Peter Abraham took a media tour of the new Yankee Stadium and has a lot of interesting stuff to report:
It’s hard to get a feel for a baseball park when the field is covered by giant cranes, trucks and cement blocks. But the place is huge. Trost said the new Stadium is 63 percent larger than the old site, an additional 500,000 square feet.
The scoreboard screen, as an example, will be six times larger than what they have now. The high-definition screen will be 58 x 103. There will also be hand-operated scoreboards in the fence in right center and left center.
It also sounds like they’ll be doing something pretty cool with the site of the current stadium:
The old Stadium: It will be torn down in the spring of 2009 and converted into a public park. Plans calls for 12,000 trees to be planted in the shape of the stadium. There will be a baseball field, a softball field and a Little League field. But outside of the warning track, no footprint of the field will remain. The city of New York owns the old stadium and will be responsible for taking it down and selling off seats and other things.
There are pictures here and here, and a video of the tour here.
It looks like they’ve made a lot of progress since I was there in August.
