Opening Day — or in the Yankees’ and Red Sox’s case, opening night — is just two days away, so the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council has picked an appropriate time to tout the hot dog as the undisputed king of ballpark concessions.

From its release today:

The NHDSC predicts that ballparks around the country will serve 21,378,064 hot dogs this season, enough to round the bases 29,691 times.  If laid end-to-end, the dogs would stretch from the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., to Coors Field in Denver, Colorado, with enough left over to give a hot dog to every fan at every Colorado Rockies’ home game for the entire 2010 season.  In addition, the NHDSC predicts ballparks will sell 4,933,853 sausages this year.

That’s a whole lot of weiners.

“Old” Yankee Stadium didn’t have much to offer in the way of food outside of the hot dog realm, and the selections were pretty limited.  Regular size and slightly larger “jumbo” were available at most stands, and a select few had “footlongs.”  Of course, the vendors came around with “dirty water” dogs that looked awful and smelled worse.  For most games, it was a dog or maybe a sausage, or grab a slice at the pizza place up 161st Street before the game.

Now, the new Stadium has tons more offerings, even a choice between standard, footlong and natural casing dogs.  The entire first level is full of vendors that there had simply been no room for in the old Stadium.

My favorites at Yankee Stadium last year were the Boar’s Head corned beef and pastrami sandwiches (usually made to order, unless you got there too early) and Philly Cheese steaks (not the Chicken Cheese steaks, which looked substantially less appetizing).

I didn’t branch out much further than that — I made the chicken fingers mistake once — but I might try a few others this year, just to see what else is out there.

It also doesn’t hurt to have a Carvel stand right near the entrance to my station.  Of course, it would help if they didn’t run out of ice cream most games by the 7th inning…