East Coast Rivals: A September Showdown at Yankee Stadium

New York Yankees

Specifics:

Yankee Stadium

Boston Red Sox vs. New York Yankees

Date of Game: Sunday September 15, 2024

Time of Game: 1:35PM EST

Final score: Red Sox - 2, Yankees - 5

Section 417 Row 2 Seat 1

Our trip to see the Yankees play at Yankee Stadium has always been on the back burner. The stadium is close, like 20 miles away, but since it is so close, a trip can be arranged with little notice.  I’ve used this reasoning for most of the east coast stadiums. My thinking is that it would be easier to escape for a day or two than a week, both financially and physically.

There was little question that we’d use public transportation to Yankee Stadium. The main reason being that I don’t like traffic, and NYC has a lot of it, and though the stadium isn’t far away it would make for a less stressful day, provide a little exercise, and an opportunity to see Grand Central Terminal. The negatives of using public transportation are the costs and longer travel time. For instance, the travel per person for the day was approximately $25. Parking at Yankee stadium is listed as $35 in 2024, although there are other lots nearby that could be less. The travel time each way could be as short as 45 minutes by car, but by public transportation could be 90-120 minutes.

Up until the night before the game, I was undecided as to whether we should travel by subway from Grand Central Terminal to Yankee Stadium or use the Metro-North Railroad. I’ve never ridden Metro-North and thought it could be a fun adventure. I decided not to do this because the walk from the station to the stadium was further than using the subway and the subway has more frequent trains.

So, the morning of it was decided that we’d use the Long Island Railroad to Grand Central Station, then using the subway (the 4 train) from Grand Central to Yankee Stadium in Bronx NY. Although, the Metro-North option wasn’t completely off the table… we’d see when we got to Grand Central.

After re-reading above, I see that my “Native New Yawker” might be hanging out a little too much, let me add a little explanation: “Grand Central” and “Grand Central Station” are two common ways to refer to the collection of trains, subways, buses, taxi’s, that stop at this one ginormous building, Grand Central Terminal. The subways are located below Grand Central Terminal, and the stop is called, Grand Central – 42nd St. See, that’s not confusing, is it? :-)  

The train ride from Long Island, N.Y. took about 45 minutes and started a little after 10:00AM. The car was packed already, so we stood on the first leg of our ride. I didn’t expect it to be so busy, but maybe it was because of the Yankee game and who they were playing against, a Yankees vs. Red Sox game is kind of a big deal! The train we were on stopped at UBS Arena, this was new to me. In the past the train ran right past this station.  I really wanted to take photos along the way, but the railroad car windows were very dirty.

I took one photo upon arrival in Grand Central (the sign that said Grand Central), then we were on the run to get to the subway. I took another when we rode this extremely long and steep escalator (about 182 feet long, 90-foot drop and takes a minute and 38 seconds, you can see a picture of it at elevatorworld.com. ) It was easy to figure out where we needed to go, follow the crowd! Seriously, there were lots and lots of people with Yankee garb walking the same direction we were. Our walk to the subway was longer than I expected, it took us about 20 minutes. There are signs and exits on the concourse to show you which street you are under, I really wish I had thought to count how many blocks we walked. Although we had plenty of time, I didn’t know what might lay ahead of us when trying to connect with the subway. I’d rather arrive early at the game than late.

The subway – wow, this was crowded! We stood, and barely fit inside the sliding doors. It’s an experience to be sure. The subway ride itself is quick another 20 minutes or so. We remained in the crowd as we left the train and descended onto the street. Luckily, the entrance to the stadium is directly across the street from the exit. The security line was large but very organized and moved quickly. Another 15 minutes and we were inside the stadium. It was now just about 1:00PM.

First stop – ice cream helmets! These were located at concession stand 125. It looks like all the ice cream is at that location. So, that was easy. This time it was Mister Softee chocolate/vanilla swirl with sprinkles. They also sold Blue Bunny. We grabbed our ice cream and headed up to our seats. We really lucked out with the weather. It was sunny, very little clouds and mid-high 70’s throughout the day. Our seats were in the shade the entire game, I overheard someone nearby our seats say that this area is generally shaded during games.

Today was Roberto Clemente Day. Some of the players and managers were wearing his jersey number 21.  The game started at 1:39PM. It was a pitcher’s game during the first inning, no hits at all. But the action starts at the bottom of the 2nd, Giancarlo Stanton doubles and drives a run home. This was the first run of the game for either side. In the bottom of the third, both Gleyber Torres and Aaron Judge hit home runs for the Yankees, Judge sends a runner home. Yankees are in the lead with 4 runs.  At the top of the 4thh Boston gets on the board with a home run by Tyler O’Neill who also sends in a run, the game is Yankees 4 and Boston 2. In the bottom of the 7th, Giancarlo Stanton hits a sacrifice fly to send in the 5th run of the game for the Yankees. The game ended with a double play against the Red Sox. Yankees win 3 out of the 4 games of the series.

I was surprised that there wasn’t any entertainment to keep the crowd active in between innings. Many of the other stadiums we’ve gone to have t-shirt guns, or character relay races. They did however have AI generated cartoon photos of the Yankees players on the Jumbotron.  Of note, the Yankees do not have a team mascot.

One thing that caught my eye several times during the game were the birds flying from perch to perch across the stadium. It was almost like they were playing a game of tag or who could fly the fastest from one side to the other. Often, I found my eyes following them instead of looking at the field, probably because they were closer to the 400 seats than the players were.

In the bottom of the 5th inning, we went to grab hot dogs and a drink. We needed to go downstairs to get to the concourse, I think that maybe the same concourse is shared with levels 3 and 4.  In this area, there wasn’t a noticeable lounge area to sit and watch the game while you ate. I think the concessions were a bit pricy, a Sabrett hot dog was about $9.  Beer was like $15 a bottle (tall bottle though) and a nearby stand sold margaritas for $22!  Also, while we were getting situated, there was a blizzard of napkins. One of the napkin dispensers wasn’t secured properly and this poor woman was trying to hold her food and clean up the napkin mess. My partner and I both jumped in to help. She was like, “I don’t even know what happened!”

It seemed the afternoon really went quickly after that. The end of the game is always followed by Frank Sinatra's, "New York, New York" playing through the stadium as the fans leave. We stuck around and heard the song on repeat for about 6X while we tried to get a nice photo with the stadium as a background. Before I realized it, we were walking out of the stadium and up to the subway (which is so weird, but yes, in some areas the subway is above ground). The subway was even more packed than our trip into the Bronx, probably because everyone was leaving at the same time. I could barely reach the pole and needed to use my core to try and balance myself every time the subway stopped. The worst part is every time we stopped, more people tried to board. Not too many were leaving. We all stood like packed sardines until the Grand Central stop, then everyone started to disembark. Sadly, we missed our train out of Manhattan, by a few minutes, so we hung around the area for another 40 minutes, but at least we were able to get a seat on the train back home. The train pulled into our station between 6-7PM. It turned out to be a really great day!    

Some information, such as baseball game information and directions were sought by using ChatGPT or Perplexity.

​Written November 9, 2024

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