The Yankee Stadium

Shorter Joel Sherman: Sure, the new Yankee Stadium is a really nice place to see a baseball game, but where's the ivy-covered wall? And while nobody could have foreseen..., they make me sick.

The new Yankee Stadium has just about everything you would want in a modern sports facility, except charm and a sense of proportion.

If you can afford the prices, you should have a good time there. The sightlines are wonderful. The large screen in center field is so clear you really do feel as if you could reach out and touch the people on it. The concourses are wide, and the food choices abundant.

Yet the place brought nausea, not nostalgia. It just feels like the wrong time in the history of this country and this city to be opening up the George Mahal. When the project was initiated 2 ½ years ago, the Yankees could not have known what the state of the economy was going to be now.

As one caller put it on WFAN this morning, "the Yankees don't do charm."

Madame Cura and I visited the place this morning and afternoon found the place, overall to be -- and this is kinda important -- a really nice place to watch a ballgame. No, it ain't quaint. It has no quirks (except some weird pedestrian bottlenecks to get to the bleacher seats. The facade of the building is certain not retro the way Camden Yards is. It's more neo-modernist -- monumental yet streamlined (and very nearly identical to the original circa 1923). The sight lines are fantastic, and as you wander around the concourses, the game is never out of sight (even standing in line, there are TVs over the vendors). We sat in the fourth deck (under a roof and the great canter levered filigree that also recreates a unique aspect of the original), and didn't feel like we were on a ski jump as it used to feel like in the old building post remodel. And the view out over center field (on either side of the hi-def) is the urban viewscape of the elevated train, brownstones, and rooftop water tanks. It ain't McCovey Cove or the sunset over Seattle, but it's unlike anything else in baseball -- it's still The Bronx. And it is still the corporate headquarters of baseball -- efficient and focused on the play on the field.

I was surprised was there wasn't any tie in with a New York restaurant, such as Citi Field's Blue Smoke bbq. There is a Hard Rock Cafe, but we wandered all over and never saw an entrance, and anyway, HRC sucks and I mean something you can eat at your seat. Shun Lee Palace chinese would be nice, for instance. Or steak sandwiches from Peter Luger (oh, right, that's Brooklyn...wouldn't be appropriate). Better yet, this would be perfect. A little imagination in the food department wouldn't take away from the game.