I Hate the Fucking Yankees, and They Fucking Hate You
The Houston Astros defeated the New York Yankees 4-0 on Friday, propelling the spry Astros squad into the 2017 World Series to face the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Thank God, because the Yankees are fucking awful. I hate them, and they hate you.
In what could be a 30-part thesis on why the Yankees are the fucking worst, let’s start by analyzing how the Yankees hate their own fans – slapping them with astronomical ticket prices to get inside a concrete prison where they might actually die.
This is difficult for me to write, because I too hate Yankees fans. However, I’m a mere mortal – a 27-year-old doofus and a depressed Twins fan with $80,000 in student loan debt. The Yankees are a multi-billion dollar franchise with their own stupid TV network. So they are worse.
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1. You can’t fucking use printed tickets.
The shit-head Yankees instituted in 2016 a policy banning attendees from using at-home printed tickets at the gates. They would only accept hard-stock tickets or electronic codes on your phone. The team argued it was to prevent fraud with printed tickets, but it was thin veil. Many saw this as the Yankees spurning StubHub, forcing would-be attendees to instead use the Yankees Ticket Exchange, run by Ticketmaster, where you can’t sell tickets below face value.
Last year, Yankees COO Lonn Trost went on the team’s local radio station and basically said that he didn’t want poor people to sit in premium seats.
"It's not that we don't want that fan to sell [their premium ticket on Stubhub], but that fan is sitting there having paid a substantial amount of money for a ticket and [another] fan picks it up for a buck-and-a-half and sits there, and it's frustrating to the purchaser of the full amount," said Trost, whose net worth is $800,000.
As you can guess, this policy sucked and led to fans being boned by the goddamn shitty Yankees.
The Yankees announced a $100-million deal with StubHub earlier this year, so now they can fuck you from two angles.
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2. The tickets are too fucking expensive.
Alright, I can’t buy discounted tickets online. Let me head on over to the Yankees box office and try to DEAR GOD WHO THE FUCK CAN AFFORD THESE.
When the ballpark opened, the average ticket price to a Yankees game was $73, almost three times as much as the league average of $26. That average cost immediately tanked the following season to $51 dollars, as seen in this painfully obvious “we-fucked-up” Statista graph.
When the stadium opened, access to the ritzy “Legends Suites” cost you an average of $510, more than five times the league average for premium seating. (Don’t worry, the suites offer many lush amenities, like a private entrance, cushioned seats, and a “dedicated premium experience specialist,” which is definitely not a stripper, probably.)
Some luxury seats went for as high as $2,500 in that inaugural year. The goddamn Yankees had the low-hanging Tyrannosaurus balls to charge these exorbitant prices in 2009. What else happened in 2009? Oh yeah, the biggest fucking economic downturn since the goddamn fucking Great Depression. Fuck the Yankees.
To make matters worse, we simple plebs can’t even pop into the suites areas for a quick photograph or to stand above the dugout before a game and peddle for autographs, which is Baseball Stadium 101. The goddamn Yankees have constructed what some call a “concrete moat” around the seating area – a heavily secured area to prevent fans from entering the area without tickets.
A fan wrote on the blog Clutch Fan that the Yankee Stadium Legends Suites debacle is but a microcosm of sports franchises pricing out their most loyal fans. Sure, but let’s blame the shitty Yankees on this one.
"[Legends Suites patrons] would be protected from the leering hoi polloi by The Moat -- not a metaphorical divide between the haves and have-nots but an actual wall that separates the Legends from the losers,” the fan wrote. “Kids without the proper tickets, the team pointed out proudly, would not be allowed down there to beg for autographs.”
The fucking Yankees hate kids.
Of course, this led to lower level seats being embarrassingly empty when the stadium opened. The stupid Yankees eventually slashed their premium ticket prices in half, but the damage was done. Ticket and suite revenues have fallen by $166 million since the stadium’s inaugural year, the New York Times reported in May. Last year alone, ticket and suite revenues dropped $46 million. Average attendance was 34,642 this season, a decline of 12,000 from the new stadium’s peak.
Defying satire, Yankees’ managing general partner Hal Steinbrenner blamed this on millennials.
“That age group is not what it could be and not what it should be” when it comes to viewership of Yankees' games, he said.
To court us youngins back into the arms of the stupid goddamn Yankees, the team set aside 200,000 tickets to be $15 or less, which included a free drink but was standing-room-only. Kids hate sitting. The team also hired a new social media director. Kids love Twittering and Facebook-timing.
“It’s obvious that looking at things … that’s the age group that is less interested than any age groups in the game,” Steinbrenner said. “Why? What can you do about it?”
Fuck Hal Steinbrenner.
No one can afford these seats.
In related news of utter fuckery, the Yankees started a new “dynamic pricing” system in 2017, saying they will use “advanced computer pricing software” and ticket prices will be “variable,” you know, like a botched mortgage deal.
“The Yankees may adjust ticket prices based on changing factors that affect market demand,” the team's website says, a cryptic statement that I’m sure would infuriate a Yankee fan if they could even decipher what the fuck it means.
OK, but what happens if I buy a ticket and then the price goes down later? You may be surprised to hear that you’ll get fucked. All ticket sales are final and non-refundable. So buying a ticket to watch the shitty Yankees just became the stock market, except, somehow, even more confusing and pointless.
