view-from-yankee-stadium-press-boxIf you were sitting in the press box at Yankee Stadium, this would be your view. What’s going on inside? According to a tipster, there have been more than a few heated battles over seats. Nobody wants to be banished to the auxiliary press box, and basically, chaos has reigned. Who knew Major League Baseball feared newspapers?

This is one of the worst clusterfucks I’ve ever seen, a perfect storm of MLB’s lack of competence, ignorance that this is the 21st century, cronyism, and New York writer rudeness and arrogance.

The problem begins in the aux box. It’s not covered and very high up. When it rains, you can’t work there. Any wind sends a cascade of rain on you and your machine. So since no one can sit there, everyone is hanging around the main box.

But the main box doesn’t nearly have enough seats and to compound matters MLB gave seats to numerous newspapers that aren’t showing up. Probably a dozen or so newspapers that requested seats haven’t been here (and the number is probably higher). MLB won’t do anything about it because they still fear newspapers.

The vacuum created by the lack of newspaper writers showing has created this bum rush scenario where the New York papers, which have sent an army, are trying to hog and steal seats that don’t belong to them.

The Post and Daily News each have two or more seats in the main box but that’s not stopping the Post’s greedy-ass writers from selfishly hogging more seats that don’t belong to them. There are literally people watching the game while standing in the back of the press box while the tabloids steal seats.

Other writers are sitting in seats either in this stinky back room or in the cafeteria. You have to arrive more than six hours before the game to get a seat.

There’ve been arguments, not fights, but good arguments by tabloid guys over who is sitting where.

And of course baseball is nowhere to be found to police this shit. The MLB PR guys have disappeared and the Yankees PR people are their usual arrogant selves.

The NFL or NBA would never allow this shit to happen. Never. Baseball is just incompetent and lets the Yankees do whatever the fuck they want.

Lastly, the cronyism is horrible. Murraychass.com has a seat in the main box. Murraychass.com? Are you serious? And a writer from Long Beach, who is friends with Selig, has a seat in the main. That’s just disgraceful.

Hear or see something? Feel free to drop me an email at either jmcintyre@thebiglead.com or thebiglead@gmail.com.

UPDATE: Unfortunately I was at a wedding and couldn’t immediately update this post, but two writers from the Post responded.

For the record, the letter writer has no idea what he’s talking about. That’s nonsense. We have 3 people with mainbox seats like every other NY and Philly: Vaccaro, King, Sherman. We got a 4th seat because MLB granted one to Kernan for Games 1 and 2 — because Kernan asked, which anyone else could have done.

Everyone else — Puma, Costello, Hubbuch, Greenberg, Hale, Terranova — scrambled for aux box and pressroom seats like everyone else.

And then there was this one:

We have 3 assigned seats. One other writer got a seat given to him by MLB (it was a MLB PR seat). Everyone else is either watching in the work room, aux box or cafeteria.