Canwest Park here in Winnipeg, is a gorgeous 7,000-seat minor league ballpark that cost $22 million. It’s dimensions are 325 down the leftfield line, 325 down the rightfield line, 375 to the gaps and 400 feet to straightaway centrefield.
The New Yankee Stadium is 318 feet down the leftfield line and 314 feet down the rightfield and that old fashioned “short porch” in right that contributed mightily — more than steroids ever would have — to Roger Maris’s 61 home runs in 1961, has been reconstructed for your historical enjoyment.
It is, for lack of a better term, a $1.5 million band box. In fact, in this day and age, it’s a joke and just like those geniuses who built Comerica Park in Detroit had to bring in the leftfield fence, the idiots in New York who built a “porch” that made sense in the dead-ball era will have to do something to make the new Yankee Stadium just a little more than a quirky little joke.
For $1.5 billion, the Yankees gave their players and fans all the amenities of a five-star hotel in a ballpark best suited for Senior Amateur Baseball.
In the first three games at the new Yankee Stadium, there have been 17 home runs. That could be a result of bad pitching, but as Tim McCarver so aptly put it on Saturday’s Fox broadcast, “It’s April. What’s going to happen in the home run months of July and August?”
Here’s the real problem: Asdrubal Cabrera’s grand slam during Cleveland’s 22-4 shellacking of the Yankees on Saturday afternoon would have been a routine out in every other ballpark in the majors.
The new Yankee Stadium is obviously a beautiful piece of modern design and engineering. Outside the actual playing surface. The field’s dimensions make for a less-than-realistic major league stadium. In fact, the size of the playing field of the new Yankee Stadium has been designed for the low minors.