Disclaimer: This post is written from the perspective of a Yankee fan because last night, that’s all I was.
Section 1: Yankees- Red Sox games are awesome! I’ve been to a few and they are all great. No matter what the score the situation is always tense. The fans band together against anyone wearing red and in support of the Yanks. The place is packed and loud and exciting. There is a palpable animosity towards the other team that really makes this the greatest rivalry in sports. If you have any chance at all to get to a Yankees- Red Sox game, either in the new stadium in the Bronx or at Fenway, go. (Note: The games are just as fun in Boston, though up there I often get beer thrown at me.)
Section 2: The Yanks have got some problems. First off, they don’t have a single starter with an average above Alex Rodriguez’s .278. That’s no
where near good enough for a team with World Series aspirations. By contrast, Boston’s got 3 guys over .300, Jacoby Ellsbury, Adrian Gonzalez, and David Ortiz. Not to mention Dustin Pedroia, Kevin Youkilis, and Carl Crawford who have all had slow starts to the season but figure to finish near the .300 mark. New York has got to either add a bat (which sounds admittedly ridiculous) or get it going real quick.
Next, The Yankees bullpen is a mess. Boone Logan came in last night and promptly gave up a single, a walk, and a bases loaded walk. Not exactly a shut down reliever. I was sitting there thinking to myself “Damn, I wish we had Pedro Feliciano right now.” After Logan, Lance Pendleton 
came in the game. After the audible whispers of “Who is this guy” wrapped up around the stadium we watched Lance walk the first batter, two of the first three, and eventually give up 3 earned runs on 2 homers over 1.2 innings. Isn’t the difference between a big league pitcher and mediocre career minor leaguer the ability to throw strikes? Are Boone Logan and Lance Pendleton the best New York can do in Yankee-Red Sox game where the winner gets sole possession of first place? The bullpen walked 4 over 3.1 innings, all in big spots.
Section 3: Imagine you’re the General Manager of a baseball team. If someone offered you a starting pitcher who, over the first 2 plus years with your team would go 29-28 with a 4.58 ERA, a 1.91 K/BB ratio and a 1.42 WHIP, how much would you offer for that guy? $3 million a year? 5? 6 or 7 if you were really desperate, right? How about $16.5 million per year for 5
years. No way, right? That’s ridiculous, who would ever pay that much for that guy? Well, that’s what the Yankees are paying AJ Burnett and the numbers I cited above are his since first putting on the Pinstripes in 2009. Certainly the Burnett signing wont go down as one of the biggest busts of all time (the Lackey signing for Boston is arguably worse) but it’s definitely no where near good. Burnett is not the number two the Yanks thought they were getting. He’s not even close. He can’t beat the arch rival Red Sox to save his life and he’s so hit or miss in every other start that you can’t help but cringe whenever you see he’s got the game. He was just awful last night, allowing 7 earned over 5.2 and walking more than he struck out. Granted, he was not helped at all by his catcher Francisco Cervelli, who made 2 costly throwing errors early in the game, but that only hurt so much. With AJ as bad and as unreliable as he is, with Phil Hughes on the DL, and with Ivan Nova, Bartolo Colon, and Freddie Garcia a combined 12-12 in the back of the rotation, it seems like CC Sabathia is going to have to pitch the Yankees to the playoffs and win every game once they get there. CC’s a big man but I doubt even he could put that much weight on his back.
Section 3: I had great seats, about 25 rows behind the first base bag. They had an 
incredible view (all photos are from my phone which has a crappy camera and no zoom) and all the amenities of new Yankee Stadium. I had those cushy seats that compress when you sit down and even a menu in my cup holder and waiter service. Although I got the tickets for free, the face value was $110. Here’s the thing about those seats though, the fans around you are absolutely awful. Allow me vent on them for a minute:
Half the people were wearing button down dress shirts like they just came from the Law firm or Wall Street and the other half were wearing polos that said AIG or Barclays on the chest. They were all on their iPhones or Blackberries the entire time. The guy in front of me in his stupid graph-paper dress shirt was on Facebook for the entire game. Seriously. The 2 guys next to me (note: I am not making this up) spent the first four innings looking at photos of one guy’s favorite ties on his iPhone and at one point the guy with the phone looked up and said “oh, its 5 to zero?” On top of that and a bunch more stuid things I wont go into, they left before the start of the 7th. The 7th! Of a Yankee-Red Sox game with great seats.
Personally, I like the new stadium but I miss the old one. It was a piece of crap but it was
our piece of crap. That was our vague smell of urine throughout the entire stadium and our crappy, uncomfortable seats that never faced the right way and our place. This one is good and lord knows the 101 foot HD TV in centerfield is damn impressive but it’s almost too nice. And its definitely too expensive. The people it attracts and the only people who can afford it are the Wall Street, lawyer types who give the tickets to clients or partners and certainly aren’t real fans. I loved my seats last night, they were incredible and I didn’t want to get up for fear of wasting them but I’d almost rather sit in the upper deck next time, with the real fans. Assuming, of course, real fans can afford the $55 for upper deck seats.
-Max Frankel
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