My kind of article, from the Times.
..the new Yankee Stadium lacks any semblance of the atmosphere that made the original so special. When you saw a game at the old place, you felt like part of a community of fans. The prices were high, and it wasn’t the kind of place the average working man could take his family often. But if you got in, everyone was part of the event, no matter where you sat. There was buzz.
The new park does not have it and is not set up for it. Everywhere else the Yankees play, fans congregate behind the dugouts for autographs, straining to get a little bit closer to the players. Not here. Not in a ballpark with a concrete moat encircling the first nine rows or so, almost from foul pole to foul pole, patrolled by a fleet of security guards.
That’s the part that is so perplexing. The Yankees had a chance to look at every other park that came before theirs — Seattle, Anaheim, Colorado, Pittsburgh, so many fabulous examples — and this is what they chose.
The rest is here.
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I remember 4 years ago when I went to Legends Field in Tampa for a Yankees Spring Training game on my tour of the Grapefruit League. There was a crowd by the Yankees practice field behind RF, and a long line to get in at 5:15. I got in, and saw that there was nobody in the lower half of the stands closest to the field. So I went walking around, and an usher told me that it was policy that you can’t go down there without a ticket for that area, and you can’t call out to the players – you can only interact when they call to you (i.e. a player seeing his family or something like that). Seeing this restriction at the new Yankee Stadium doesn’t even surprise me because of that “Yankee way” I learned in Tampa. It’s the same “Yankee way” that Willie Randolph brought to the Mets and they seem to have embraced.