BUY STOCK IN CHEAP SEATS

A temperate day, the first-ever regular-season Sunday game at the new Yankee Stadium, excitement high. But to look at the premium seats behind home plate (below left, with Derek Jeter at bat), conspicuous in their sparsity of occupants, you’d think you were catching a glimpse a late-September stinker by a team thirty games out of first. Shift your view to the bleachers and the upper tiers above left field, though (below right), and the mood is happily raucous, the attendance count aptly high.

Those sections behind home plate ought to be filled, need to be filled—for the players’ sake as much as the fans’. (How strange it must be to take one’s on-deck swings in a pocket of humdrum quiet.) But the seats there are priced for a clientele that no longer exists, running from the mid-hundreds up to $2,625 a head. The merriment in the bleachers (from where these photos were taken; tickets are $14 apiece) and the upper grandstand (tickets $23-$30) is testament to the fact that people still want to go to a ballgame. No one should harbor any illusion that the seats behind home plate shouldn’t cost substantially more—but when they’re priced to the point of creating a peculiar in-game ghost town, where only imaginary circa-2007 partners from Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers are enjoying the close-up view, it’s time to recalibrate the pricing plan.

—David Kamp

UPDATE: Some progress on the pricing front.