| 14 June 2010
This past weekend I had a friend from Houston staying with me and a plan: Attend all three Yankees/Astros games. I sat in my regular Friday night seat (423, row 14) and with my friend on Saturday and Sunday.
It was my friend's first time at the new Yankee Stadium, so I spent some chunks of time before and after the games checking out the place in a way I hadn't since the exhibition games last year. I'm sure much of this is not new at all, but I came across a few notable things while wandering around.
- They seem to have snuck in a bunch of bottle serve Beers of the World stands in the concession areas. At these areas you can grab a Peroni, Brooklyn Lager, Hoegarden, Yuengling Lager and a few other brands that escape me right now for $8.75. I noticed a beer listed as gluten free as well
- If you're looking for a nice place to take pictures of the black and white player flags in the Great Hall, wander up to where the Yankee Museum is on the Main Level. While the angle is still not optimal you can get nice shots of almost the whole row. Sadly, the awesome picture of Bill Dickey is blocked off. Still, it's much easier to try and snap a picture up on the little area up there than wandering around the ground floor in the Great Hall itself.
Lately, I've noticed that security has been pretty lax at the entry gates and that continued during the Houston series. They still check out all your stuff but I haven't come across any guards who really rifle through bags since the first week. I consider this a plus. It makes getting through the security area much faster, and I haven't had to worry about my camera getting dropped on the ground (this happened to me last year when the guard just sort of snatched my camera case out of my bag, and opened it up upside down). I know that Ross has had some issues with security this year, so this might not be standard. I am a female of the tiny variety and I have no doubt that my experiences might be different from the norm.
For the Friday night game, I sat in my usual Friday night seat and have nothing exciting to report about them but on Saturday and Sunday I sat in some seats I acquired from a friend with a full season plan in 420C, row 5. These are absolutely great seats and I would call them the equivalent of my old Tier 3 tickets in Yankee Stadium II.
Row 5 is not under the overhang, so when it started raining on Sunday we had to run for cover elsewhere. At YSIII there's not much of that to be found on the Terrace/Grandstand level so we went down to the Main and watched the action from the standing room area.
The crowd for the weekend was pretty quiet. It's pretty hard to get excited about games against the Astros, or maybe people were depressed because of the cloudy weather. I have no actual theories about why the Stadium was in a lull for most of the weekend (at least in the Grandstand). I am pleased to report to my fellow wave haters that I didn't spot much of it until midway through the game on Sunday.
There were several pockets of Astros fans around the stadium (easy to spot thanks to the team colors) and they were your typical polite baseball fans just there to see their team from what I could tell. Yankees fans in attendance did not seem to be confrontational or attempt to pick on any of the Houston fans near where I was sitting, including my friend. We also had no problems with Yankee fans outside of the stadium or at the Yankee Tavern where we had a few drinks after the game on Friday night. I was surprised, but very happy about this. I have seen Yankees fans try to pick fights with fans of just about every visiting team, so I was expecting something small at the very least. I guess while New York fans don't have much compassion for beaten and broken Orioles fans they feel bad for people who like the Astros enough to see them play the Yankees in New York to leave them alone.
If you're looking for an outsider's impression of Yankee Stadium, my friend liked it very much. He has season tickets for the Astros and goes to almost every game at Minute Maid Park (a very nice place). He described YSIII as a “good place to watch a game” and felt that it was put together with sitting and watching a game in mind, rather than packing the place full of distractions away from the seating areas. So, there's one happy traveler if you never hear of another one.
Overall, a good weekend for me and a not as good one for my friend
