$30 For Yankees Grass Seeds

Gary Dunaier posted this photo of a bag of Yankees grass seeds for sale at the new Stadium. And for $30? What else do you get besides a little bag with a bunch of grass seeds? Am I missing something here?

Yankee Execs On The Hot Seat?

In what may be a bit of welcoming news for many Yankee fans, Yankee COO Lonn Trost and President Randy Levine may be fired over the new Yankee Stadium ticket pricing fiasco [1050AM ESPN]. They may end up being the fall guys for the swaths of empty seats at the new Yankee Stadium.

Now in their third home stand of the year, Yankees are still not selling out their games [NY Times]. They drew only 43,856 for last night's game against the Twins on a warm Friday night in May. Compared to last season, the Yankees drew over 52,000 fans for a Friday night May game against the Mariners.

I know a lot has been made over the swaths of empty seats at in the premium seats behind homeplate and the dugouts. But the truth is that even the non-premium seats are not selling well at all. More than 75% of the empty seats for the games are actually the non-premium seats, which means that the brilliant genius of Lonn Trost and Randy Levine has priced out both the average joe and the super rich joe. Simply put, they screwed up royally.

Did A-Rod Take Steroids As A Yankee?

Selena Roberts new book alleges that A-Rod took steroids or HGH while he was playing with the Yankees, and started doing steroids as far back as high school. I can't say that I'm too surprised.

In addition, an unnamed major-leaguer is quoted as saying Rodriguez and steroid-tainted pitcher Kevin Brown were seen together with human growth hormone - HGH - in 2004.

Brown, who was named in the Mitchell Report on steroids, denied through a lawyer that he ever shared the hormone with the highest-paid player in baseball.

Two other anonymous Yankees said they believed A-Rod was using based on side effects they saw - and a clubhouse staffer said management wondered if he was using banned substances.

"No one ever asked Alex directly that I know of, but there was a lot of suspicion in house," the employee is quoted as saying.

... "Was he on steroids in high school?" he said. "I think probably so. I worked out with him when he was 18. He could lift almost as much as I could."

Rodriguez put on 25 pounds of muscle between his sophomore and junior years, and word was that his connection was a dog kennel owner.

A former high school teammate told Roberts the future No.1 MLB draft pick was on steroids and his coach knew it.

Another student said the son of coach Rich Hofman admitted he saw Rodriguez use steroids.

[Tracy Connor/ NY Daily News]

Yankees Reduce Prices, Give Away Tickets to Season Ticket Holders

Mike Francesa announced on WFAN that the Yankees are giving away free tickets per game to all their premium season ticket holders. The value and number of tickets that each season ticket holder gets depends on how much they are paying for their seats. The Yankees choose to do it this away rather than give out refunds to current season ticket holders who have already paid the premium price.

ESPN/AP:

Those who bought $2,500 first-row season tickets in the 11 sections surrounding the plate that weren't reduced will receive an equal number of free first-row tickets for the rest of the season. Those who bought $1,250 first-row seats in the first two sections past each photo cage will receive free seats for 24 games.

Fans who bought $850 Legends Suite season tickets will get free seats in the same section for eight games and free seats in the $500 section for four games. Those who bought $600 Legends Suite season tickets will get free seats in the $500 section for 10 games, and those who bought $500 Legends Suite seats will get free seats in that section for eight games.

The reason the Yankees are giving away tickets is because they have had trouble selling out their premium seats around the home plate area.

Saturday Night MLB NBA NFL

Tyler Kepner/ NY Times Yanks get smacked by the Red Sox, despite a 6-0 lead. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, the six-run deficit was the largest the Red Sox have overcome in a victory over the Yankees since May 16, 1968. Saturday’s game took 4 hours 21 minutes to complete, the same duration as Friday night’s thriller. Both teams can use the extra rest before Sunday night’s series finale.

Inside The Lakers Tex Winters had a stroke. Tex Winter, the 87-year-old special consultant to Lakers coach Phil Jackson, suffered an apparent stroke while attending a reunion of the Kansas State basketball team in Manhattan, Kan.

Gene Wojciechowski/ ESPN Randy Johnson's high school scouting reports weren't very flattering. That same April of '82, another scout wrote, "Just about average [major league] velocity at the present time. Could get above-average when he gets some weight on him."

BBC Super Bowl in London? NFL is exploring the possibility. "We have had very substantive conversations with the city of London. We've got to the point of exploring the bid document," he added.

Marc Stein/ ESPN Will Shaq end up in NO next year? I have my doubts. O'Neal's interest in a return to the NBA territory closest to his LSU roots is even more genuine than we thought. Mitch Lawrence of the New York Daily News wrote recently that O'Neal "thinks" he's going to New Orleans in a deal headlined by Chandler. I've since heard that Shaq was not at all shy about telling Chris Paul what a great arrangement that would be when they were Western Conference teammates at All-Star Weekend.

Ric Bucher/ ESPN Billy Hunter doesn't see any need to change the current CBA. He wants the rich owners to share their wealth with the broke ones. Good luck. "One of the principle issues is that some owners are having a hard time with cash flow," Hunter said. "I don't see why that automatically means more give-backs from the players. It seems to me a new revenue-sharing plan among the owners is one of the things they have to look at. Then you wouldn't be looking to the players every time there's a shortfall."

413 at old Yankee Stadium in 1966

Richard Sandomir /NY Times thinks the Yankees should raffle away their empty seats. At the end of his article, there's also a remarkable account of a Yankee game in 1966 that had a measly attendance of 413. I can't believe Red Barber was later fired for talking about the empty stadium.

This early season’s why-aren’t-they-selling-out situation sends us back to the end of the 1966 season. No, it’s not as bad as all that when the Yankees won 70 and finished last.

