The Yankees deserve a world class facility. I hope they do it right, and be the views I see-they are doing just that.

quote:

Originally posted by Oil Can Kelly:
The Yankees deserve a world class facility. I hope they do it right, and be the views I see-they are doing just that.

The exterior looks like the 1923 version of Yankee Stadium.

The interior looks like [insert Great America, New Nats, Citizen's, etc.)]. In other words, it looks generic.

I'm not sold on it.

I saw the Halos/Yankees game on Sunday in The Bronx--the stadium, and it is a stadium, not really feeling like a baseball "park", the way Fenway or Wrigley does, is pretty nondescript other than the obvious great history they have there (views, such as they are, are restricted to a boxy, blah post office-like building in The Bronx--it is too too bad they couldn't find a way to build the new park in Manhattan or even Brooklyn, near Coney Island?)--however, sitting among the rowdy right field bleacher creatures was great fun...now I can say I saw a game at (soon to be "old") Yankee Stadium--no burning desire to go back, but it was cool enough...guess I got spoiled by Pac Bell, Fenway, Wrigley, Dodger and their ilk!

Click on the link to read the article from the Boston Herald

Yanks could cash in on stadium
By Scott Van Voorhis
Boston Herald Business Reporter
Wednesday, August 23, 2006

The Boston Massacre is over and the Yankees are speeding away, with the roadkill Red Sox fast receding in the rear-view mirror.

But if you think it couldn't get worse after that five- game train wreck, think again.

Because the Yankees, off the field, are also poised to pull away with a bold business move.

And it's one that could have more dire consequences for Red Sox Nation than a painful five-game sweep.

The Evil Empire has begun constructing a giant new Bronx baseball palace, one that will give Boss Steinbrenner even more money to play with.

Yankee Stadium has for years been a weak spot in the franchise's operations. The once-grand 1920s structure gobbled up millions a year in short-term fixups just to keep it from crumbling.

No more.

The Yankees, starting in 2009, will have a sparkling new, $1.2 billion stadium to play in.

And it promises to be a veritable cash machine, soaking up tens of millions in extra revenue to keep the Yankees bloated payroll -at last count $208 million - afloat.

And maybe even enough to put the free-spending Yankees - who lose more than $50 million a year, according to various estimates - back in the black again.

The new stadium is "vital" to helping the Yankees become profitable again, General Manager Brian Cashman told Bloomberg News yesterday.

At the same time, financier John Henry's Red Sox ownership group is approaching a revenue wall as immovable as the Green Monster.

With the help of Camden Yards architect Janet Marie Smith, the Sox have turned once-decrepit Fenway Park into their own cash cow. By the time the renovations are complete, the team will have added thousands of seats, many of them luxury, to the ballpark, boosting capacity to 39,000.

But team executives also know the day is approaching when the big revenue gains at Fenway begin to level off, when there won't be room left to cram one more concession stand into the cramped confines of baseball's smallest ballpark.

Maybe as soon as 2009, when a smiling Steinbrenner cuts the ribbon on a new, 51,800 seat stadium.

While a few thousand seats smaller, the new stadium will be loaded up with 60 luxury suites, triple the number in the old stadium. Ticket and luxury box revenue will be critical to repaying municipal bonds that make it possible for the Yankees to fund the stadium.

But more to the point of padding the Yankees bottom line will be the corporate sponsorship opportunities.

Old Yankee Stadium had few areas for such displays.

But Steinbrenner's new ballpark will be built for such lucrative signage and mini-naming rights deals.

Each gate will provide a high-priced corporate naming deal, said Marc Ganis, a top Chicago-based sports-business expert.

That alone could bring in tens of millions in extra cash for the Yanks.Clearly money isn't everything in baseball.

Yet Steinbrenner's Yankees also show how tough it can be to beat a team with big money. "They already have limitless resources," said Sam Kennedy, the Sox corporate sponsor guru. "At that point, it will take them to another level."

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Click on the link to read the article from Bloomberg.com

New York Yankees Are Losing Money, Cashman Says (Update1)

By Scott Soshnick, Jerry Azar and Larry DiTore

Aug. 22 (Bloomberg) -- The New York Yankees are losing money even as they're winning games, General Manager Brian Cashman said.

