The 2009 New York Yankees: 162 road games

Even though my Yankees lost both games I attended in Philadelphia over Memorial Day weekend, overall, I had a pretty decent holiday, especially for my first Memorial Day since 2000 without a beach house.

Phillies fan (can't say I disagree with his jersey)

Wait … what’s that you say? The games were in the Bronx, not Philadelphia? Well, you could have fucking fooled me.

The number of Phillies fans in the ballpark Friday night and Sunday afternoon — naturally, the only game I didn’t attend was the only game the Yankees won — was even more excessive than the number of Boston fans earlier this month.

It was so excessive that when I got on the PATH train to return to Hoboken Friday night, there was only one other Yankees fan on the car, and the rest of the people were Philadelphia fans, which led my girlfriend to ask, “Is this the Broad Street line?”

And the ferry from Hoboken to Yankee Stadium Sunday was even worse. The boat carried, without question, two-thirds to three-quarters Phillies fans. As my girlfriend pointed out, it wasn’t a ferry: It was a pherry. And I phucking hate it.

T-shirt from BaldVinny.com

First off, while Red Sux fans can go get bent, I have no problem with Phillies fans. I’d probably hate a lot of them during football season, because my hatred for the Eagles is beyond irrational, but I really don’t have a problem with them during baseball season, and they certainly did nothing wrong by buying tickets to this past weekend’s games.

Second, I have no problem with Yankees fans who sold their tickets. Many of us were forced into buying full season tickets in order to have seats with a view of something other than a urinal, which is why there are so many tickets on the market.

I just hope the Yankees’ “brain trust” (it was hard to type that with a straight face) sees what they’ve created. There’s absolutely no home-field advantage anymore. When chants of “Let’s go Red Sox” and “Let’s go Phillies” drown out the fans of the home team, this is a serious problem.

I know the team’s management more than likely doesn’t give a rat’s ass, since the tickets are sold, which is all they care about. And that’s the sad part: Yes, baseball is a business, but this organization has managed to drain every last drop of fun out of being a Yankees fan. Feeling like a visiting fan in my own ballpark sucks ass.

Another Springsteen fix

I blame my Hebrew-school tutor for all of this. As a reward for successfully making it through the Torah portion of my Bar Mitzvah without puking on the sacred parchment or tripping up over the Hebrew words and accidentally telling the congregation to go sodomize sheep, he bought me the album — yes, the actual 12-inch, vinyl record album — of Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

Born to Run

At the time — the time being 1981 — I knew a few Springsteen songs, but I wouldn’t have called myself a fan. I knew “Hungry Heart” because it was all over the radio, and I knew the title track from Born to Run, but that was about it.

Then, I brought the record home and put on the first track, “Thunder Road.” I was an instant Springsteen junkie about three minutes into the song, and it’s only gotten worse.

Thank you, Mark Elber, wherever you are.

I went to see the heart-stopping, pants-dropping, hard-rocking, booty-shaking, earth-quaking, nerve-breaking, Viagra-taking history-making, legendary … E-STREET BAND at the debacle of a facility currently known as the IZOD Center last night. Between how bland the home of my beloved New Jersey Nets is and how pathetic the half-finished Xanadu God-knows-what project looks, they really should drop a nuclear bomb on that part of the Meadowlands (the two football stadiums and the track can be spared).

Anyway, for whatever reason, I wasn’t as fired up as I usually am to see The Boss. I was excited, but I didn’t have that all-day adrenalin surge. I guess part of it is that I know I always like the end-of-summer Giants Stadium shows better — speaking of which, the final concerts at Giants Stadium will be performed by none other than Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, with three shows wrapping up Oct. 3. And part of it is that things have been crazy in my life, but in a good way — working part-time, tons of visits to the new Yankee Stadium, lots of softball games and, most important, my girlfriend moving in soon.

