Archives for April 2009

The Mets and the Yankees together have spent more than $2 billion on new stadiums partly to bring fans much closer to the action. But that access comes at a cost. For the best views, fans will have to pay eye-popping prices to sit on the field level and in the decks behind home plate in seats angled toward the infield.

Fans on tighter budgets, though, will have to settle for seats in far-off sections, some of which have obstructed views of the field.

Mets fans learned this the hard way on Sunday, when St. John’s and Georgetown played the first game at Citi Field. Steven Gottesman, who has a 15-game ticket plan, went to see his four seats in Section 533, Row 15, near the top of the upper deck down the left-field line. To his “shock and horror,” he could not see the warning track or about 20 feet of the outfield from the left-field line to center field.

“In other words, I will only know if a home run is hit if I am listening to a radio at the game or I wait to see the sign from the umpire,” Gottesman, 45, said in an e-mail message. “If Endy Chávez made his catch in this new stadium and I had been there, I would not have seen it.”

Some Yankee fans will have it even worse. That is because the 1,048 bleacher seats in Sections 201 and 239 have views partly blocked by the walls of the Mohegan Sun Sports Bar, which sits above Monument Park behind the center-field fence. Fans in Section 201, for instance, will not be able to see left field and, in some cases, even third base.

The Yankees are mounting five flat-panel screens on each side of the restaurant’s outer walls so fans can see on television what they miss live. After Newsday reported that these sections had obstructed views, the Yankees said they would charge $5 for seats there, less than the $12 that season-ticket holders will pay for other bleacher seats.

Alice McGillion, a spokeswoman for the Yankees, said obstructed-view seats were always supposed to cost $5 and that an invoicing problem led to the mix-up that had them originally being offered for more than twice as much. (The Yankees’ Web site does not reflect the new, lower prices.) Fans there will also get access to other parts of the park and to the Bleachers Café, which is above the sports bar.

“In the old stadium, you had no place to eat and you came in and stayed there,” McGillion said, adding that fans will be able to buy beer, which was not sold in recent years in the bleachers at the old stadium. “People can get up and watch the entire game from the cafe, plus there will be TVs.”

As for the Mets, they continue to maintain that there are no obscured-view seats in Citi Field, despite what some fans were contending after Sunday’s game. Fans might miss a play or two, the Mets conceded. But, they added, the game action will be replayed on the scoreboards and the fans are closer to the field to begin with.

“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,” said Dave Howard, the Mets’ vice president for business operations. “That’s typical in new ballparks, but a little different for our customers because Shea didn’t have much of anything like that.”

Howard admitted that the seats in Section 533 are angled in such a way that fans will be unable to see the warning track and some of the field. He said the team has no plans to lower its ticket prices or label the seats in question as having obscured views.

Seats in many ballparks have blind spots. But Mets and Yankees fans are angry now because the teams did not tell them about the obstructed views before they sold them the tickets. Until recently, fans could not visit the stadiums and had to rely on three-dimensional representations on the teams’ Web sites.

“How they ended up building brand new stadiums and not realize this is a head-scratcher,” said Jim Holzman, president of Ace Ticket, the official reseller of Boston Red Sox tickets. “Here they are with all these high-end seats to sell and they dropped the ball on the cheaper seats.”

The Red Sox, Holzman said, routinely mark their tickets when the seats have obstructed views. That helps the first fans who buy them, but does not necessarily inform fans who buy them when they are resold on StubHub and other ticket-selling sites. That means Mets and Yankees fans who buy their tickets from these sites could be in for a shock, too.

The problem is thornier for the Mets because Citi Field has only 42,000 seats, 26 percent fewer than at Shea Stadium. (The new Yankee Stadium will have 53,000 seats, a 5 percent decrease.) At Shea, seats in the last rows of the loge and mezzanine decks were discounted because the roofs above them obscured views of the field.

But because Shea was so much larger, opportunistic fans could often find better seats sometimes just a few rows away. With far fewer seats at Citi Field, some fans may end up standing in concourses to get better views.

Fans in the bleachers in the old Yankee Stadium, which was routinely sold out, learned to compromise.

“You were clearly giving up views and really being able to call balls and strikes and see close plays,” said Jason Fenton, who had season tickets in the right-field bleachers until 2005. “I would clearly prefer three rows behind the dugout. But you’re buying the tickets in the hope that you can go to the World Series.”

And while the Yankees may have disappointed some fans in the new bleacher seats, the team stands to earn money from the naming rights to the Mohegan Sun Sports Bar and the food sold inside and above it. And fans seem to be willing to put up with their seats’ defects if the price is right. Those $5 bleacher seats at Yankee Stadium are sold out for the season.