The team's highest-in-baseball payroll, revenue-sharing outlay and other expenses eclipse its revenue, Cashman said in an interview on Bloomberg radio's "On the Ball,'' to be aired this weekend.

"We're making a lot, but we're spending more than we're making,'' Cashman said. He declined to say how much the team is losing.

His comments come a week after the team broke ground for a $1.2 billion stadium project next to their current home in the Bronx that is funded mainly through municipal bonds. It's scheduled to open in 2009.

The Yankees this year became Major League Baseball's first team worth more than $1 billion, according to Forbes magazine's annual valuation published in April. The team had a baseball- best $277 million in revenue, Forbes said.

Forbes said the Yankees lost $50 million last season before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization because they paid $77 million in revenue sharing to less wealthy clubs.

The New York Daily News reported in December that the team lost between $50 million and $85 million last season, even while becoming only the third team ever to draw more than 4 million fans to home games. Neither publication cited anyone from the Yankees organization.

The club said on July 2 that it already sold more than 4 million tickets for this season.

Winning Team

Cashman said owner George Steinbrenner's desire to give fans a winning team led to New York's acquiring high-priced players including Alex Rodriguez, Jason Giambi, Gary Sheffield, Johnny Damon and, in July, Bobby Abreu. Together they are making $79.5 million this season.

Such acquisitions have left the Yankees with baseball's highest payroll every season since 1999.

"You can try to build a perfect business plan, but again you're going to have to deviate from it,'' Cashman said. "That's why some of the decisions that we've made and started to make going forward are to help transition us to help get the payroll back in line.''

The team began last season with a $208 million payroll, about 6.7 percent higher than the $195 million it started with in 2006.

Playoff Run

The Yankees' spending has paid off on the field. The team has made the playoffs every year since 1995, winning the World Series in 1996 and 1998-2000. They've won a total of 26 championships, more than any other team. This season, the Yankees lead the American League East Division by 6 1/2 games after sweeping a five-game series last weekend from the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park for the first time in 55 years.

Cashman said the new stadium, which will triple the number of luxury suites to 60, is "vital'' to helping the team return to profitability.

The Yankees issued about $967 million of municipal bonds through the New York City Industrial Development Agency to help finance the stadium. The bonds are to be repaid with money from ticket and luxury box sales at the new stadium.

"The team needs to be a viable enterprise,'' said Moody's analyst Thomas Paolicelli. "There's only so much time where they can run a deficit before it would start impacting their obligations.''

Paolicelli said Moody's will monitor the situation. He said bondholders are protected because the Yankees would risk foreclosure on the stadium if they didn't repay the debt. Also, he said, the team estimates that revenue from ticket sales and luxury boxes should be four times as much as the annual debt payments due bondholders.

"We think the incentive to pay the bonds is going to be very strong,'' Paolicelli said.

To contact the reporters on this story: Jerry Azar in New York at zarstar@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: August 22, 2006 17:30 EDT

Well, it's been more than a year, so I'll just post a few pics of the construction so far:























Thanks to Yankeetradition.com for some of the pics.

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0813,as-new-yankee-an,389221,1.html

As New Yankee and Met Stadiums Go Up, So Do Costs and Disruption
by Neil deMause
March 25th, 2008 12:00 AM

When Mets and Yankees fans arrive for the start of the new season, the teams' past and future will be on display side by side"”and not just Pedro Martinez and Johan Santana or Andy Pettitte and Joba Chamberlain. At a record-shattering price tag of more than $2.5 billion, twin homes for New York's ball clubs are being readied for their 2009 openings"”and in the Bronx in particular, the repercussions are affecting not just the city treasury but the local neighborhood.

At the time of the two teams' ignominious exits last fall, the new stadiums were still little more than skeletons. Since then, decorative arches"”granite for the new Yankee Stadium, brick for the Mets' Citi Field"”have mostly taken shape, and the seating bowls are in place. Sharp-eyed fans will note the wide gap between the outer and inner structures: As in most modern stadiums (but not relative oldsters like Shea and Yankee), the façades are mere shells around the actual ballparks within, the better to fill the space in between with concession-y goodness.