Photo by A.M. Saddler, from Backstreets.com

But as usual, the boys didn’t disappoint. This was yet another fantastic show, with some songs that I hadn’t seen played live since the Born in the USA tour in 1985. Pleasant surprises included “Seeds,” “Johnny 99” and “The Ghost of Tom Joad” — it seemed like a mini-set tribute to the unemployed — and always welcome classics included “Thunder Road,” “Jungleland” and “Rosalita.” And I saw the band play one of my personal favorites, “I’m Goin’ Down,” for the first time since the previously mentioned Born in the USA tour.

I am exhausted and drained, but I will be sure to get my energy back by June 1, when tickets for the next assault on New Jersey go on sale. What a fucking great show.

The set list (thank you, Badlands.com):
Badlands
Adam Raised a Cain
Outlaw Pete
Radio Nowhere
She’s the One
Working on a Dream
Seeds
Johnny 99
The Ghost of Tom Joad
Raise Your Hand
Growin’ Up
I’m Goin’ Down
Prove It All Night
Waitin’ on a Sunny Day
The Promised Land
The Wrestler
Kingdom of Days
Lonesome Day
The Rising
Born to Run
* * *
Hard Times
Thunder Road
Jungleland
Land of Hope and Dreams
American Land
Rosalita

Summertime blues

Holiday Snack Bar, Beach Haven, NJ

Something is missing this week, and it’s very weird.

This is the week before Memorial Day. I’m supposed to be getting everything ready to head down to the beach house on LBI Friday morning. But I’m not.

I’m supposed to be buying cases of G2 (low-calorie Gatorade) and good beer, because I refuse to drink Bud, Miller or Coors (Miller Lite is tolerable). I’m supposed to be packing bathing suits, towels, bedding, toiletries, Hawaiian shirts and more good beer. But I’m not.

I’m supposed to constantly check weather.com for the Beach Haven forecast. But I’m not.

I’m supposed to be making arrangements for someone to feed the cats, because God forbid the two pot-bellied pigs miss a meal. But I’m not.

The summer of 2009 will be the first one since the summer of 2000 that I’m not in a beach house. It really bothered me at first, but I started coping with it, accepting it and making other plans, so I was at peace with it for a while. But now, with the Friday before Memorial Day staring me in the face, to put it mildly, it fucking sucks.

There are things I won’t miss. The bar scene down at LBI has become agonizing the past couple of summers, with the exact same bands playing the exact same songs week after week after week. And the two-hour drive each way does tend to get old. But the good outweighs the bad.

I’ll keep busy. I have a lot more weekend Yankees tickets. My girlfriend and I are planning a few trips. But I still feel like something is missing.

This is always one of my favorite weeks of the year. I love the feeling of anticipation that the beginning of summer brings. But as excited as I am to welcome the World Champion Phillies to Yankee Stadium this weekend, it just isn’t the same kind of buzz.

Bah.

Lonn Trost really needs to shut the hell up

It is truly amazing to me that the New York Yankees continue to let Lonn Trost anywhere near a microphone. It is even more amazing to me that he still has any job in the organization, much less the position of chief operating officer.

Lonn Trost, amazingly WITHOUT his foot in his mouth

Among his many faults, Trost can’t seem to get it through his thick skull that Yankee Stadium is supposed to be a baseball stadium – not a corporate events center, not a networking destination, not an entertainment and shopping complex, a baseball stadium.

One of the many fun experiences of attending a baseball game, if you’re fortunate enough to get there early, is heading down to field level to try to catch balls hit into the stands and interact with players.

However, since Trost clearly has no concept, clue or theory what going to a baseball game means, when asked why fans aren’t permitted into the field-level seats before games, his ingenious response was: “If you purchased a suite, do you want people in your suite? If you purchased a house, do you want people in your house?”

This isn’t the Kennedy compound, you fucking moron. It’s a baseball stadium, where baseball is played, and baseball fans congregate. How hard is this to understand?

But that’s fine: Continue to insult every one of your customers who was too smart to shell out $2,500 per ticket, and then continue to sit in your suite, free of us savage invaders, scratching your head and wondering why the first eight rows of Yankee Stadium are as sparsely populated as a bus terminal at 3 a.m.

