The Kids Aren't Alright

I finally made it to Yankee Stadium on Wednesday afternoon, just in time to see the Mariners break the season's longest losing streak against New York.  Normally, it would have been a great baseball experience; Mariners ace Felix Hernandez pitched for the visitors and Seattle phenom Dustin Ackley looked like the stud prospect he's been advertised as.  Unfortunately, the combination of terrible upper deck seats, a strong July sun and annoying, high-pitched neighbors turned the game into a rather pedestrian afternoon.

I'm certainly not above sitting in the upper deck at baseball games; on the contrary, I love sitting in the upper deck directly behind home plate and find those seats the best bang for your buck in most stadiums (when I go see the Braves play the Mets next Friday, for example, that's where I'll be sitting while at Citi Field).  For Wednesday's game, though, we were stuck in Section 406, just to the fair side of the right field foul pole (see below).  From those seats, not only is it very difficult to judge the depth of virtually every fly ball, but you also have a blocked view of the right field corner.  There were a surprising number of deep balls hit to Nick Swisher and Curtis Granderson that we couldn't see, which was at least mildly annoying.

There's no view of the right field corner from Section 406 at Yankee Stadium.

My next complaint was the heat, and in all honesty it wasn't that hot out.  The highs were in the mid-80s, which for a late July mid-afternoon in the Bronx is not unreasonably warm.  But when you're spending three hours sitting under a hot sun on navy blue seats in the upper deck of Yankee Stadium, you get very hot very quickly - not to mention sunburned.  It's for this reason that I always prefer night games to afternoon ones; I'd much rather watch a day game from the comfort of my air conditioned home and spend my money on a nice, cool, artificially-lit night game.  When a day game is during the week, you also have an unusually small crowd, which takes away from the normally vibrant Stadium atmosphere.

That being said, there was a reasonable crowd for Wednesday afternoon's game, but much of it was driven by the presence of dozens of different camp groups scattered throughout the upper deck.  Everywhere you looked you saw rows of kids wearing the same brightly colored shirts - some orange, some red, some green - cheering their brains out for the Yankees during the announcement of the starting lineups.  Unfortunately, all of those kids got bored by the second inning, and turned their high-pitched screams for Derek Jeter into generic screaming and whining.  While I don't have a problem with kids in general and honestly believe that bringing them to a ballgame is one of the best things you can do, sitting next to hundreds of eight year-olds supervised by only a handful of unqualified camp counselors can get pretty annoying.

I'll never turn down the opportunity to go to a baseball game (especially a free one), and still enjoyed my Wednesday afternoon at Yankee Stadium.  But if anything can let the air out of an otherwise entertaining Major League Baseball game, it's the potent combination of bad seats, a hot sun and hundreds of squealing children.  With my next scheduled game a week from tonight - Braves at Mets on a Friday evening sitting behind home plate - I'm looking forward to bigger and better things.