And Here Comes the Pitch…

August 13th, 2009 | By | Posted in Gotham
Tags: Gotham, Icon, Review

These seats were exceptional. Not the view–that was exceptional too–I mean the actual seats. They had cushioning. Baseball stadium seats, with cushioning…

This is our national pastime’s answer to those luxurious reclining thrones at Cinema le Grand Action in Paris. And this, mes amis, is the way to watch the Yankees pull off a high drama, homer-driven 7-5 comeback win over the Blue Jays on a balmy mid-August evening: well-cushioned and close enough to the action that the home plate umpire definitely heard me when I told him what a great eye he had, and Derek Jeter also definitely heard me when I reminded him that we met once at Club Cheetah in 1997.

But the setting for all this cushioniness and drama and yelling is, ultimately, a sterile, insipid design disappointment. Not that the old (renovated) Yankee stadium was much to speak of, but the new one-for all the effort and millions and hype-is a lowbrow, nondescript, white bread roll, stuffed with commercial space, wrapped in a bland, vaguely monumental shell , and capped with a classic Yankee frieze that looks, here, like an afterthought. It’s nice. It’s serviceable. It’s ok for a midwestern city of, say, 1-2 million, but not for the hallowed (if repeatedly desecrated) baseball grounds of the Bronx. Even the arch-corporate Yankees deserve something better than this (full disclosure, I am blue and orange and-this season-black with mourning.)

In fairness, TARP field out in Queens, gussied up in its Ebbets field finest , isn’t much better, but at least it has some design elements–the bridge terrace and food court areas in right field, as well as some of the masonry and color details throughout-that can make a Mets fan almost forget how much he misses that clumsy old blue and orange piss-reeking concrete half-donut that used to stand in the parking lot next door.

Particularly puzzling at the new Yankee park is the guest pass-only Mohegan Sun bar encased in the center field batter’s eye. Passes came with our seats so in innings 3 and 4 we stationed ourselves there for some upscale fine drinking. Drink we did-finely, if not cheaply-but it’s beyond me why anyone would go all the way to the ballpark just to sit inside a chilly blackbox sports bar and watch the game on twenty televisions. And you have to watch on twenty televisions because,despite the name of the place, you can’t gamble or find hookers there, and the windows are so tinted you can barely see the field.

But these days, things on television are more real than things that are not on television. In the truly brave new world to come, we’ll do away with seats altogether–cushioned or otherwise–and simply build ballfields ringed, concentrically, by: