My son wants to make it to a Yankee game this year before they shut down the historic Bronx stadium for good and move next door. No problem there. I’m a longtime and avid fan, and took him to his first game there years ago. I myself have been going to games since 1970, when my dad and uncle took us to the old stadium to see the Bombers get demolished by the Orioles. I also had partial season tickets for years, when I worked out of the Bronx County Courthouse during my stint at the Daily News.

Here’s the catch: My son wants to go with just me and his mom — the former family unit.

I have some mixed feelings on this, and it makes for some awkwardness. I’ve always felt fortunate that my ex and I were able to maintain a friendship, and that we are all able to get along. My girlfriend and I had my ex and her husband over for Christmas Eve dinner (it’s a feast we call Noche Buena in Cuban culture, and it’s a big deal for us), and I had Easter brunch with my ex, her family and her husband last month. As I’ve blogged before, we all went trick-or-treating together last year as well.

To be fair, I can see how my son might simply view an outing to a Yankee game as an extension of the friendship his mom and I maintain. But at the same time, I feel like excluding his mom’s husband and his dad’s new partner is a sign that he may be clinging to something. Obviously, he wouldn’t be the first child to want his parents together, even if it is just for a baseball game.

But are we letting him mislead himself if we go along? Or is it just his wish to have an outing with his parents?

Or am I just making too much out of it?

The opening days for New York’s new baseball parks are still a year off, but one thing is obvious when you get past the gorgeous renderings – the stadiums are too small. For the sake of all New York baseball fans, construction needs to stop and new plans drawn up for bigger stadiums.

The people who run the Yankees and the Mets are smart people, so how they came up with these schemes is beyond me. Baseball draws more people every year, while New York City and its suburbs are growing. So what do our baseball teams (with the approval of New York City and state officials) do? They shrink the size of the ball parks.

The new Yankee Stadium will hold about 52,000, down from the current 57,500. The Mets’ new Citi Field will hold 44,000 people compared with Shea Stadium’s 55,700. This is a bad for baseball fans and terrible for parents, kids and grandparents, too.

A baseball stadium is a place where lasting family memories are made. I won’t forget the first time my father took me to the stadium in the Bronx one sweltering August night when I was seven. The Yankees beat the Kansas City Athletics 4-0 in a game that didn’t last two hours. And then there was the first game I took my oldest son to: He chanted “Let’s Go Mets” so loud I feared he had been permanently imprinted a fan of the city’s National League team rather than the Yankees.

Not only will these ball parks have fewer seats, but the ticket prices will be shocking. If you are planning a game or two next year, start saving up by skipping lunch now. A low-cost ticket will go for about  the price of Broadway show ticket.  A top-priced field-level seat at Yankee Stadium will cost $2,500,  about the price of a used car. Ouch.

Don’t get me wrong. The new ball parks look beautiful, especially Citi Field. They will be better places to watch games – much better than the upper deck seats at Shea. Pilots landing at LaGuardia are closer to home plate than my seat near the foul pole a few years ago.

Yankees Chief Operating Officer Lonn Trost recently told our sport writer Sam Borden that the new stadium could have had more seats, but they would have been further from the field. “We didn’t want to do that. We wanted to make sure that each fan had a great view and could truly enjoy the new park as much as possible.”

No disrespect meant, Mr. Trost, but Yankees fans – and Mets fans, too – won’t be able to enjoy their new stadiums if there are too few seats and if the tickets are priced far beyond their means.

Do you think you’ll take your kids to see the Yankees or the Mets as often in their new stadiums? Do you remember first game with a parent, or with your own child? If so, tell us about your memories.

I’m sure we’re all familiar with the argument linking kids and steroids: Athletes take performance enhancing drugs, and kids become vulnerable because they either idolize and want to mimick their doping heroes or they’re young athletes who want to perform like the pros and follow the lead by “juicing.”

Well, tonight I heard former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell announce his long-awaited report on performance-enhancing drug use in major league baseball. The debate on this will go on for some time, and the report will be discredited by some, over-hyped by others.

But what hit me most about all this was the call I got in the midst of Mitchell’s press conference today. It was my son. He was watching at his mom’s house and couldn’t believe that some familiar names from his beloved Yankees were named.

Now, the rest of us will debate that list and the players on it for months and years to come. We’ll go on at the water cooler at work about Mitchell’s Boston ties and the high percentage of current and former New York players on this list—along with the lack of ties to the Red Sox. We’ll comment on how most of the players named were on the steroid radar anyway. We’ll speculate on the names that should be there but weren’t. We’ll even defend a player or two on the list, primarily if they play for our team.

But the bottom line is that a kid’s heart was broken today, and that just sucks.

This is a pet peeve for me every year: The late game times for the Major League Baseball playoffs. I mean, how do you get young kids to develop a passion for baseball with the games running ‘til midnight?

Now, my son is not an avid athlete, but does love to play baseball. As a fan, he roots for the Yanks and the football Jets, largely because his mom and dad do. And as an avid fan myself, sharing the game is a strong bonding tool with my son. It brings me back to baseball championships from when I was a kid, an experience that provided one of the few bonding times with my own father. So, naturally, I want to share the experience with my son as well.

This year, we’ll catch a break in the first round of playoffs, the division series, which begin today. Of the 20 potential games in those four series, 12 start at 6:30 p.m. or earlier. All of the scheduled Yankees games — our rooting interest — are at 6:30 or earlier.

But by the time the World Series rolls around, all scheduled seven games are slotted for nighttime. My 9-year-old will be lucky to catch the end of the fifth inning. We all know the why: There’s advertising dollars at stake, so the games cater to TV.

But it would be nice if someone in Major League Baseball threw us parents a bone sometime.

I took my sons to Shea to watch the Mets play the Marlins on Tuesday night. We sat in the upper deck behind home, overlooking the gorgeous green field and beyond the outfield wall, the construction site for Citi Field, their future stadium.

It’s an amazing scene: a circular lattice of steel rising from the parking lot and above that, six concrete towers with strange window-like openings. They looked like abandoned apartment buildings from an apocalyptic nightmare. I took photos with my cell phone and would have posted one right here – X – had I remembered to save them.

My older son and I recalled his first baseball game: a school trip to see the Mets that I also attended. At one point in that game many years ago, D joined with the crowd chanting “Let’s go Mets.â€? I smiled but immediately asked myself if I hadn’t made a big mistake. A Yankees fan from the womb, I wondered if D right then and there would be imprinted forever as a Mets fan. D, who is 17 now, laughed at that story. Both my sons are fans of the Yankees.

Later, I raised the possibility with my younger son that he might one day take a son to a game at Citi Field. Then he could tell the tale of how he and his father sat in the old ballpark and saw Citi Field being built. My son, N, who is 12, thought that was cool, and so did I.

I remember my father taking me to my first game when I was 7. Art Ditmar pitched the Yankees to a 4-0 win over the Kansas City Athletics in the Bronx that summer night. I’ll have to ask my father if he remembers it, too.