When I was a child, bleacher seats at Shea Stadium were, I believe, $1.00 for adults, fifty cents for children and senior citizens, and free after the second inning. The most expensive seats in the house were field- or loge-level box seats, which cost $4.00. Yearbooks were a dollar. Scorecards were a quarter (including the pencil).
Of course, we usually paid nothing to get in. We used to clip coupons from the backs of Dairylea milk containers and save the caps from their bottled milk. For every 10 quarts, we got a free ticket to a Mets game. We went to quite a few games every year by having every woman in the neighborhood give us their empty milk containers. Some were even nice enough to clip the coupons for us.
Today, those same bleacher seats
cost as much as $25.00, and box seats cost as much as $82.00, for "Platinum" games. Add to that the cost of parking, a couple of hot dogs, and a couple of beers or soft drinks, and you're talking between $200.00 and $600.00 for a family of four to see a freaking baseball game.
I live about ten minutes from Shea these days, but I haven't been inside the place in more than a decade. I have better things to spend my money on than multi-millionaire ballplayers' inflated salaries. Instead, I've discovered minor-league ball. What the
Brooklyn Cyclones lack in skill and polish, they make up for in guts and hustle. It's good baseball and it's cheap.
Rich
