Yankee Stadium prices are insane!

Yankee Stadium prices are insane!
Sunday, May 4th 2008, 7:51 AM

Sipkin/News
Yankee Stadium.

There is a very good reason why most Yankee fans don't care how much their team spends on baseball players. One of the best reasons is that their team keeps asking them - at least the most well-heeled of them - to spend more and more to help pay the freight.

There is a guy I know who has tickets behind the Yankee dugout, has had them for awhile. Last season each seat cost $150 per game. This season, because it is the last season at the old Yankee Stadium, the cost went up to $250. Next season, if he wants to keep the same seats when everybody moves across 161st St. to the new Yankee Stadium, the cost will go to $850 per seat.

If he wants to keep his current seats, he has to sign a minimum four-year contract, and they want a third of the cost of the first year up front. If he goes for that deal, they say the most they can increase him over the term of the contract is 4% a year.

"I told my friends who are going this season, ‘Enjoy yourselves, because you'll never be this close again,'" my friend said Saturday.

Now this isn't the old Lawn Tennis Association out of the 1950s, where everybody was just supposed to play for the love of the game. The Yankees are the biggest baseball business in the world, and running the business costs money. The Mets aren't going to be giving away their "premium" tickets at Citi Field, either. But they haven't set next season's ticket prices yet, perhaps sitting back and tracking the baseball market in the Bronx.
Well, it's either a market or a shakedown.

I have on the desk next to me a color-coded seat "Premium" plan for the new Yankee Stadium that a rather amazed Yankee fan sent me. It is pretty as a rainbow, just with pots of gold everywhere. We have always been told that walking into Yankee Stadium is like walking into some sort of baseball cathedral, and it is clear now that the Yankees don't think the new place is merely a cathedral, they think it is St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

"They call you in for an appointment," my Yankee season-ticket holder said to me yesterday morning. "And they say, ‘The old Stadium is The House That Ruth Built.' The new place is going to be the house you guys build."

Start with the best seats in the house, first row, dugout to dugout. At the Garden, these are known as the Spike Lee seats. At the Stadium, I still like to think of them as the Rudy Giuliani seats. The plan is to sell these for $2500 next season.
Per seat.

Front-row seats in the first couple of boxes beyond the dugouts, in 14A and 14B on the home side and 26 and 27A on the visitors' side, are supposed to go for $1250. Right behind them, the Yankees are looking for $600 a ticket.

Front-row seats that extend from there toward the foul poles? The Yankees want those to go for a thousand.

Five hundred for the ones behind them.

Even seats in the very first row of the upper deck behind home plate will cost $135. Which, if you've been tracking the math, is just 15 bucks less than a seat behind the dugout cost season-ticket holders just one season ago. It is a good thing that these "premium" seats are going to make up only 10% or so of the new ballpark. Because there are also "non-premium" seats at field level that go for $325. There are at least 3,400 of those and 500 more that go for $200 a seat.

"They tell you that the price of the ticket includes all the food you want except alcoholic beverages and parking," the Yankee season-ticket holder said. "But they do tell you that if you don't want to pay for the premium seats, they can't guarantee you where you're going to end up."

The price of the whole world, especially in the Bush economy, keeps going up. The Yankees aren't breaking any laws here. Again: This is the cost of doing Yankee business, or so they say. Believe me, when the Mets set their new prices, they will go right into the newspaper, too. And the Giants' prices and the Jets' prices the next time they go up. The Yankees, though, are out front on this, telling their subscribers that a lot of corporations have wanted the best Yankee seats for years and now have a chance to get them.

Why do they think they can get away with this for next season? Because they just announced that they have four million tickets sold for this season, that's why.

For now the Yankee season-ticket holder says to me, "It's going to change the atmosphere. You're going to see that same sterile atmosphere close to the field like you see in the best seats in the Garden."

You wonder why Yankee fans don't care what Johan Santana or anybody else on the field costs?

The seats closest to the field are as good place to start as any.