Meet the New Boss

The new Yankee Stadium is kind of like a strip club, cobbled together to showcase the hottest broads baseball has to offer. Despite the bright lights and expensive lather seats, Mystique and Aura nevertheless perform with the same enthusiasm and joy as any old broads from a ratty upstate New York joint who dance while trying to remember what was that third thing they had to get at the supermarket after work.

I got a chance to go to a game at the new Yankee Stadium last week and it is beautiful, if you are a fan of the Forum Shops at Caesar's Palace. Which I am, but not when going to a baseball game.

Whereas the old Yankee Stadium had the charm of an old but reliable bar that should have been demolished ten years ago yet still soldiers on despite numerous health violations, the new Yankee stadium is like that new flashy "lounge" that pays Lindsay Lohan $100K to stand amidst techno music nobody enjoys and text her coke dealer, while the douchebag bouncers force you to wait in line for half an hour even though nobody is actually inside.

I sound like I'm bitching, even though the trip to the Stadium was a lot of fun, it was awesome to sit there with my grandpa, and baseball is great. What I'm bitching about is the new stadium seems to me kind of unnecessary. Yes, the bathrooms in the old stadium were portals to hell, but, good God, Mickey Mantle and Babe Ruth and all those players who, even as a Yankee hater, I'll begrudgingly admit were all-time greats played there. It wasn't as dilapidated as you might think, and I'll serve Fenway Park as an example of what a little renovation can do to your historic ballpark.

In the new Yankee stadium, the $1,500 seats (marked down from $2,500 or so -- plus a $65 convenience charge each -- since this is a recession) are separated from the $400 seats by an honest-to-God moat, and feature more security guards than Saddam Hussein's palaces. At 4 p.m., they wouldn't let my grandfather -- an 82 year-old life long Yankee fan who is now maybe 5-5 and always wears wool suits and wears his baseball cap with a flat brim because he has never put one on and doesn't know that's not how 82 year-olds wear them -- even lean against the rail to take a picture.

There are only three sit-down restaurants. One is available only to the fine folks who paid for the $1,500 seats. It is always empty. The other is the Mohegan Sun's Bar, open only to those who are members of the fine casino in Connecticut. And the other is the Hard Rock Cafe. So if you want to get a good sit-down meal at the stadium, you can't.

What you can do is order $16 sandwiches from industrious waitresses who run between the seats. That's right. No characters hawking peanuts and tossing them at you behind their back like in every other baseball stadium. While the waitresses are certainly convenient, come on. Few things are as entertaining as watching a fat guy who is clearly loaded trying to balance a full beer in one hand and three dripping hot dogs in the other while he squeezes himself in through the seats -- ass out to the field, of course -- in front of a terrified family wearing matching white shirts.

I'm going to miss the old Yankee Stadium. It was a fine place to watch a ballgame and a living museum of what is admittedly a great tradition. The new one is nice in the same way those $5 in-flight meals are nice. It's a marginally better meal, but, really? Five dollars for what I used to get for free?

The long and short of it? If the old Yankee Stadium was Heather Locklear -- who probably looks awful in the mornings but can still get it done, plus it's Heather frickin' Locklear -- then the new Yankee Stadium is Madonna. Not because of A-Rod (although it helps), but because she's high maintenance and demanding even though there is a lot of make-up, a lot of things that weren't there before, and her fans follow her blindly even though she hasn't really done anything worthwhile in years.