreed that the more palatable option was going to a sports bar on Sunday and watching the game on the big screen.
Fine by me, I can nosh on chicken wings and not have to experience the two most reviled Yankees in team history.
This clown.
And this harpy.
Listening to these two is like experiencing a seaweed facial scrub with a Brillo pad. They both stink as announcers and they’ve only expanded in their stinkinees over the years. Sterling with his godawful “Mmmitishigh, mmmitisfar, itisgawne” personalized home run calls, and Waldman with her excitement over each Yankees accomplishment like she had just scored frontrows at an Ed Sheeran concert … no. Please, no.
And for that matter … $375 for two tickets? Are the Yankees still wearing their masks because they’re bandits?
Yeah, yeah, I get it. Baseball salaries are astronomical, the teams have to recover from the non-attendance because of COVID, all of that. But I would have at least figured the Yankees might throw in a vaccination perk or two … maybe a discount on the price, or at least a free box of Cracker Jack.
Pfft.
Man, I remember the days … back in the day when you could go to the Yankees game for the single cost of two fillups of gasoline at the local Hess station. Ah, memories.
Now we local baseball fans are essentially priced out of the market for attending big league ball. I’m sure we could get some reasonably priced tickets if we rode one of those Yankee Trails buses, but I’m not comfortable yet riding in a bus with a bunch of possibly unvaccinated strangers.
Or maybe we could watch the local minor league team, because they’ve got tomorrow’s stars on the roster today … oh, wait, the Tri-City ValleyCats aren’t the Houston Astros farm team any more, because of that stupid rejiggering of the minor league network, now the ValleyCats are essentially a glorified town team. You know, like the Albany-Colonie Diamond Dogs were when the Albany-Colonie Yankees moved out of town.
Yeah, I’m still not keen on taking out the equivalent of a week’s pay to go to a major league baseball game. Not when I can still watch the games on my television or hear them on the car radio.
Oh wait. Hearing them on the car radio means I gotta put up with John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman. Yeesh.
Oh, well, at least it’ll be too noisy in the sports bar for me to worry about the game announcers. So there’s that. And I won’t have to spend the equivalent of rent money for an order of chicken wings. 😀
Chuck The Writer 
Chuck:
As if you didn’t know already, the Yankees, and other teams, overcharge for concessions, parking, et al, in order to defray the costs of exorbitant player (and in Sterling’s case, announcer) contracts. The Valleycats are a bargain by comparison. Yankee radio broadcasts should be sponsored by Geritol since Sterling is so old (80+).
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I went to the Stadium a few years back. We were in the “cheap” seats, well under $75 each. I had a grand time. https://www.rogerogreen.com/2018/09/27/enjoying-aussie-interaction-sports-edition/
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