NYU graduation at Yankee Stadium (photo from Subway Chatter)

Every time this man speaks, he becomes exponentially less popular. The fact that Hal and Hank Steinbrenner haven’t put a muzzle on him is astounding. Rather than beating around the bush, he might as well just come straight out and say, “If you can’t afford to pay top dollar for tickets, you are clearly inferior scum. You should be grateful to us for letting you purchase any tickets at all.” That’s exactly the way the man comes across. Does media training sound like a good idea to anyone?

In an even funnier note, my alma mater, NYU, held its graduation ceremony at Yankee Stadium, and the Legends Suite was still kept empty. I mean, really, are you people serious? I guess Trost didn’t want any NYU ruffians running through his suite and his house.

The new Yankee Stadium may be beautiful, but the way the organization is running things is nothing short of a disaster.

Stop the stupidity

STOP sign

Attention, drivers in and around Hoboken, N.J.: When you see the sign pictured on the right, it means exactly what it says. Why is this difficult? “Stop” means stop. Are you all that stupid?

“Stop” doesn’t mean head toward the intersection at 50 miles per hour on a residential block, lightly tap the brake and blow through it at about 40.

“Stop” doesn’t mean roll out into the middle of the intersection.

“Stop” doesn’t mean stop at the intersection and refuse to move until the closest oncoming car is somewhere around Netcong.

“Stop” means stop, check for oncoming traffic or pedestrians, and then proceed.

Seriously, is it really that hard?

New Yankee Stadium: Kiss home-field advantage goodbye

I’ve tried to keep an open mind about the new Yankee Stadium and the entire process of relocating ticket-holders, telling myself that the first Boston series would provide a true litmus test of whether the ballpark is a success or not. After attending both atrocities against the hated Red Sox, some glaring issues reared their ugly heads.

A proud member of Red Sox Nation

There always tends to be a strong presence of Red Sox fans at games between the two teams. After all, they are bitter rivals, and Boston’s less than four hours away by car. But the sheer number of Boston fans at the games the past two nights was ridiculous. And the reason why was pretty easy to figure out, especially after talking with some of them: Tickets were available on StubHub for, in some cases, less than one-half of face value.

Why were so many tickets for two premium games practically being given away? The answer is simple: Far too many fans, including the one writing this blog, were basically strong-armed into buying full season tickets, in order to avoid being assigned horrible seats or no seats, and the number of tickets available for every game via StubHub is simply staggering.

It truly pains me to praise a ball club that I hate as much as the Red Sox, but they’re clearly doing things the right way, while the Yankees’ top management is lucky to be breathing, considering how far up their asses their heads must be.

Let’s compare various facets of the two organizations:

The Boston Red Sox have won two World Series titles since the last time the Yankees won, in 2000.

The Red Sox play in a ballpark that opened on the day the Titanic sank (I am NOT making this up). Fenway Park has undergone several rounds of improvements, but it’s still nearly 100 years old, and it still has more than 15,000 fewer seats than Yankee Stadium.

The most expensive ticket in Fenway Park is $325. The Yankees, meanwhile, play in a brand-new, $1.5 billion ballpark with the equivalent of Fenway’s $325 seats having sold for $900, $1,050 and $2,500 before the Yankees were forced to lower their prices due to the embarrassing number of prime empty seats that were painfully visible on TV. But even after the price reductions and factoring in the extra seats being given to season-ticket holders, the Yankees’ premium seats are still far more expensive than Boston’s.

As I mentioned earlier, many of the Boston fans I spoke with at this week’s games paid less than one-half of face value for their tickets, and other blogs documented the staggering number of tickets available for each game and the desperation by sellers to just get some money back on their hefty investments.

I looked at StubHub’s offerings for the next Yankees-Red Sox game in Boston — Tuesday, June 9 at 7:05 p.m. — and the results were completely different.

