Ballpark Savvy

One of the many things that make the baseball experience much better today than 20 years ago is the food.

I still get a hot dog at almost every game I go to. I guess it's a matter of making sure that I'm doing my part to ensure that hot dogs are always available at ballgames, and protecting a tradition in a sport whose charm lies in its history.

But of late I've been much more eager to try the local offerings at a ballpark, whether it is the Tony Luke's cheesesteak at Citizens Bank Park in Philly, the Ben's All-The-Way Chili Dog at Nationals Park in Washington, or the Shackburger at Citi Field in New York. As I detail in Ballpark E-Guides, there are many, many food choices at nearly all ballparks these days, and many of them have that signature item that reflects the local flavor.

Well at PNC Park in Pittsburgh, that item happens to be a Primanti Bros. sandwich. I have yet to have one at the park itself, but I have tried it in one of their restaurants. A Primanti Bros. meal includes the sandwich on Italian white bread with fresh-cut fries and coleslaw. Nothing unusual, until you see that the fries and cole slaw are actually piled onto the sandwich! Hey, it all ends up in the same place, right?

The legend I originally heard was that truckers would frequent the restaurant but often did not have time to eat the fries and slaw with their sandwich, so they were all packed together. Well, that's not quite right, as the Primanti Bros. website describes here.

Still, a popular and unusual food item in a city is always worth checking out, and if it's available in a gorgeous ballpark, hey, triple play.

I have read opinions of people that suggest getting your Primanti Bros. sandwich elsewhere at any of the many locations in greater Pittsburgh, since it's less expensive, the portions are slightly bigger, and reportedly it's just a higher quality sandwich elsewhere.  But if you want to spare yourself the trouble of finding another place and make a Primanti Bros. sandwich your meal of choice at the ballpark, it's perfectly adequate.

And if you spend some time sitting with a Primanti and an Iron City beer (more on that in a future post) at beautiful PNC Park, this Pittsburgh place will really grow on you.

Ballpark E-Guides uses many, many sources for its information. I figure if I'm asking customers for a fin, I can't be cutting corners on getting as much information as possible.

But it's rare that I find a source that contains so much information that I start to sweat whether people could just go there as opposed to buying a (still inexpensive!) Ballpark E-Guide.

One such website is a blog called "NYY Stadium Insider", run by a (now former) season ticket holder by the name of Ross. (I couldn't find his last name.) Ross updates his blog on a fairly regular basis with deals, bargains, and his own experiences attending games at Yankee Stadium. His latest post is a diatribe about his forfeiting season ticket privileges after what he rightly believed to be unfair treatment by the Yankees.

Most useful is the section called "Stadium Tips", a list of insider tips on enjoying the game at the new Stadium...some of which have been included in the Yankee Stadium E-Guide. He even goes so far as to mention a security guard by name while talking about the best places to stand and watch the game.

Ross also was a source of information on how to avoid the obstructed views in the bleacher seating at the new stadium, although I did verify it on my first trip. You can either read my earlier post about this or check out one of Ross's many posts here.

NYY Stadium Insider is such a well done blog with so much great information that it made me question whether people would still find the Yankee Stadium E-Guide worthwhile. Well, aside from the fact that I've included information from plenty of other sources, and of course the Yankee Stadium E-Guide is a wonderfully colorful and interesting handbook, I did search to see if Ross mentioned a very good tip that the E-Guide shares for saving money on tickets...and I did not find it.

So without denigrating NYY Stadium Insider in any way, the Yankee Stadium E-Guide is still well worth the five-spot! (Whew!)

Of course, I could probably find some other things, but the fact that I had to search nervously should tell you something about the quality of this blog. Check it out.

Some time ago I wrote a blog about the wonderful website called “Precise Seating”, that provides  all sorts of details on nearly every seat at Fenway Park—how close the seat is to home plate, how much of the view if any is obstructed, whether you’ll have to crane your neck to watch, and much more. It is recommended in the Fenway Park E-Guide.

It’s sites like Precise Seating that makes the Internet such a valuable tool for so many things. Think about how we used to buy tickets, book hotels and flights, look for restaurants, even find our way somewhere. Good old Yellow Pages…I sure don’t miss them. Remember writing down directions to someone’s house that they gave you on the phone? These kids today, they just don’t know how good they have it.

Anyway, while working on the coming Ballpark E-Guides booklet for Wrigley Field (hopefully available sometime in 2011, although I can’t promise it), I stumbled on a site called ParkWhiz, and driving to the game, or even to the city in general, will never be the same.

