They now can’t get into the stadium, like we could at the Vet for free after the 7th inning, for “security reasons.”
They can’t get a 50-cent ticket and sit at the very top behind home plate with your older brother and watch the Phillies play.
But first, can we start with the name?
No matter how charmingly “retro” it looks, I can’t get past the fact that the name, “Citizen’s Bank Park,” especially in this age of “support our troops,” seems embarrassing, especially when contrasted with “Veterans Stadium” — opened in 1971 at the height of the Vietnam War when we supposedly didn’t even like our troops.
Even the name of the street out front is the bank’s name.
Could our plutocracy get any more cynical than this?
Has our society’s money inflated so much in three decades from the $50 million the Vet cost (for both football and baseball) to the $400 million it cost to build a baseball-only one with 20,000 fewer seats so rich or connected people can sit in luxury boxes and stuff themselves with food and booze?
From now on, let’s just call it the “newer park,” OK?
It had been a long road to get to the glories of Veterans Stadium.
From 1909 to 1971, the park before the Vet, Shibe Park/Connie Mack Stadium, stood in the middle of a north Philadelphia neighborhood, at 21st Street and Lehigh Avenue.
Its centerfield fence went to 515 feet when it was first built. Steroids or not, no wonder folks didn’t hit as many homers back then.
But the neighborhood had deteriorated over the six decades it saw the A’s and the Phillies play.
I remember going to a game at Connie Mack as a little kid when the Phillies played the Reds. I still remember watching a young Pete Rose score a run, as the Reds won 6-3.
But I also remember driving home with my father and our next-door neighbor, rushing out of the neighborhood while kids threw rocks at the car.
The Vet, far from any neighborhood, and part of a “sports complex” accessible via major highways, was a revelation at the time.
That baby seated nearly 20,000 more fans than the “newer park.”
Yes, I know. Compared to the newer park, it had fewer concession stands, bathrooms and luxury boxes, not to mention diaper-changing stations and a bar and restaurant open all year-round — because, after all, those are the reasons why we go to baseball games in the first place.
Kids will never understand, for example, the heady odor and manly feeling of indifferently going to the bathroom in an dilapidated facility surrounded by dozens of other guys who have been holding it in for five innings.
And don’t even get me started on ticket prices.
Back then, you could decide to go to the park at the very last minute, and with only what you had in our pockets, sans lint. Me and my younger brother could get into those 700-level seats for 50 cents each, while our older brother who could drive got in for $2.25.
And we used to love to go the twi-night doubleheaders, two wonderful summer games all for that low, low price.
Now, they split those late-night doubleheaders up so you can pay the exorbitant prices twice.
Greed.
Back then, we’d purposely sit at the very top row behind home plate, where the thumbnail-sized players ran along gorgeously geometrical lines on an emerald-green rock-hard carpet.
Nice.
And baseball at the Vet, just like at Shibe/Connie Mack, was poetry, like all those high-falutin’ talking heads say it is. Only more visceral than they dare emote.
Watching Larry Bowa and Dave Cash and Mike Schmidt play — well, do you really care if it was in a “retro” park that charges too much for EVERYTHING, than going to the Vet, where the greatest third baseman in history played?
At Shibe, Richie Ashburn showed how he was the best lead-off hitter in Phillies history. At the Vet, he broadcast from the booth. In neither park was he an alley or a statue.
But it’s there along “Ashburn Alley” in centerfield at the “newer park” where all the ramped-up luxuries suck up our hard-earned bucks.
Sorry, Richie.
Today, bigwig executives and those who kiss choice parts of their bodies get to go into luxury skyboxes and feast on all-you-can eat dogs, burgers and booze, and watch the game on high-definition plasma screens.
Because, in the 21st century, this is the way baseball is supposed to be watched.
So, tell me — Does anyone have any idea why the greatest game ever played is losing its audience?