MAKE SOME NOISE
Silence is deafening at new Yankee Stadium
IF the previous Yankee Stadium was a “cathedral,” this one, almost from Day 1, sounds like one.
Perhaps the life was drained from Friday night’s crowd after a 1-hour, 42-minute rain delay then a 2-1, 10-inning game that ran another 3:32.
Still, the Yankees — the New York Yankees, for crying out loud — were in first place and there was something that resembled a crowd. But unlike those that formed in old Yankee Stadium, Friday’s, as barely heard on YES, created nothing greater than a dull murmur, the kind tourists make walking through Notre Dame Cathedral.
Even the public address system’s canned prompts to stir the crowd went ignored.
But Saturday was a good afternoon for first-place baseball in any stadium. Yet in new Yankee Stadium, again very low on those dedicated regulars who made the old, affordable one a fabulous fanhouse, the sound could be mistaken for that of a museum, a wake, or something less than awake.
Given the Stadium was short roughly 15,000 who might’ve otherwise been there had new Yankee Stadium not been designed and sustained as a Palace of Greed, Saturday’s persistent dull murmur was the sound of avarice.
The Rangers took a 1-0 lead in the first, thus in the bottom of the first, after Brett Gardner led off with a single, Aaron Hicks and Aaron Judge up next, the joint should’ve been jumping. It wasn’t. The place was dead and couldn’t be jump-started.
And when Judge, extra special in so many ways, came to bat, that murmur was raised only slightly, to a mild buzz.
Still at 1-0, Starlin Castro led off the bottom of the second with a hit. “Let’s go Yanks!”? Nope. Again, the Stadium sounded as if it contained observers, not fans. And the PA system’s encouragement to demonstrate some audible enthusiasm was again met with indifference.
Bottom of the third, still 1-0, two out and a man on second, Judge came to the plate to nothing above the dull and ordinary.
Perhaps, with the announced attendance of 40,225 — how did so many produce so little noise? — there were thousands who traveled to the game just to watch on the large screen TVs in the fancy buffet room.
If 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.
In the ninth, with Texas up, 8-1, the Stadium had mostly emptied when Judge batted. Paul O’Neill then spoke for a tiny and inconspicuous minority. He said that many fans had stuck around because “Judge is batting in the ninth.”
A crowd shot then showed that if this were true, it wasn’t by much. Certainly those customers — “guests,” as the Yankees have misnamed them — who’d filled no more than half of those insanely expensive good seats earlier, were gone. And if we couldn’t see those who stuck around for Judge’s last licks, we couldn’t hear them, either.
We didn’t even hear a groan after he struck out.