In this age of highly specialized baseball — pitchers assigned the seventh inning, and, even after three groundouts on three pitches, only the seventh — the Yankees’ executive branch now has a Designated (bulls) Hitter.
From the moment it opened, new Yankee Stadium has been run like a clip joint, a challenge to the logical to get fleeced or get out.
The best-to-better seats were priced — $2,500, $1,500, $850, $650, $450 per seat per game — to be purchased not by fans but by corporations. But even corporations have limits. Stockholders, after all, are likely to ask why the company annually spends $500,000 for four tickets to ballgames, including Tuesday nighters against the Twins in April.
Yanks COO Lonn Trost has been assigned to defend the indefensible, as he did last week on team station WFAN, explaining why the Yankees will try to prevent fans from buying tickets, especially day-of, at reasonable prices via StubHub.
Trost answers to president Randy Levine, a former operative within NYC politics. Levine was at the controls when new Yankee Stadium opened to ticket pricing so obscenely expensive that longtime season’s subscribers and semi-regulars could not afford tickets — or wouldn’t suffer the shakedown — unless secondary market middle-man vendors, such as StubHub, were in place to ease costs for both sellers and buyers.
And when the Yanks are stuck for good answers to good questions, Levine apparently assigns Trost to give bad ones.
When the Yankees, even in the new park’s first year, couldn’t ignore the consistently conspicuous — thousands of empty best-to-good seats — Trost was dispatched to deliver an explanation that survives as just-following-orders, hilarious nonsense.
Trost said that those who bought all the best-seats-in-the-house tickets are actually in attendance, but are watching on big-screen TVs in the luxury restaurant.
That’s right, those who travel to Yankee Stadium having spent a fortune to sit in large, plush seats, first base around to third, finished their buffet dinners, then, with their ticketed seats just a few yards away, settled in to watch on a restaurant TV set, which, after all, showed the game in high-def — almost as if you were at the game!
After Trost made this claim, I was a guest in one of those seats — three rows back, just off the Yanks’ dugout. The seats nearby, behind the backstop, around to the visitors’ dugout and 20 rows deep were, at most, half-filled.
But it was a hot weeknight, so perhaps hundreds of people were beating the heat watching the game on TVs in the Yanks’ top, nearby, air-conditioned luxury restaurant.
I checked. In the third inning, then in the sixth. The only souls hanging out were restaurant staff. They were watching the game on big-screen TVs.
The next day, for self-amusement, I called the Yankees asking the availability of season’s down-low, plush-back seats. I asked where four might still be available. Answer: “Anywhere you want.”
Then I asked if, once I bought the tickets, I had to sit in my seats. A: “What do you mean?”
“Can’t I just stay in the restaurant and watch the games on a big-screen TV?” The sales rep sensed he was being had. Why, he asked, would anyone do that? He apparently hadn’t heard Trost’s public explanation for thousands of empty expensive seats per game.
This latest serving of Trost-delivered nonsense concerns the home printing and cellphone scanning of tickets by buyers from secondary sellers such as StubHub. The Yanks, and their official seller of tack-on-cost tickets, TicketMaster, have moved to prevent that, which Trost explained was a means of protecting those who paid “a substantial amount of money” from being seated near those who bought them at discount.
Yeah, don’t make suckers out of our suckers!
The Yanks, in exchange for their cut, want all purchases conducted through TicketMaster, long and nationally known for malodorous practices and pricing. TicketMaster also saves the Yanks overhead of staffing box offices and in-house phone sales.
Yep, if there’s dumping of tickets to be done, they’d better be dumped in the more resale-expensive Yankees’ Official Team Dumpster.
All of this bad-faith business can be traced to the months before new Yankee Stadium opened; the plan to price steady, regular fans either out or up — to the upper deck.
This blind-greed plan not only still exists, it annually creates a senselessly inverted reality: Where once the crowds at Yankee Stadium logically thinned looking from down to up — best seats to the worst — they now thin from up to down — worst to the best.
But if you and your significant other are looking to spend, say, two grand to watch a Yankees game on TV, there’s this nice buffet restaurant in The Bronx …
Not much thought in college broadcasts
Student-athletics: You couldn’t miss it. Saturday on FOX, Butler took a 44-41 lead at Villanova with a 3-pointer. But the shooter clearly was inside the arc. Moments later, a replay, en route to commercials, again showed just that. And when FOX returned, a changed score — 43-41 — was seen.
But FOX’s lead play-by-player, excitable hype artist Gus Johnson, either missed or ignored it.
He was so busy talking, he didn’t say a thing.
Can’t someone at CBS, especially with the NCAA Tournament knocking, stop, look and think?
Throughout live play in Miami-UNC, Saturday, and Sunday’s Michigan-Maryland game, CBS flashed distracting, view-obstructing stats: Field-goal percentages, 3-point attempts, points off turnovers, state capitals.
If there were three people watching who preferred to read these rather than watch the games, three’s not enough. We already have what we need: the score, the half, the clock, the shot clock. Besides, it’s television!
Jonathan Holton was back playing for West Virginia, Saturday on ESPN, against Oklahoma.
The info didn’t make the telecast, but Holton was recruited to Rhode Island despite an arrest warrant for a robbery in Florida. URI tossed him after he recorded video of him having sex with a student, and also for possession of a student’s stolen laptop.
Soon, he was given a full scholarship to play for Bob Huggins at WVU, which recently suspended him for “violating team rules.”
Underdogs worth a look
Get off my leaderboard! While we understand the post-Tiger Woods, don’t-touch-that-dial sell in a Jim Nantz crowing, “We have a great leaderboard,” such seems to dismiss lesser-known PGA players, as if they’re shoo-fly annoyances and undeserving contenders.
Should we not root for a long shot trying to make a big paycheck by beating multi-multimillionaires? What if we don’t like Bubba Watson? And what’s a not-so-great leaderboard?