A Whole ‘Nother Ball Game

I hadn’t gotten a chance to go to the new Yankee Stadium until last night, when a friend invited me to watch the Yankees play against the Texas Rangers. I’m not invested in any particular team (maybe the Dodgers for a second while I was growing up), so for me, baseball games are more of a chance to hang out with friends, drink expensive beer, eat a hot dog, shoot the breeze, and yes, watch some of the game from the nosebleed section.

This was certainly not the experience I had at last night’s game. As you can see from the photo, I was not in the nosebleed section due to the fact that my friend had scored the tickets for free at her office, which happens to be a sports publication. Yankee Stadium is fancy and eerily shiny. You can order gluten-free food, or watch a butcher carve meat and make you a steak sandwich, and dine on sushi or noodle dishes.

The great seats came with a huge price tag:

Seeing $210 on a ticket was shocking to because I’m used to seeing $25 on a ticket. Paying top dollar for a ticket, or at least sitting in a section where people pay top dollar, also gets you in-seat service.

When my friends and I sat down, a man approached us and said, “Pardon the interruption, but if you’d like to order beer or food, just let me know and I’ll get it for you.” We decided to skip the in-seat service, and explore the concession options in the stadium, and settled on BBQ. I got a Carolina pulled pork sandwich and a beer: $24.

While I was eating my sandwich and spying on Jimmy Fallon, who was sitting in a section over, a man in a row in front of me placed an order with a man in uniform, who returned with a bottle of wine and two wine glasses. Drinking wine at a baseball game seemed so foreign to me — this was not America’s pastime. I can’t complain, of course. This was a mostly free experience that I probably wouldn’t get to have again.

Nick Swisher and Mark Teixeira both hit homeruns at the end of the night in a game where there were no runs for the majority of the innings. So I guess the Yankees won.

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