Earlier this month, I blasted the New York Yankees for making many tickets in their new stadium too expensive for the average fan. Since then, quite a few of these pricey seats -- which sell for up to $2,625 a pop, with no discount for mom -- have remained empty.
My reaction to this? BWAHAHA! Given that the team's super-rich owners used taxpayer subsidies to help finance their gilded ballpark, it serves them right that they're losing some revenue. Yet I'm haunted by the question of what these empty seats can be used for instead.
One possibility would be for Yankee owners to withdraw their huge fortunes from the bank and stack this cash on the empty seats. The money would no longer earn interest, of course, but it would earn a different kind of interest from people in the cheaper seats who want their tax money back. I can almost hear a recession-slammed fan calling out to a stadium vendor: "Give me a wad of twenties with on a bun with mustard!" More fiber than a hot dog, and it's always good to "go green."
Or each empty seat could become a luxury condo. Sure, these upscale dwellings would be a bit small, but no smaller than most studio apartments in Manhattan. And with the U.S. government doing all that wiretapping, who has privacy anymore anyway? (Those two "any" words in a row leave me just 54 short of Joe DiMaggio's famous hitting streak of 1941 -- when the old Yankee Stadium turned 18, got drafted, and received the boot-camp training that enabled it to join the Normandy Invasion three years later. The ballpark was surprisingly agile when running up Omaha Beach.)
You could also fill the stadium's lower deck with a few tons of sand and turn those pricey empty seats into beach chairs. Such a scenario would require diverting the Atlantic Ocean onto the field. As the grounds crew performs its once-a-game ritual of smoothing the infield dirt to the strains of "YMCA," that Village People song would become a plaint for swimming lessons.
One more possibility: The new stadium's pricey empty seats could be used to store old blog posts when the "Internets" fills up. Blog posts wouldn't mind traveling through congested streets to reach the ballpark, because traffic makes them happy. And blog posts wouldn't mind watching high-scoring games, because hits are important to them. Blog posts DO mind bad puns, which means I better end this piece now.
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Got any other potential uses for the pricey empty seats at Yankee Stadium? You can offer your suggestions below for a fee that's $2,625 less than $2,625.