New York City baseball fans are complaining long and hard about issues with their cheap seats at the new ballparks, forcing the Yankees to re-price some ducats and cornering the Mets into some defensiveness.
New York City baseball fans are complaining long and hard about issues with their cheap seats at the new ballparks, forcing the Yankees to re-price some ducats and cornering the Mets into some defensiveness.
On the one hand, you can’t expect every seat in a ballpark to be perfect. The Yankees knew there would be issues with center-field bleacher seats, but didn’t lower the price to $5 or install flat-screen TVs for replays until fans complained.
Then some Mets fans started raising a stink about their upper-deck seats at Citi Field, pointing out that would not be able to see the warning track and part of the outfield. That’s true, but the Mets insist the seats aren’t truly obstructed, and that fans are welcome to look back at a scoreboard for a replay:
"Whenever you bring seating closer to the action, and put seating in fair territory, there will be certain angles where you lose a sightline here or there," Dave Howard, the Mets’ vice president for business operations, told The New York Times. "That’s typical in new ballparks, but a little different for our customers because Shea didn’t have much of anything like that."
We don’t expect the issue to die down. Really, the issue here isn’t the fact that someone sitting in Section 533, Row 15 can’t see the warning track; there will always be remote seats with less-than-perfect views in any ballpark. The issue is the change in tenor for the two ballparks. Baseball in New York City always belonged to the common man: the ballparks weren’t great, tickets were relatively affordable, and anyone could buy season tickets in good areas. But the new pricing structure at the new ballpark pushed many long-time season-ticket holders to the far reaches of the ballpark (even after pushing a big price increase on them) and forced many others out.
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