I have these two ranked next to each other, so I'll compare them before giving my verdict on which one gets 8th place and which one gets 9th place on my rankings.
Let's start with Citi Field since I went there first and that's the one I've been to more times. I think it's 12 games. I just discovered this MLB.com At the Ballpark app today on my phone. I had downloaded it a while ago and never used it. It's probably my favorite app now. One of the things you can do is keep a record of every game you've been to going as far back as 2005. I came up with 39 games that I've been to during that time, but I'm pretty sure I'm missing some from 2005-2007. So unless I missed any games at Citi Field (I don't think so, but maybe), I've been there 12 times now. It's much much nicer than Shea Stadium. I like how it has the old home run apple and parts of the old scoreboard from Shea. But a lot of Met fans have issues with Citi Field. If Mr. Burns sat down at Citi Field and then saw the Mets take the field, he would say, "So you say the Dodgers don't play in New York anymore?" The outside of the stadium looks like Ebbets Field and you walk in and the rotunda is dedicated to Jackie Robinson. You see pictures of him and Branch Rickey. It looks like it should be the home of the Dodgers. So yeah, for me, that's a good thing. But they have done some things since it opened to make it look like the home of the Mets. I like the whole center field area and the top of the rotunda area.
Now for some bad things about Citi Field. Some of the seats have pretty bad views. That might be true anywhere, but I've never noticed any stadium being as bad as where I was the first time I went to Citi Field. We were way up high in left field. From where we were, you couldn't see a good part of the outfield. Also, you can see the field as you walk around the concourse on every level except for when you're behind home plate. On every level, you're cut off from the field when you're behind home plate on the concourse. So I would sacrifice that nice top of the rotunda area for a view of the field from the concourse behind home plate if I could. And there are some good food options, but the best one is probably Shake Shack. But the only location is in center field and there's always a long line before the game. If there was one a Shake Shack on the upper level, that would help. They also made the field dimensions too big (they finally brought in the fences and lowered them last year) and the color scheme made no sense (dark green, at least the outfield wall is now blue and orange).
I know I've been to Yankee Stadium four times. I'll start with the bad. Somebody that I used to work with described it as "a shopping mall with a baseball game going on inside it." That's a pretty good description. There's too much going on. If you just want to go and watch a baseball game, Citi Field is probably better. I don't have many other negative things to say, but that's a pretty big negative. It's more expensive than Citi Field, but that's to be expected with the Yankees.
Unlike Citi Field, you can see the field from anywhere on the concourse. They do a much better job than the Mets of honoring the history of the franchise (I'll let you make your own joke here). You have the facade around the top of the stadium and Monument Park. But actually, Monument Park is kind of a negative. It's in a bad location (it's like a cave down there, it was better at the old stadium) and the Steinbrenner monument is absurd. Steinbrenner definitely deserves a monument, but there's no reason for his to be bigger than the monuments for Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, and Mickey Mantle combined (I don't know if it's really bigger than all of those put together, but it's outrageously large).
So like I said, if you just want to go and watch a baseball game, Citi Field is probably better. Now you're expecting me to rank Citi Field ahead of Yankee Stadium, but I'm not going to. The verdict:
9. Citi Field
8. Yankee Stadium
I'll tell you why. It's the one football game I went to at Yankee Stadium. I was there for the first football game at Yankee Stadium, Notre Dame-Army in 2010. You could easily fit a football field at Citi Field. But why would you when you could play football at Yankee Stadium? Citi Field just isn't Yankee Stadium (If Pope Francis ever comes to the United States and says mass in a stadium in New York, which one do you think it will be?). I was surprised by how well Yankee Stadium worked for football. I was in the last row of the stadium and it was a great view of the field. I've said that the NFL should have put the Super Bowl in Yankee Stadium instead of Met Life Stadium (I know, they would never do that). Met Life Stadium is so bland and sterile. And it's in East Rutherford, New Jersey. It would be so much cooler in Yankee Stadium. It would actually be in New York City and you could retell the story of the Greatest Game Ever Played (Giants-Colts in the 1958 NFL Championship Game at the old Yankee Stadium). Now that college football is going to move their championship game around, they should have it in Yankee Stadium. I'm all for football at Yankee Stadium.
Now if they would just fix that Steinbrenner monument.
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