What Can’t You Do With An iPad? Go to Yankee Stadium

It would seem like a marriage of two bourgeois staples: Apple’s iPad and the New York Yankees. And yet, you can’t bring an iPad into Yankee Stadium, as one fan found out.Big League Stew’s Kevin Kaduk says this is a case of white whine, but it’s also a missed opportunity for MLB and the Yankees. There’s no shortage of apps for the iPad/iPod/iPhone related to baseball, including one for Yankee Stadium, and letting fans bring their iPads to a game would permit them to enjoy the free Wi-Fi at the park. People with smart phones no doubt use that Wi-Fi to browse the web; the iPad is different, because, as Kaduk learned, it falls into the category of laptop, and laptops are banned.

So this is a situation in which Apple’s gaudy new product is being definitively categorized as not a big iPhone—and the iPad still loses for it.

Kaduk notes that there are a lot of things wrong with bringing an iPad to a game—“For one, you’re at a ballpark. Watch the game,” he quips—but I’ll take this one up on behalf of the poor, downtrodden person who could drop $500 or more on a not-quite-a-laptop with that cool Apple logo: shouldn’t the Yankees be trying not to alienate their fans? And isn’t a generation with an addled attention span more likely to enjoy the in-person baseball experience with gadgets and gizmos to play with during half-inning breaks and pitching changes?

Yes, it is at least a bit silly to pay to see a baseball game and spend time not actually watching the game. But if you don’t buy the laptops-are-a-hazard security excuse—if you’ve been on an airplane in the last decade, I bet you won’t—you may think that banning iPads is one more puzzling decision in a sport riddled with retrograde thinking. I think you’d be right.

↵