The Staten Island Yankees get a special award for accomplishing the impossible and being even more aggravating about season ticket renewals than their big brother in the Bronx. They use a system that they call “Live Seating”. What Live Seating does is throw out any seniority and logical way of doing things and instructs everyone to call the ticket office at the same time. First come, first serve!

How this winds up working is that their phones are busy the whole day and the ticket system goes down at least once. I’ve never actually gotten through to a person while calling during this process, having to either leave a message to call back or sending an email telling them I can’t get through here are my seat preferences blahblahblah. This means that the process isn’t actually first come first serve and also that it doesn’t really work.

It’s the kind of process, actually, that makes me wonder why anyone thought it was a good idea ever. Even if you only have, say, 500 season ticket and mini plan holders why would you implement something where you instruct them to all call a number at the same time using seating location as the impetus? Just send out a renewal form using the plan people had last year and tell them to call for upgrades or to change plans. Maybe people can—gasp!!!—even keep the same seats two years in a row? I guess whoever makes these decisions is too busy thinking of great ways to market the luxury experience on Staten Island.

The last few years SI did give renewals an option to send in their seating preferences if you couldn’t or didn’t want to participate in the live seating fiasco but this year apparently it’s all done by blocking time out of your day to try and get through to the ticket office. I only have the email they sent people since the renewal materials they tell me were sent never arrived in my mailbox (full disclosure: I don’t believe they actually sent them to me). You do have a full business week to call and take care of things as they are not crazy enough to give people only one day to take care of their tickets.

I just want to give the team money without having to play phone tag. I promise that if it goes nice and easy Monday I will write up another post giving them mega-props.

I didn’t get as many pictures as I normally would due to the weather (it’s hard to hold an umbrella and operate a camera at the same time!), but I was able to get some and will be back later in the week to hopefully get a lot more.

Starting for the Yankees was Nik Turley, who is a tall lefty (6’7″!) that the team drafted in 2008. He was their 50th round pick and they gave him $150,000 to sign out of high school. At the time of his signing, he was labelled a “project” and the nicest way to put it is that he still is. While he’s been on Staten Island for most of the year, this is the first time I saw him. I wasn’t very impressed, he had some major command issues and just totally lost the zone here and there for a batter or two at a time. The stadium gun wasn’t working but the word we got is that his fastball was 88-91. While that’s not bad from a lefty, you generally expect more out of someone that tall.

Other than that, I think the best way to go is bullet-points.

• Rob Segedin does not look like an agile guy at first glance but seemed to move pretty well at 3B last night. Given the sample size of one game, I’m not going to label him as an above average fielder but he made at least three nice plays on balls including an excellent pick.
• Cito Culver got his first NYPL hit, a liner up the middle. He handled his position in the field pretty well, especially for a kid his age. After some of the minor league “shortstops” I have seen this year, it was a nice treat.
• Gary Sanchez is a big kid. His calves are huge and he is built like a Molina. Since he’s so very young, I’m not sure if that’s a good thing and he’ll have to work hard to keep up on his conditioning. He was charged with a passed ball that I personally would have scored a wild pitch.
• Daniel Burawa pitched an inning in relief, and I sent Greg over to the scout with a gun to find out what he was throwing (the answer was “95″). He had some command issues and threw pretty much all fastballs.

Here’s a bad quality video of Burawa pitching to Daniel Anderson (who singled). While Burawa himself is a bit blurry, you can see that he’s got a few funky things going on in his motion that can help out with deception:

And lastly, here are the pictures that I took last night.

Staten Island Yankees 08-23-2010

I’ll have something more comprehensive later in the week, weather permitting.

The first was a Norwegian Cruise Lines ship. I wasn’t able to get a very good picture of it because of the glare:

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Cruise ships do not normally come this close to RCB, making it a rare sighting.

Next up was a huge cargo ship. These are the most common type of large ship, but as they are very big I always find them very fun.

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The last ship came by much later in the game, and it was another cargo ship albeit a different kind.

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Sometimes these ones have a huge number of crates stacked on the deck, making them much more impressive. Still, a big boat is a big boat. Or ship, I suppose, I don’t want to offend any of the serious maritime fans out there.

As a not boat related aside, Kelvin De Leon hit a homerun over these trees in Left Field.

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A good night on ole Satan Island. I will not talk about the Yankees game, though.

I had intended to evaluate the game and decide whether another trip up there was worth it—I would have had to leave the game at 4pm to get to Staten Island on time which was important as I was going to be meeting a friend at South Ferry with her ticket in tow. In the end, I decided that a rush trip and maybe less than two hours of baseball was not worth the hassle and flopped down on the couch to watch the game.

With that flub out of the way, my four game/day schedule became this:

• 6/30 – Yankees vs Mariners
• 7/1 – Yankees vs Mariners
• 7/2 – Brooklyn vs Staten Island at Richmond County Bank Ballpark
• 7/3 – Staten Island vs Brooklyn at MCU Park

Not really a lot of diversity in teams, but that’s what happens when you don’t leave the city for a trip.

I found that I was ungodly tired after the second game—I meant it when I said I have no idea how full season ticket holders/attendees do it—which is probably lead to the ticket incident on the third day. I salute you, people who do this all the time. You have much more energy than I do.

The highlights from my baseball binge were:

1. Being aggravated at Felix Hernandez for being too good for words. I was with a friend who is a Mariners fan, and we sat in my bleacher seats which gave me a great view of his pitches being ridiculous. The Yankees had some chances early on, but anything they hit hard later in the game went for outs. Damn you, Felix.
2. Being aggravated at the Yankees offense for not doing much against Ryan Rowland-Smith. Then A-Rod hit a homerun and it was cool.
3. Seeing Staten Island win back-to-back games against Brooklyn in a home-and-home weekend. They won on a walkoff on July 2nd, which is always fun. The Staten Island Center Fielder is Eduardo Sosa and he is an excellent fielder. He makes at least one great play a game. And not the kind where the fielder runs in circles trying to figure out where the ball is going to come down.

I’m on a break from baseball for a few more days until Saturday, when I go to another Staten Island game. Which is good because as much as I love the sport I’m not sure I could deal with going to games in this weather.

This year the Cyclones’ opener happened on the same day as the Mermaid Parade which made everything a little trickier than usual. With the two hours of padding between the end of the parade and the start of the game we were hopeful that the four block walk from the train station wouldn’t be too painful. This turned out to be not the case, when we stepped out of the station the streets were flooded with people walking in the opposite direction as us, and I had to do some quick scouting to determine the least aggravating path to MCU.

When we got to the main entry gates, it was packed and disorganized. There weren’t lines so much as blobs of people generally moving in the same direction and not nearly enough security people to attend to the crowd. The security guards, to their credit, were working fast and doing their best to pull some order out of the chaos. The bloblines moved pretty fast and we got into our seats in the bleachers in time for the first pitch, though we missed the player intros. Since I’d already seen the players on both teams introduced the day before I didn’t mind. My goal for the day was to get into my seat in time for the game, so mission accomplished.

In previous trips to MCU Park I’d either picked up standing room tickets or seating between the bases. This time I’d decided to go the cheap route, completely understanding that I’d probably be in the middle of groups of kids and the like. We found ourselves in the middle of a birthday party, for some reason their tickets weren’t all sold in a block and we were in between some of the party-goers. No big deal there, we just offered to switch seats so everyone could be together and everyone was happy.

The bleachers at MCU Park suck, to be frank. They are rickety, and it’s hard to see over the heads of the people sitting in front of you. A small boy sitting next to us was unable to see anything for large stretches of the game, even when sitting on his mother’s lap. The man and I decided to get up and roam after the fourth inning, and so I told the mom and kid combo to just scoot over to our seats as the people sitting in front of us had left. I hope the boy could see better, he was very happy to be at the game and from talking to his mom it seems they go on family trips to lots of the area ballparks during the summer. Take notes parents and future parents, that’s how you wind up with kids who love baseball as much as you do.

The bleachers at MCU Park are not pleasant if you are short like me.

After walking over to the main area of MCU Park, our goal was to get something to munch on to tide us over until hitting up Nathan’s after the game. This led us to what was easily the most frustrating part of the night: Waiting on line for food. Yankee Stadium has a reputation for having slow moving lines but it was utterly ridiculous at MCU. The lines were not long—especially when compared with the previous night at RCB—but you’d be hard pressed to find ones that moved slower. There were four or five people on line before us and it took two full innings to get served. Strangely the culprit seemed to be that everyone was ordering hot chocolate (it was windy and chilly once the sun went down) and there was only one station where it could be made (it is made with your standard Swiss Miss mix packets, not premade like coffee).

Once we actually got up to order, it didn’t take very long. So as to avoid eating too many hot dogs in one night—if such a thing is possible—we got hamburgers and fries. I am not very picky about ballpark food, it’s generally pretty boring and standard—but we were really disappointed with the burgers. They were completely bland and there is no cheese option to add some taste to the meat. At $4 a pop we will never be having the burgers there again, it was a totally unfulfilling mini meal even with the crinkle cut fries. In short: don’t buy the “Brooklyn Burgers”, they suck.

After eating our food we wandered over to left field where we spent the rest of the game.

