New stadium or old stadium?

  I don’t get it. To me, if you are going to pay good money to watch a baseball game, you go there to watch the game. You fill in the booklet if you want, or you pay attention to who is up to bat and what’s going on. You learn to do this. Your attention span lengthens as you watch something that takes awhile. You feel the excitement of the location, you watch the people around you, and you p-a-r-t-i-c-i-p-a-t-e.

  They tore down Veteran’s Stadium.  To me, it seemed like a perfectly good place the way it was. I liked it. There were cheap seats so we could take half the neighborhood (see posts from April 7 & 11). It was all enclosed and it was easy to figure out how to get here or there. I taught the boys to look at the section numbers and figure out where they were going that way. Simple. It seemed like it worked just fine for a long time. Maybe it needed too much overhauling like they said, I don’t know. Seemed to me that somebody just wanted something newer and more advanced.

  So I went to the new stadium once, and only once. I will admit that I am not a huge Phillies fan, so they aren’t exactly losing out on a lot of ticket sales because of my not attending. But I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the fact that there weren’t any more cheap seats, and I didn’t like the newer location. I don’t like the big hole in the outfield, although I have been told that it is an improvement appreciated by the players. But mostly I don’t like what has happened to watching sports.

  Every five feet there’s a restaurant, and maybe another stand or restaurant out in the middle area. This makes it more difficult to get where one is going because of the odd Mexico-City like traffic patterns, people going hither and yon and across and wherever. It’s frustrating. And then off to the side I saw the “attractions.” There’s a playground. And batting cages and so forth (the latter were at theVet too.) A playground. For when little Joey gets bored, so then his mom or dad can miss half the game taking him to play there. Of course, they are probably also taking him to get high-priced food and nice Phillies souvenirs, so maybe it’s for when they are in the area.

  It just seems to me that so much has been added just on the off chance that someone might get bored and need more than the baseball game to keep them happy. And, of course, one must always be happy.

  Well, anyway, I’m not an expert. I just liked Vet Stadium and less frustration and cost much better.