More Mockery from Redsock Fans

This must stop...

NEW YORK (AP) --Alex Rodriguez is not the only one missing Yankees games these days.

Thousands of fans, expected to fill the luxury seats on the first level of the new Yankee Stadium, are doing the same thing.

In fact, the Bombers’ braintrust is reportedly considering taking extraordinary measures, including computer-generated images, to give the impression that the seats are filled.

The ticket manager of one major-league team, who requested anonymity, said that the Yankees are attempting to purchase from other teams videotape of fan-filled stands. "Apparently, they plan to run a blue screen around the stands from dugout to dugout, and use a computer to make it seem that someone is in the park," he said.

Yankee management refused comment on the report, but clearly was upset that no one was buying the seats. "For God’s sake," one executive said, "the centerfield-camera shot looks like a vacation videotape of the pitcher, batter and umpire, taken at Death Valley."

He added that the dearth of fans was a mystery, and was infuriating Hank Steinbrenner and other Yankee officials. "I can see why fans would stay away if we were perennial losers like Pittsburgh and Kansas City," he said. "But we won an American League pennant just
six years ago, and a World Series championship in 2000. What the hell do they want from us?"

Officials of several other teams reported that the Yankees had approached them about purchasing fan-heavy videotapes, but all said they had refused to sell such tapes to the team.

Meanwhile, in New Zealand, , Peter Jackson, director of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, said that the Yankees had asked him about the availability outtakes of scenes involving Orcs, mythical J.R.R. Tolkein creatures that were created by the thousands in computers for the films.

"The Yankees’ people were interested at first," Jackson said, "because they said the Orcs looked like Yankee fans. But the expense of altering the computer images to eliminate the clubs and battleaxes the Orcs carried, and replace them with batteries, was prohibitive."

The empty-seat crisis worsened yesterday when the New York Post reported that one fan, who had been lost in the empty space on opening day, was located by searchers behind the third-base dugout..

"He told us he had just about given up hope of being rescued," one of the searchers said. " He felt he would never be found in that vast emptiness, that he was like a needle in a haystack."