I know what you're thinking. Tickets are too expensive, so just don’t go to the game.
The stadium was built with $1.2 billion in public subsidies. Joke’s on you, asshole! You’re still paying for that fucking stadium.
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3. The fucking Yankees want to kill children.
Many MLB teams made it a priority this year to extend protective netting along baseline seating, after a string of high-profile incidents of kids eating baseballs for dinner, and sometimes lunch, if it was a day game. The MLB issued an official recommendation in December 2015 to install netting from home plate to the end of the dugouts.
Four teams - the Reds, Padres, Mariners, and Rockies – decided to extend the netting when a one-year-old girl was sent to the hospital after being stuck by a 105 mph ball at – you guessed it – a fucking Yankees game.
What’s worse – Yankee players actually want the extending netting in place, but ownership continued to wring its hands. Todd Frazier, the veteran infielder whose foul ball hit the girl, told the media he immediately thought of his own young children.
"I know the dad, or whoever it was that was with them, was trying their hardest, but the ball's coming at 120 miles an hour at them, and the ball's hooking,” Frazier said, as reported by Business Insider.
Rookie Aaron Judge, when asked of the extended netting, responded simply: “We need it.” Yankee veteran pitcher CC Sabathia said he always has his family sit behind the protective netting. Frazier said the same.
A child is hit with a chunk of broken bat at Yankee Stadium in May. // Image by Charles Wenzelberg
This isn’t the first child to have their face exploded by a stupid baseball at shitty Yankee Stadium. A boy was bloodied after being hit in the head by a shard of a broken bat in May.
In July, a fan sitting beyond the first-base dugout at Yankee Stadium was hit by a 105 mph ball.
After the Frazier incident, New York City Councilman Rafael L. Espinal Jr. introduced legislation to have netting extended in New York arenas that held more than 5,000 fans. The Mets, New York’s only not-the-fucking-Yankees baseball team, followed up and extended the netting, like decent humans.
Meanwhile, human garbage piles the New York Yankees released a statement saying they were “seriously exploring extending the netting prior to the 2018 season.” This is corporate speak for: “But, money??”
Yankees COO Lonn Trost, the same dude who doesn’t want poor people to watch baseball, told the New York Times that fans were "upset that we were even considering” extending netting. Trost then bizarrely stated that the Yankees were studying installing netting but that “We don’t think this is a three-day job.” After the Frazier incident, the team did issue a statement on their website sending “thoughts and prayers” to the injured child. Sources report the thoughts and prayers were roughly a three-minute job.
The Yankees finally announced earlier this month that they would be installing extended netting next fucking season, so let’s thank God there will be no more playoff games played at shitty-ass Yankee Stadium this year.
In reaction to the policy update, manager and extremely smart man Joe Girardi told the media that baseballs are “extremely hard” and go real fast! They sure do, don't they, Joe?
The stupid Yankees have not given any more details on what the netting will look like or how far it will extend. Fucking great. Who fucking cares.
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4. The stadium fucking sucks.
OK, you’ve paid outrageous prices to get inside the hallowed Yankee Stadium. You’ve worn a protective catcher’s helmet and chest plate. Time to enjoy some baseball! Here we go, Yankees! Here we --- wait, why is no one chanting with me?
Since opening, the new Yankee Stadium has attained a reputation that every awful sports arena craves – it literally has no soul.
“This ballpark is beautiful, don’t get me wrong. But it just doesn’t seem like it has the atmosphere of the old one,” former Red Sox manager Terry Francona said in 2012.
Tyler Kepner, a New York Times contributor, wrote in 2009 when the stadium opened: “It sure seems that the new Yankee Stadium lacks any semblance of the atmosphere that made the original so special.”
Kepner blames this on all the things already mentioned – fans can’t traverse the concrete moat to get close to players and no one is sitting near the field anyway because they can’t afford it. “The new park does not have [atmosphere], and it’s not set up for it,” Kepner wrote.
Daily News writer Bob Raissman, in a 2012 piece for the Daily News, called the new stadium “The Library” because of how it deadens fan noise.
Even opposing players have noted how pathetic fans sound at the new stadium. During a playoff game in 2012, Detroit Tigers outfielder Quintin Berry delivered a simply-stated but delicious burn, saying the new Yankee Stadium is a “very easy” place for opposing teams to play. In the same series, the Yankees told ushers to cover up unfilled seats.
"Coming from Oakland, the fans there were so rowdy,” Berry said, per Yahoo! Sports. “It was easier to come here."
The issues compound – kids can’t talk to players, fans can’t afford nice seats, and it’s not fun to be there. The pinstriped snake eats its own tail.
New York Post writer Phil Mushnik, in a column from June, likened the atmosphere in the new stadium to a “funeral.” The crowd at a recent game, he said, “created nothing greater than a dull murmur, the kind tourists make walking through Notre Dame Cathedral."
Mushnik then drives the knife into the throat.
“If [Yankee’s President] Randy Levine and Hal Steinbrenner’s business plan was to condition the Yanks’ steadiest paying customers to get out and stay out, it has succeeded.”
Fuck the Yankees. They hate you.
Vigorous hat tips to ESPN, Bleacher Report, Yahoo! Sports, The New York Times, New York Daily News, New York Post, and others cited above.