The similarities, however, stop at the ballpark walls. The Yankees' project has gotten more attention not just because it's displacing more hallowed ground"”the biggest controversy for Mets fans has been whether the team will preserve Shea's 1980s-vintage plaster home-run apple"”but because it's far vaster in scale. Where Citi Field is going up in a parking lot, the new Yankee Stadium is being erected in the former Macombs Dam and Mullaly parks and, with its accompanying garages, is already transforming its South Bronx environs. It's one reason why the Yanks' costs are so much higher: nearly $1.9 billion, compared to the Mets' comparatively thrifty $850 million. Of that, taxpayers are covering almost half, mostly via tax rebates and other goodies; the latest estimates for total public subsidies, according to figures compiled by the Voice, are $833 million for the Yankees, $449 million for the Mets.

Hidden costs like tax-exempt bonds are to blame for much of the subsidy bloat, but the soaring costs afflicting all city construction come into play here, too. When Mayor Bloomberg first announced the Yankees plan in June 2005, he projected that it would cost $135 million just to replace the parks being demolished for the new stadium (as well as to raze the old stadium and move a water main). By last year, that figure had risen to $195 million, thanks to what the city called "contingency funding," and apparently those contingencies weren't enough: Last week, the city's Economic Development Corporation reported its current projections had reached $190 million for the parks alone, plus another $52 million for "infrastructure."

The signs of all that money being spent are everywhere around the intersection of 161st Street and River Avenue as opening day nears. To the north, in the former Macombs Dam Park, cranes lift into place the final pieces of the new stadium"”slightly shorter than the old, but much broader, a salad bowl rather than a tureen. To the southwest, what was until recently a set of ballfields adjacent to the team parking lot is now a sea of earth movers, prepping the land for one of three new parking garages. The decorative frieze"”the bit of scrim that architecturally challenged sportswriters usually call the "façade""”is mostly in place atop the stadium's rim, while giant baseballs have been engraved into the underpass beneath the Macombs Dam Bridge approach.

What you won't see are a lot of public parks being built. The largest of the planned replacements, dubbed "Heritage Field," won't be ready for another three years"”the current stadium must be torn down first to make way for it. Another, with a track to replace the one now buried beneath the Yankees' infield, has had its opening pushed back to 2011 as well, according to the EDC. Some work has begun on new tennis courts along the Harlem River (about half a mile and one highway overpass away from the old ones), but there's no sign of activity on the vest-pocket kiddie and skate parks promised for the corner of 157th Street and River Avenue. The new Metro-North station to serve the stadium, by contrast, is already taking shape, and scheduled to open next spring.

For local residents already faced with a construction site larger than Ground Zero on their doorstep, the slow pace of the new parks adds insult to injury. Geneva Hester's apartment in an Art Deco building on Jerome Avenue once looked out on a leafy treescape; now she sees a wall that rises straight up only a few feet back from the curb line. Next to it, a garage is going up that will provide free valet parking for the Yanks and 600 of their special guests; workers recently began driving support beams for it, restoring the familiar "PING! PING!" that was the neighborhood's background noise for much of last year. "They work Saturdays, so you don't really get any rest," says Hester. "Even if you close the door, you hear it."

To get her daily exercise, Hester and her neighbors must now rely on a small temporary park below a bridge ramp. To reach the 161st Street shopping strip, meanwhile, requires running a gauntlet of construction fencing and heavy machinery, plus the tangle of traffic that's resulted from multiple street closures. During the rebuild of the original stadium in the mid-'70s, Hester recalls, streets and parks were likewise torn up for two years. How does the current construction compare? "There is no comparison, please. Nothing like this. This is terrible."

One other new revelation from the EDC: The House That Ruth Built is scheduled for demolition in the spring and summer of 2009"”in full view of fans filing past en route to the new digs. This promises the kind of drawn-out scene that faced Chicago in 1991, where White Sox fans could watch Comiskey Park's death throes unfolding across the street. (The morbidly curious can visit ballparks.phanfare.com for a slideshow of the carnage in action.)

"It took quite a while to knock Comiskey down," recalls John Aranza, a lifelong Sox fan who sneaked into the old ballpark "maybe a dozen times" during demolition. "I couldn't believe it when that wrecking ball hit. You realize that nothing's sacred. It'll hurt"”I'm telling you, it'll hurt."