Today was Opening Day at Citi Field. A day filled with optimism. (Unless you’re one of the fans booing Oliver Perez, the Mets trainers, Luis Castillo or Jerry Manuel) The day lived up to the hype and the Mets won as they usually do on Opening Day. I met with a surprising amount of other bloggers and the Blue Cap Army to tour the Mets Hall of Fame and Museum which was a lot of fun. Hopefully I’ll see a bunch more of them this season. (My next game is Friday.)
The important stuff:
Johan pitched great. He wasn’t exactly lights out, but he was excellent and held the Marlins to 1 run in 6 innings. The bullpen pitched excellently. It was just Nieve and K-Rod this time, but still good way to start. David Wright got his first home run in his first at-bat, and it was just amazing. Wright’s poised to have an amazing MVP caliber player, and getting that first home run out of the way so that no one can start doubting him was a great jolt to the Mets fans. It said, “This season is going to be good. We’re not going to fall on old clichés and you’re not going to be able to use the phrase ‘here we go again.’” Bay and Barajas both had big hits, to help break the ice so to speak. More importantly, the Mets were aggressive. They played an aggressive game, made the Marlins have to make plays (they didn’t), and played hard. There was even a suicide squeeze attempt which was great to see. So even though I think he’s still the worst manager the Mets have ever had, I do offer kudos to Jerry Manuel for calling that play. Suicide squeezes and terror on the basepaths is a much better way to try to steal runs than sacrifice bunting.
Now some pictures of things I noticed at Citi Field today. There are a lot of changes, and plenty of them are fairly mundane, but still changes. I took 400 pictures and a couple of videos, and there was so much good stuff that I’ll never be able to get to it all. The full gallery is here. More pictures at The Real Dirty Mets Blog.
The moved Home Run Apple. Great change. Great location. Looks amazing there. Could become a meeting point, although it’s just a wee bit crowded there.
more below to save on page load times.
Cats, especially black ones, have a special meaning to Mets fans. So you can imagine I was pysched to randomly encounter one on my way from the car to the park.
The Museum was excellent. I’ll let other bloggers that are better with the history stuff break that one down, but good stuff.
You can now see into the Champions Club, which is on the field level behind home plate. That area always seemed so dark and dreary, and this definitely opens it up a bit.
The newly dedicated Shea Bridge. Great name for it, great symbolism. Great bridge.
I don’t know if this was there last year, because it’s in what I deem the ‘secret’ gift shop. Right past the Carvel that serves ice cream floats. (Where the dunk tank used to be) If you have kids, you probably _did_ know about this one. (btw, isn’t the kid sitting on the shelf a little creepy?)
I could just be just not remembering, but I don’t remember globe lights to distinguish an up elevator from a down one last year.
This isn’t exactly ‘new’, but newly accessible. The Acela Club can be reached with a ticket that claims any club access. My tickets ended up being Promenade Club, so I was able to walk into the Acela Club to check it out, which does indeed look like a cool place. Not really my style for a ballgame necessarily though.
One of the new menu items, Disco Frittes. Pretty good, although not overly amazing either. (Btw, Box Frittes no longer seems to be serving “Blanche De Queens” as their beer, which I found disappointing. Didn’t like the Brooklyn Summer as much.
I know some criticized the ads around the ‘Diamondvision’. It does look a lot cleaner this year.
Picture of the Blue and Orange stairwells. This isn’t the greatest picture, but you get the idea.