ParkWhiz could best be described as StubHub for parking spots. You go to the ParkWhiz website, enter the date and time and location (including sports venues) that you wish to declare a spot your own, and ParkWhiz will list for you the addresses of all of the available nearby spots. There is a map to show where each spot is, and even customer ratings and whether tailgating is permitted for each spot. Click on a button to reserve it, print out your reservation, plug it into your GPS and head to the game knowing that a spot will be yours and you’ll have more time to spend grazing around the ballpark. These days, you could do it all with your phone if it’s advanced enough. ParkWhiz does charge a 10% commission…they do need to make a profit…but that’s worth its weight in gas money saved by a couple laps around the park.

For just one example, as of this writing, for the December 12 Bears game at Soldier Field in Chicago, there are spots available for just $11. That’s quite a deal, although it is 1.7 miles away (which is just a short train ride in Chicago).

ParkWhiz guarantees your reservation too…full refund if you don’t get your reserved spot.

Not only does a site like ParkWhiz help motorists find a spot without searching endlessly around a ballpark, it helps parking lot owners or anyone else offering spaces to fill them at market value prices. How many times have you felt ripped off after shelling out a ridiculous amount of money for the only space you could find? With ParkWhiz, it’s a lot more likely that you’ll pay what a space is worth, and you don’t have to be gouged anymore. Well not as much anyway.

ParkWhiz probably wouldn’t be as great in a city like Philadelphia, where there is a sports complex taking up a great deal of space that has ample parking anyway. But if you would really prefer not to take a train, ParkWhiz would be a great boon to your party heading to New York, Boston, Chicago or any other city where parking is always a challenge.

One less hassle for the ballpark visitor thanks to the Internet. If this keeps up, there won’t be a need for Ballpark E-Guides. But until then, I soldier on!

ParkWhiz website: www.parkwhiz.com

To give you an idea of how far the world has come when it comes to obtaining tickets to events, I'm going to tell you about getting tickets for my first Rush concert.

 

Since the days of the Internet, sleeping out for tickets has become a forgotten pastime, but when I was in high school it was pretty common. Any hot acts that came to the Philadelphia Spectrum were going to inspire a group of fans to head to a Ticketron (it wasn't yet Ticketmaster then, but Ticketron was every bit as bad) vendor the night before tickets went on sale, in hopes of snaring great seats for the upcoming show.

 

My good friend Mike Lucas and I got up at 3AM and rode our bikes in the cold for the three miles to the Rickels hardware store in Edgewater, hoping to grab tickets for the Grace Under Pressure tour. In that strip mall there was a video store that doubled as the local Ticketron.

 

We sat on concrete for the next seven hours--and that is one long damn time to sit on concrete--waiting for the ticket buying to begin.

 

And because some jerk decided to make a list of the order of the line, people who signed the list the night before showed up the next morning and got in their place in line, making the line a useless, jumbled mess. I expect this probably happened everywhere that seats were sold. We ended up with about the worst seats available.

 

So, no, it isn't a fond memory. And I'm glad that I have a little money now and can simply outbid jackwagons who cut in line for the better seats.

 

When I checked out SeatGeek, I marveled at how much better this ticket buying business has gotten. Yes, tickets are more expensive--that Rush ticket cost me $11.50--but today, 26 years later, anytime before the event, you can scour the entire venue and pay what you think is acceptable, all while lounging in your underwear.

 

SeatGeek is merely a search engine for tickets. It searches all of the major secondary ticket brokers - TicketsNow, RazorGator, Ticket Network, and of course StubHub and eBay among others. Now you don't have to go from site to site and compare...SeatGeek does it for you.

 

Best of all, SeatGeek even informs you whether the tickets being sold are a good or bad deal, if it's known. On the seating chart, a green dot means the ticket is a great deal, a red one means a bad deal, and a yellow is somewhere in the middle. And SeatGeek will even let you know how much the broker's fee is, and it works that into the price, so there are no surprises--and don't those surprise fees tick you off?

 

I looked at the October 1 game between the Yankees and Red Sox at Fenway Park, obviously an extremely tough ticket. There is a green dot deal in Section 120, Row KK, which are Loge Box seats between home and first. The tickets are $175 apiece. (And yes, that is a great deal.) Similarly, just three sections closer to home plate, are tickets going for $226 apiece. SeatGeek calls this a bad deal.

 

As if all of this info weren't enough, the SeatGeek folks (boy, are these guys geeks) have even developed an algorithm to let you know where the price of tickets is trending, and indicate when the best time for you to buy would be.

 

SeatGeek makes clear that they do not buy or sell the tickets, they only search. But they do have a buy button on tickets that you click on, which takes you directly to the site offering the tickets.

 

Sites like SeatGeek, I believe, are great for sharpening the free market and determining exactly how much value tickets have. I don't know who is the best of the brokers, and I reluctantly endorsed StubHub in the past. Now I don't have to know. One blogger wrote about SeatGeek, "Never use Ticketmaster or Craigslist again".

 

And I still remember a sore butt from sitting on concrete that would appreciate that.

 

Everything from parking to peanuts at the ballgame...check out www.BallparkEGuides.com