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| The idea of building a replacement for 80-year-old Yankee Stadium stirs many emotions. |
Author Lawrence Ritter grew up a New York Giants fan and didn't care much for the Yankees, but he remembers every detail about his first trip to Yankee Stadium.
It was June 1932, and Lou Gehrig and Jimmie Foxx both homered in a 4-2 Yankees victory over the Red Sox, Ritter recalled. Babe Ruth didn't go deep, but he did throw out a runner trying to go from first to third. "It was a perfect throw," said Ritter, author of "The Glory of Their Times." "Ruth had a good arm, you know."
While Yankee Stadium is no longer the economic and architectural ideal to which all other ballpark builders aspire, it remains a treasured link to baseball's past.
So, as Yankee executives look to rekindle interest in a temporarily shelved $800 million project to replace the 80-year-old park with a new stadium on Manhattan's west side, many question whether the current stadium's economic shortcomings merit a painful split with the past.
"This is not a problem ballpark," said Bill Dorsey, executive director of the Association of Luxury Suite Directors, noting that despite having well below the average number of luxury boxes, the Yankees are one of a handful of clubs that consistently sell out their premium seating. "They probably could do better, but Yankee Stadium is part of the American landscape, just like Wrigley and Fenway."
From the time it was built in 1923 to the multipurpose stadium boom that began in the early 1960s, Yankee Stadium was unrivaled in size and significance. The Yankees had been sharing the Polo Grounds across the Harlem River with the Giants, but Giants manager John McGraw evicted the Yankees because he was angry that the club, with new slugger Babe Ruth, was drawing so many more fans.
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| Yankee Stadium was hailed as a modern marvel when it opened in 1923. A crowdof more than 72,000 packed the stands for the first game at the stadium andwatched Babe Ruth crack the ballpark's first home run. |
So the Yankees paid the estate of William Waldorf Astor $675,000 for 10 acres of land in the west Bronx. Less than two years and about $2.5 million later, Yankee Stadium played host to its first game on April 18, 1923, when 74,200 packed the ballpark for a game against the Boston Red Sox.
The stadium featured baseball's first triple-deck grandstand. Its seating capacity dominated baseball for 40 years, excluding the construction of 80,000-seat Municipal Stadium in Cleveland in the mid-1940s.
But that kind of seating capacity became the norm during the stadium construction boom of the 1960s and '70s, when a wave of multipurpose concrete bowls were built in such cities as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Seattle. What those stadiums lacked in character they made up for in their ability to cater to corporations with luxury suites and other premium seating, an arena in which Yankee Stadium has been playing catch-up ever since.
The Yankees made up some ground in the early 1970s with a renovation that added 19 luxury boxes below the press box. Wooden seats were replaced with plastic ones, and obstructive steel beams were taken out.
Despite the improvements, Yankee Stadium couldn't approach the number of suites of other stadiums while maintaining the integrity of its ballpark. Its 19 suites paled in comparison to the likes of Oakland-Alameda Coliseum, with 146 suites, or Philadelphia's Veterans Stadium, with 141 suites, according to the Association of Luxury Suite Directors.
Still, Yankee Stadium had a historical significance that the multipurpose structures lacked, said Rick Horrow, a stadium consultant who has helped broker deals such as Foxboro's Gillette Stadium, Detroit's Ford Field and Boston's FleetCenter.
But that gap diminished when the construction of Oriole Park at Camden Yards in 1992 ushered in a new era of single-purpose, old-style stadiums that restored intimacy and reflected the city's character while maximizing revenue opportunities from premium seating.
Today, Major League Baseball's 30 parks have an average of nearly 80 luxury boxes, according to the Association of Luxury Suite Directors. The Yankees added 15 additional "party" suites during the past decade, but the total of 34 leaves it well behind the rest of the league.
The Yankees don't disclose pricing for suites. But similarly ancient Fenway, with its 50 suites priced between $175,000 and $180,000, according to the ALSD, brings in about $9 million a year in luxury suite sales. And the recently added patches of new seats, which include some atop the Green Monster, are likely to generate another $3 million a year, according to prices provided by the ALSD.
Furthermore, club seating has become a major revenue stream for many of the clubs with new parks, and MLB's 30 teams have an average of more than 2,700 club seats, according to ALSD. The Yankees have 100.
"The industry has evolved in terms of club seats, skyboxes, concession points of sale and other opportunities to generate and maximize revenue," Harrow said.
But the Yankees are in the rare position of not being as dependent on stadium revenue, thanks to the relative size of their local television contracts, Dorsey said.
For now, all such considerations are moot, since New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has shelved the $1.6 billion proposal to build new stadiums for both the Mets and Yankees until the economic climate improves. In the meantime, the Yankees are looking into ways to fund the project and keep it moving forward.
Ritter doesn't embrace that prospect.
"It would destroy the mystique that has grown up around the ballpark," Ritter said. "People do not want the stadium on the west side of Manhattan. It's important for the stadium to stay in the Bronx, because that's its home."