The cheapest tickets available were standing-room vouchers at $78 (face value of $20-$30). The cheapest “real” seats were 26 rows up in the left-field bleachers, at $80 apiece (face value of $12). And while it’s tough to compare the two ballparks, as they could not possibly be more structurally different, tickets in section 9, which is the rough equivalent of my Yankees seats, ranged from $128-$397.75 apiece (face value of $30) — a far cry from the $20 (for $40 tickets) the Red Sox fans next to me last night paid for their tickets. Do you know what that means? The crowd June 9 will be heavily pro-Red Sox, as it should, since it’s a home game for them. As a Yankee fan, I’m not sure what a home game is anymore.

Red Sox fans are able to rake in serious profits, should they choose to sell their tickets, while Yankees fans are, for all intents and purposes, giving them away. Why? Because, as I said earlier, so many Yankees fans were forced into buying full-season tickets, and it’s simple supply-and-demand economics.

You would think the New York Yankees’ brilliant management would want the ballpark to be raucous and pro-Yankees all the time, but especially for big series, like the one Boston just swept. But thanks to their ticketing policies, not only will the Red Sox play virtual home games at Yankee Stadium, but so will the Mets, the Phillies and just about any other team with fans willing to travel.

And as the icing on the cake, the Yankees’ organization consistently does things to alienate the Yankees fans who do actually attend games. Just look at what happened Monday night. For those who don’t know, a 7:05 p.m. game didn’t start until 9:22 p.m. due to rain, and many fans left the Stadium after being told by Yankees’ personnel that the game would be canceled.

When an announcement was made that the game was indeed on, many of these fans were refused readmission into the ballpark, despite the fact that they only exited due to being fed erroneous information by representatives of the organization. How many of those people do you think are going to be in a hurry to fork over more dollars to the team after being treated that way? My guess is that the number will be small. Smooth move, Yankees.

The Yankees organization has always been sorely lacking when it comes to dealing with fans, ticket-holders and the media, but it seems to reach a new low every day. Things were far from perfect at the old ballpark, but crap like this makes me miss box 611 more and more every inning.

Remember blank tapes?

I listened to a lot of 1980s heavy metal this past week. This is not necessarily unusual for me, but finally seeing The Wrestler last Saturday night probably contributed to it, as the movie’s entire soundtrack is made up of the music that got me through high school and college.

I realized how different things used to be after listening to three straight albums — The Scorpions’ Love at First Sting, Accept’s Metal Heart and AC/DC’s Let There Be Rock — that were all 10 songs or fewer and all around 45 minutes or less.

TDK blank cassette tape

I had to laugh because it brought back memories of when I used to buy all my albums on either vinyl or CD (obviously depending on the time period) and transfer them to blank cassette tapes so I could listen to them in the car and on my Walkman.

I remembered worrying about the length of albums. If they were longer than 45 minutes, it really fouled up the entire taping process, because you had to use the B side of a 90-minute tape for the spill-over, and you couldn’t put an entire other album on it. If they were much shorter than 45 minutes, you had way too much empty space at the end of the tape, and fast-forwarding to the end was a pain in the ass.

I remembered the still-unresolved argument over whether there was really a difference between normal cassette tapes and chrome cassette tapes, and if the latter were actually worth the extra 50 cents or so. And don’t even get me started on the really expensive metal cassette tapes.

Is it live ... or is it Memorex?

I remembered arguing that although the Memorex ad with the guy sitting in the chair getting blown away by the sound was an all-time classic, when it came to quality, TDK kicked Memorex’s ass up and down the block, at least in my opinion. So did Maxell. And Sony wasn’t bad, either.

I thought back on times when I left on a road trip, only to realize that the carrying case that held 12 cassettes — about 20 times the size of my current iPod and containing around 1% of the music — was never refilled, meaning that I’d have to listen to the same tapes I had on the previous road trip.

And anyone ever have the miserable experience of trying to clean out all of what was left of a destroyed tape out of your tape deck?

Yeah, I’d say music distribution has come a long way in the past few years. Wouldn’t you?