June 21, 2005

The Boss vs. The Babe: A comparison

For those of you wondering what your visit to a new New York Yankees stadium would look like - assuming, that is, that the stadium is built out of cardboard and you're Godzilla - I now have a page of photos of the Yanks' new stadium model for public perusal.

Also, with the help of stadium architecture consultant and critic Philip Bess, I've put together a cross-section comparison of the existing and proposed stadiums. The Yankees didn't provide a measurement scale with their architectural renderings, but by matching tread widths (the depth of each row of seats) and using other clues, I've come up with the following guesstimate (Yankee Stadium is in red, proposed new stadium in full color):

As you can see, the main changes from the existing stadium would be: Eliminating the middle loge deck entirely to make room for luxury suites, and replacing some of these seats with new rows at the back of the two-level lower deck; and shifting the entire upper deck about 30 feet further back from the field, while lopping off the top few rows. While the resulting stadium would be shorter than the current stadium, it would also have about 12% fewer seats, meaning the 50,000th ticket sold would still be at about the same height. And with the upper deck pushed back from the field, the worst seat in the new smaller-capacity building would be just as far from the action as the worst seat in the current 57,000-seat stadium.