The Ballpark is located on 161st Street in the New York borough of Bronx, and this year welcomed the second most visitors in the MLB. It is home to the most successful franchise in baseball history: the New York Yankees.
Yankee Stadium is one of the newest ballparks in the league, but this is easily overlooked by the half-interested observer. There is an acute risk of confusion with the old Yankees stadium, which had the same name, was in almost the same place, and was architecturally very similar to the new one.
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The old Yankee Stadium, opened in 1923, was the first stadium of the Yankees’ own, who until then had shared the Polo Grounds with the New York Giants. The Yankees could afford the building not least because they had risen to New York’s most successful club in the previous years and had also outstripped the Giants in terms of viewership. Superstar Babe Ruth played a major role in both developments. The stadium was therefore often called “the house that Ruth built”.
Old Yankee Stadium (1923-2008)
An extensive renovation in 1974/75 extended the lifespan of the ballpark, but team owner George Steinbrenner had been campaigning for a new building since the early 1980s. He did this for a long time without success because he did not find an approval for the necessary public funding either in New York or at the alternative location in New Jersey. But constant dripping wears away the stone: 20 years later, Steinbrenner had driven negotiations with New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani just before the end of his term of office to the point that his successor Michael Bloomberg could not get out of the commitments, although he tried. With a total cost of $ 2.3 billion, including 1.2 billion public funds, Yankee Stadium, built between 2006 and 2008, is still the most expensive stadium in the world.
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From a sporting point of view, the new entry into the stadium was always a guarantee for quick success for the Yankees: in 1923 they won their first World Series in the newly built Yankee Stadium, in 2009 their 27th and so far last in the new Yankee Stadium. In 1976, when they were allowed to return to their stadium after two years of renovation, they at least reached the final series and in the two following years, they each won the title. It may come as a surprise that the ten-year-old stadium has never hosted the All-Star Game before. This is mainly due to the fact that the old Ballpark had this honor in 2008 when it left, so the Yankees have to wait a while before their next turn.
In addition to baseball, Yankee Stadium also hosts regular New York City FC soccer games, as well as the occasional college football and concerts.
The core of the new Yankee Stadium is of course a state-of-the-art ballpark with various amenities. However, when it came to the exterior design, great importance was attached to using models from the old stadium. The facade should look as similar as possible to the original state of the first Yankee Stadium from 1923 and the border-like decoration on the roof was also copied from this time.
In the center field there is a modern video wall, but in the left and right outfield additional manually operated scoreboards have been installed in the same places as in the old stadium. The two incisions in the stadium, through which you can see the passing subway trains, were also taken over for the new building.
Panoramic view of Yankee Stadium from the outfield
The inner workings of the new Yankee Stadium are a matter of taste, not to say: I don’t like it. The large hall in the southern part is not particularly beautiful, but at least spacious. When trying to go around the stadium, you inevitably get into very gloomy concrete channels behind the outfield. Instead of open stairs, as are common in most of the other newer stadiums, endless, fully enclosed concrete ramps lead to the higher stands.
The field dimensions of the new Yankee Stadium are almost identical to those of the old: With foul lines of 318 feet (97 meters) in the left-field and 314 feet (96 meters) in the right field as well as a 408 feet (124 meters) deep center field, the ballpark belongs to the smaller in the MLB and enables a corresponding number of home runs.
This is also reflected in the ballpark factors, according to which Yankee Stadium allows more hits, more runs, and more home runs than most other stadiums. Doubles and triples, on the other hand, are less common than the MLB average – this is also a typical observation in rather small ballparks.
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New York is generally an expensive place and you can tell when you buy baseball tickets. Due to the unbroken popularity of the Yankees, the stadium is often sold out, so tickets can often only be obtained well in advance or via the usual resale platforms.
You can watch the game at Yankee Stadium from almost every seat, preferably from the seats on the lower level around the home plate. For such seats, you have to reckon with prices of several hundred dollars as a rule. One level up, the view is almost as good and the price per ticket is significantly lower, but still in three digits.
View from the home plate side
You can get a bargain at Yankee Stadium by taking a seat on the Bleachers, the uncovered outfield grandstands. From $ 15 you can get a ticket here if it’s not against the Red Sox or the Mets. In blocks 201 and 239, prices even start at $ 5 – but only because these are the blocks from which the view is limited to part of the field.
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