NY Times Editorial Published: May 2, 2009
As New York’s two baseball teams unveiled their opulent new stadiums this spring, an overreach was evident to fans watching on television. As the cameras followed the pitches, grand swaths of the most expensive upholstered seats around home plate and the dugouts — up to $2,500 per at Yankee Stadium and $495 at the Mets’ Citi Field — were revealed to be empty.
Where were all of the playful plutocrats for whom they were designed? Could they be out trying whiffle ball for free with the kids?
Those seats became a riveting distraction, especially when, during a national broadcast, one sportscaster intoned on the Yankees’ luxury gap. (No proposal was heard for a federal elite-seat retention bailout.) The vacancies had to be a treat for Gotham loathers everywhere. But also for local fans inside the $1.5 billion stadium straining to watch all of the action from the $14 bleacher seats beyond deep center field.
The Yankees’ money-is-no-object management is rarely embarrassed. But this time it was — up to a point. The team cut the price of a few hundred of its most telegenic teak-trimmed seats in half. That’s still as much as $1,250. The Mets, whose park cost a relatively more populist $875 million, stood pat with their top prices, though they were forced to auction scores of the most expensive seats for opening day to try to fill the gaps.
“Don’t ever think sports is anything but a business,” was the advice of New York’s richest fan, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as he defended the value of the taxpayer-subsidized stadiums. This raises the question of whether the recession mercy extended to the richest fans might be wisely trickled down to the less affluent.
They face stiff prices of $50 or $150 for the sort of family seats where a fresh generation of fans presumably will grow, if they can afford to. New York has a lesson to learn from Toronto, where the Blue Jays are already offering “Messin’ With Recession” games with tickets as low as $5 and hot dogs for $1.
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