My last note: They are–or were, on Saturday night–extremely lax about smoking at MCU Park. While no one was smoking in the seating areas it seemed people were lighting up everywhere else. I am a smoker and I was pretty taken aback by this (and no I did not light up anywhere, I went to places that seemed to be designate smoking areas away from the large groups of people). I don’t recall it being this way last year. In contrast, they had a ton of “Alcohol Compliance Officers” around the place. I have no idea what they do (Remove very drunk people? Snatch beers away from underage drinkers?) but there were a lot of them.

Oh, and the Yankees lost again. They did stage a comeback it fell short. Such is baseball.

I had a nice seat (not that there are any bad seats in a small stadium like RCB) in reserved seating:

Section 14, Row A at Richmond County Bank Ballpark

The stadium looks empty here at the start, but it filled up as the game went on and Staten Island announced their first sellout of the year.

As part of the opening ceremonies, some sort of motorcycle rec club on Staten Island rode around the stadium (on the edge, not across the actual field of course). The three Yankees mascots hitched rides and were dropped off around home plate.

Mascots on motorcycles.

The game itself was pretty uneventful, but if you want to know more about the events check out Robert Pimpser’s game story on Gotham Baseball.

A huge amount of the crowd was made up of group ticket sales, which is not uncommon for Staten Island games.  Section 14 seemed to be made up of me (I went to the game by myself), the two people next to me and then three or four groups who had a large number of drunk angry people in them. I don’t think they were angry about the game so much as just angry people. There was a group of Little League kids I’d say were in 4th or 5th grade. They were not being aggravating or annoying, just cheering for the Yankees and occasionally yelling for a ball. Several people in the (not Little League) groups just constantly shrieked mean things at them. I was rather taken aback, and in the 4th inning I decided that I didn’t want to sit near these people anymore and went to get some food and walk around to see what changed since last year.

There were two big changes in concessions this year:

1. The food stands now take credit/debit cards–hooray!
2. All you can eat food is served at the normal concession stands through separate lines rather than in their own areas like last year.

The lines were, to put it simply, atrocious. I walked around trying to find one of acceptable length but found nothing. I wasn’t willing to stand on line for an hour to get a hot dog so I passed on eating. A lot of season ticket holders complained, and in an attempt to make good the team apologized over the PA and is offering ticket exchanges for people who had tickets to the game.

I took a picture of a line to document it. You see all those people on the concourse? They are on line for food:

I was not able to attend yesterday’s game, so I’m not sure if they’e had any luck working out the kinks yet. I may go Wednesday, and am definitely going Thursday so I’ll know soon enough.

I was hungry, but I still had fun. It’s really hard to not have fun at a minor league game. Here are a few more pictures from the night.

Staten Island Yankees Opening Day 06-18-10

Next day was Old Timer’s Day, where there were no big boats but there were some big fish. I took a lot of pictures (though significantly fewer than last year), so check them all out if you want.

Teaser shot:

Jeff Nelson tips his hat after a show-off catch.

Full Old Timer’s Day Gallery:

On July 3rd, I made my way to Yankee Stadium for their series opener against the Blue Jays. There were a lot of red hats, which I really hate. I am easily confused and they disorient me. Plus can anyone explain to me why the Jays have to wear them too? Nobody wears special Canada Day hats for Toronto (except maybe the Jays themselves but I know nothing about that).

Then on actual Independence Day, I went to the Staten Island Yankees game. They always have fireworks on Saturdays and you could see the fireworks from the Macy’s extravaganza if you sat or stood in the right place so though I am not a huge fan I got to see a lot of them on the 4th.

Overall, a good weekend. Especially since I didn’t get rained on at a baseball game for what felt like the first time this year.

Sure, it’s not good baseball but it’s fun. Where else can you see Subway Series Mets-like defense at every game? Every routine play is an adventure!!

In all seriousness, minor league baseball rules and if you live in the area you should check out Richmond County Bank Ballpark. Big boats go by, the beer costs about as much as it does in a bar and it’s all very fun. Need some more convincing? Here’s my first batch of photos from the year:

As a lifelong Coney Island hater (it takes too long to get there from the Heights to make the trip worth it in any way normally) I was sort of expecting not to have any fun, but the park was very cute and minor league baseball always makes me happy apparently.

The game itself was no great shakes–Arodys Vizcaino started for Staten Island. He’s an 18 year old international signing with a lot of promise. I wasn’t really in a good position to really check him out as we had standing room tickets and roaming around, but other than a meltdown with two outs in the third he looked pretty good. NY-Penn League numbers should not really be taken to mean anything, but he struck out 7 in 4.1 innings so good for him. He’s worth keeping an eye on.

Also, Carmen Angelini did not make any errors so that was pretty exciting.

Without further ado, here are my pictures: