New Yankee Stadium Construction set to conclude on 2/17/09

There is a GREAT article on Yankees.com about the New Yankee Stadium today, and I recommend it to any baseball fan. Many nuggets within this article (none of which pertaining to tickets or relocation packages). Here are the highlights:

And around the construction site, many of the upbeat workers are wearing dark blue buttons with the name of the famous ballpark in white capital letters set above this date: Feb. 17, 2009, less than two months before Opening Day.

"That's when we're turning the stadium over to the Yankees," said Harry Olsen, the project manager for the company that's overseeing the construction and site.

Pretty cool to have a completion date! Right around pitchers and catchers next year, the New Yankee Stadium will be complete.

Every seat in the new Yankee Stadium will have a full view of home plate. (Stephen Chernin/AP)

It will seat 53,000, but somehow, as MLB.com learned on a recent tour that traversed almost every nook and cranny of the new facility, every one of those seats has an unencumbered view of home plate, even though the new stadium reaches about the same height as the existing one.

Most are much closer to the field than the current stadium, where the catcher squats about 70 feet from the backstop. In the new park, that distance will be about 50 feet. The grade, which seems nearly flat at 35 percent in the current lower deck, has been changed to a much steeper 45 percent. That's akin to a pitcher peering down from a mound 10 feet above the ground, as opposed to a mound that's about six feet high. There are also many fewer rows in each deck.

All of the above is some good news for the people who sit in the main reserved in the outfield and wonder why they are paying way more than most of the people in the Stadium, but get a worse view.

It is airy and open. The congestion in the concourses and the problems of ingress and egress in the current stadium will be left in the past.

You had me at airy and open. I'm sick of being molested when attempting to exit the current "Cathedral" (appropriate nickname for all of the wrong reasons?)

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