But Red Barber gazed upon the absence of humanity in the old, pre-renovation stadium and told his radio listeners, according to his recollection in one of his books: “I don’t know what the paid attendance is today — but whatever it is, it is the smallest crowd in the history of Yankee Stadium.”

By the time he moved onto the TV side, he announced the paid crowed: 413. By order of someone with the Yankees, cameramen were told not to pan around to the vast wasteland.

Barber was dismissed soon after for reporting the obvious.

Empty seats at NY baseball games

Great job by Wallace Mathews/NY Newsday in pointing out that both NY teams are having a hard time selling out their brand new ballparks. It's pretty simple really. The prices are way too expensive.

Last year, when both teams finally owned up to the fact that there would be a total of 20,000 fewer seats between the two parks, it appeared New York would be grossly underserved. Now it appears the opposite is true, and the teams have no one to blame but themselves.

Ninety miles down the turnpike, they are turning fans away at Citizens Bank Park, and in New York, at least 10,000 seats go unoccupied every game. There can be only one explanation: The tickets are too damned expensive. And something must be done about it soon.

Sunday, the Yankees hosted the Indians and the Mets hosted the Brewers. Neither place came within 5,000 seats of being sold out. Most teams would be overjoyed playing to 85-percent capacity in April, but these are not most teams and this is not any other city.

[Wallace Mathews/ NY Newsday]

Skip Wang's next start?

Chien-Ming Wang has stunk up the joint in all three of his starts this year and as a result, the Yankees might skip his next turn in the rotation. Wang's next start is supposed to be against the Red Sox in Fenway.

The soft-spoken 29-year-old from Taiwan said he has compared video of his performances from this season to last year, when was 8-2 with a 4.07 ERA in 15 starts before injuring his right foot June 15, and doesn't see a difference.

"Everything is the same as last season," Wang said. "Nothing's wrong. Just keep working."

But Girardi also watched video with his staff and thinks there are several things Wang can work on.

"We looked at his hands, height of his leg kick, where his head is -- if it's out of line -- the angle of his arm. We looked at everything." Girardi said. "We had some healthy stuff that we saw. We understand that we need to make some adjustments." [ESPN/AP]

Average innings pitched per team's starting pitchers

Ken Davidoff's Baseball Insider posted statistics about the average innings pitched per team's starting pitchers.

I called the great Bob Waterman from Elias Sports Bureau to get the info. Through Thursday's actions, here are the leaders and trailers in this category (average innings pitched per team's starting pitchers), with our local two included.

1. Angels 6.15 (Joe Saunders, pictured above, is second in the majors with 20.2 innings pitched in three starts).
2. Mariners 6.10
3. Marlins 6.04
4. (tie) Royals, Pirates, Cardinals, Rays, Blue Jays 6.0

18. Yankees 5.60 (that'll go down, after Joba Chamberlain's outing today).

21. Mets 5.52

26. Astros 4.96
27. Indians 4.87 (this will go up slightly, as Anthony Reyes pitched five innings today and left).
28. Giants 4.85
29. Nationals 4.67
30. Orioles 4.59

The major-league average is 5.60. The American League average is 5.69, and the National League average is 5.51. So the Yankees are below avearge for their league and were even with the big-league average before today, while the Mets are a tick above average for their league and below average for the majors.

Nick Swisher pitching in blowout

Super utility man Nick Swisher had to pitch the bottom of the 8th inning in a 15-5 blowout loss against the Rays. Not a bad job actually. 1 IP, 1 H, 1 BB, 0 R.

Joba responds to reporters about Yogi controversy

Here is audio of Joba's response to his latest Yogi controversy. Francesa is having a field day with this. In particular, Mike had problems with Joba saying, "I love Yogi and Yogi loves me", and never actually saying he is sorry. [Joba courtesy of WFAN]

MLB.TV not off to a good start

Wow, the 2009 MLB.TV feeds have been very choppy. I'm trying to watch the Cubs v. Astros game and it plays for 5 seconds, and then stops for 15 seconds. Very bad.

My experiences so far have been a mixed bag. In SF, I had an extremely good feed of the World Baseball Classics. However, the games I've watched from my place in Vancouver have not been as good.

I've watched all Met and Yankee games from Friday through Monday, and not one game has been completely error free. The Yankee game today had such a poor connection, it would play for 10-15 seconds at most before a long pause of 10-20 seconds. Thankfully, I'm not a Yankee fan, so I just gave up after 5 minutes.

Today's Met game at Cincinnati was pretty good from the 1st inning until the bottom of the 6th. I lost complete connection during a key moment in the game when Sean Green relieved Santana. From that moment on, I was unable to get the HD feeds and the game's resolution was very poor, worse than the 400K feeds from last season. Throughout the game, it got stuck 5 or 6 times. It would pause for 3-6 seconds at a time.

The only game that provided a nearly perfect connection was Sunday night's Braves at Dodgers game, which was an ESPN broadcast. The picture quality was quite good and it was almost better than standard cable. It got stuck once or twice, which was almost tolerable, considering how choppy the rest of the games have been so far.

I'm hoping that MLB.TV gets this fixed soon. In previous seasons, they usually have one major hiccup or two to starts things off. But by May, most of the glitches were worked out.

Lonn Trost and David Howard on Mike Francesa show

Interview with head Yankee guy in charge of building the new Yankee Stadium. Very informative. The cost of excavations for the new site was 65 million. Clarity of the huge 59 feet by 103 HD screen behind centerfield is incredible. [Lonn Trost]

David Howard, head Met executive for the construction of Citi Field, tells Mike that they conducted a survey that told them that 89% of Met fans wanted the apple to be brought over from Shea Stadium. [David Howard]