Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

MLB

Pricing fans out of Stadium no good for Yankees or MLB

As layups, tap-ins and cakewalks go, this was it. Early in the Angels-Yankees game Saturday, FS1’s Kenny Albert and Tom Verducci had spoken them all:

It was a beautiful spring afternoon, a good chance to catch one of Derek Jeter’s final-season games. The Yankees were in first place and Albert Pujols, fresh off homer 500, was in the house — that house being Yankee Stadium, home of the most famous team in North America.

OK, so then why did we see what we saw? Why did we see what we’ve seen again and again since this Yankee Stadium opened, in 2009?

Why were thousands of the good, better and best seats empty? Why isn’t such a startling, senseless, self-evident scene ever spoken of on TV, regardless of which network televises Yankees games?

Why is the matter never addressed? Why is it taboo?

Why, on the FS1 telecast that followed — Pirates-Cardinals — were field-side seats similar to those that went empty on such a nice Saturday afternoon in Yankee Stadium stuffed with baseball fans?

Clearly, as seen from the start of the 2009 season, the better-to-best Yankees seats remain priced so insanely and obscenely high as to make both multimillionaires and corporate credit-card carriers — the original targets of such pricing — gag.

OK, so then what?

Such a can’t-miss-it, greed-driven-and-delivered plan can neither be mentioned nor fixed? It can be seen — over and over — but not spoken of, as if it were a family secret or an incurable illness.

It’s not as if New Yorkers preferred to spend their time and money to attend that night’s Marlins-Mets game. And neither the Nets nor Rangers played on Saturday.

Before the Yankees’ new stadium opener, in what may have been the first and last stab at suggesting, during a Yankees telecast, that the team was barking up the wrong money tree — that they established their own PSLs that could price their best customers either up, further from the field, or out — Michael Kay, on YES, asked MLB Commissioner Bud Selig about ticket prices.

Selig said: “You know, people talk about ticket prices and I think the Yankees have been treated somewhat unfairly because I broke down all the ticket prices of all the seats, today, and they are affordable.”

Selig’s nonsense was spoken just a few feet from box seats that cost $850 per seat, per game. The season before, similar seats had ballooned to $250 from $90.

So then it must be something else other than greed that has driven so many so far from the field and either out of Yankee Stadium or into the upper decks. Hay fever?

It was interesting that in the top of the ninth, one down, Yankees leading, 4-3, Mark Teixeira fought a losing battle with two fans in the front row along the first-base line to try to catch a Pujols pop-up. Those two fans just happened to be there.

Three, four feet more up the line, it would have been clear sailing for Teixeira, not a soul in the seats to bother him.

Alleged rant not new for Sterling

Longtime NBA followers, executives, employees and media know Clippers owner Donald Sterling as a moneyed fool. Not a terrible man, but a jerk with dough who likes to show off, pop off and, increasingly, think too late, if at all. He’s someone best — and easily — ignored, especially at 81.

Well, not anymore.

Yes, what he allegedly said was painful, indefensible and inexcusable, except why would we expect him, at 81, to be less loony and more discreet and clear-headed than he was at 75 or 78?

Visit any assisted living facility. Or think of that aunt or uncle all of us have known and suffered with a wince because we knew they were off. And they come in all races.

Not everyone, at 81, should reasonably or humanely be held accountable for whatever ugly comments come out their mouths.

At least keep that in mind.

Yankees’ Sterling’s still at it

The other Sterling: While stuck in the car with John Sterling on Saturday, listening to one of his lectures about baseball, it struck me: If he knows so much about baseball, why, for the last 25 years, has he not waited for the umpire’s home-run signal before calling it a home run?

And with 40 years of radio play-by-play experience, he always pooh-poohed fundamentals.

On Saturday, his “At the end of 6 ½, 4-3, Yanks” — a standard Sterling cut-away — doesn’t cut it for radio. Audiences can’t see whom the Yankees are playing.

Smooth skating for NHL playoff games

Give it up for NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman and Company. Unlike the interminable, TV commercial-smothered, network debt-service state of NFL, MLB and NBA playoff games, the pace of Stanley Cup games remains a steady pleasure. Don’t go changin’!

The last 1:33 of the Pacers-Hawks game Saturday on TNT, five timeouts were called, plus assorted other systemic delays. In the time it took to play that last 1:33, I was able to diagram an entire Stephen A. Smith sentence.


I don’t care if Curtis Granderson hits .185 for the Mets or Yankees, on Saturday after a ball four, he ran to first faster than Alfonso Soriano does on a deep fly.


Although most promos are designed to mislead, NBC’s Kentucky Derby come-on during the Flyers-Rangers game Sunday was absurd. After noting NBCSN would have lead-in coverage, Kenny Albert read:

“And it all leads up to the big race, Saturday, 4 p.m. Eastern, on NBC.” Post time is 6:24.


Yes, doctoring the ball “has always been part of baseball.” So has getting caught.


Why would FOX graphics force us to first squint, then decipher the inning, score and count? That’s nuts. All should be immediately clear.


Reader Tim Crowe alerted us to this all-day MLBN scroller: “Cleveland 5, KC 1. [Corey] Kluber 9 innings, 0 earned runs, first career shutout.”


Which Yankees game would MLB Commissioner Bud Selig have chosen for his family and friends? One played yesterday at sunny, 60-degree Yankee Stadium, or the one played for ESPN money last night at Yankee Stadium?


A buddy of mine had lunch at the Four Seasons in Palm Beach, Fla. At the entrance, a valet with a shirt tag that IDed him as “Frankie” took his car. That’s right, Frankie valet at the Four Seasons. Drink with lunch? Sherry, baby, of course.