The Bisons Beer Dinner, Mets Beer Competitions?

Prost!The Buffalo Bisons are having a Beer vs. Wine II dinner Thursday at Coca-Cola Field.  It’s a rematch of a dinner they had last November.

 

This is a pretty cool idea and a great use of the park during the offseason.  $60 gets you a 5-course meal and a wine and beer pairing with each.  Your vote decides which paired better, and the votes are tallied at the end for a winner.  Of course beer won the first dinner.

 

I’m not going to whine (haha, get it?) about the Mets not doing something similar at Citi Field, although I do think it’d be a fun idea.  I’m not that unreasonable that I demand all my interests to align in one centrally located area within Flushing.

 

Except this isn’t really that much different than an event the Mets already have.  Oktoberfest!  The Mets already have a plan in place for food and drink events, so why not host a couple more?  I’d make a point to go to a “Summer Beerfest” event before a Mets game.   The competition angle is one way to go too.  When the Padres visit in town, pour five Stone Brewery beers on one side, and five Brooklyn Brewery beers on the other. Ask fans to rank their top three beers and then announce the winner during the 5th inning, which would double as a great way to advertise the next competitive beer tasting event.

More on Citi Field’s Uninspiring Beer List

Citi Field is a first-class venue.  It’s got amazing food, and much of it is local.  The Citi Field beer list is extensive, but it’s also uninspiring.  Beer and baseball go together so well yet most of the beers available, particularly to the general public, at Citi Field are only the typical expanded list of beers available via Anheuser Busch distribution. Some of these beers are pretty good, but it lacks that local flair and originality.  I’m not knocking the Redhook beers; but it seems sloppy to get them through Anheuser Busch when the brewery itself is only a handful of miles away. Even though they’re all over the place now, the Danny Meyer stands are New York creations.  Cascarino’s is a New York pizza place.  Pastrami on rye is a very New York food, and Keith’s burgers are especially homey.  Even McFaddens was first a New York staple.

 

So why was Brooklyn Brewery priced out?  Why aren’t there more Sixpoint beers around the stadium, especially now that they serve the beer in cans? What about some of the other local breweries?  Chelsea? What about Schmaltz Brewing Company which makes the Coney Island Freak line of beer. Interestingly, the Brooklyn Cyclones, the Mets rookie team, plays in Coney Island.  Maybe the Mets could serve Albino Python when the Diamonbacks are in town, or the Mermaid Pilsener to mock the Marlin’s cheerleaders.  What about Harlem Brewing Company’s Sugar Hill Golden Ale?  Harlem is where the Mets first placed, and where the Giants played before them.  Blue Point Brewery is probably the only real local beer outside of the Delta Club.  Their Blue Point Toasted Lager is available at Catch of the Day, but they’ve got other beers as well.

 

This all says nothing of the possibility of finding a partner to brew Mets themed beers.   Brooklyn Brewery has an expanded brewery now, and when they provided beer to Box Frites, it was their own beer called Blanche De Brooklyn that they renamed Blanche we Queens.  Why stop there?  What about a Home Run Apple Lager?  A World’s Fair Oktoberfest?  A Darryl Strawberry Blonde? The possibilities are endless. Maybe Schmaltz would be intrigued by the opportunity to create a Brooklyn Cyclones Ale for MCU Park and Citi Field.

 

I think the Mets, and Aramark, may underestimate just how many Mets fans are huge beer fans as well.  It’s not just the hardcore fan either.  There are plenty of casual baseball fans out there that could be drawn off the fence and into the park if they were tempted to try a unique beer.

 

Stay tuned, later this week I’m going to talk about what some of the other stadiums around baseball are doing with beer.

New Mets HOF Member John Franco: First Pitch at Citi Field

Congratulations to John Franco for being selected for the Mets Hall of Fame.

Did you know John Franco threw out the first ever ceremonial first pitch at Citi Field?  It’s true!  It took place at an exhibition game between St. Johns and Georgetown.  Franco went to St. Johns, so was tagged to do the honors.

John Franco throws out the first ceremonial first pitch at Citi Field. -CeetarJohn Franco Throwing out the first ceremonial first pitch at Citi Field for a St. Johns game. -Ceetar

Other Citi Field Changes?

Last spring we were faced with the shocking news that Brooklyn Brewery beers would no longer be available at the Shake Shack stands out in center field.  Every season at most stadiums things change from season to season.  Usually they’re small things; advertisers change, menus get tweaked, music changes and mid-inning contests are different.  Maybe there’s a new dunk tank, a home run apple, or a new banner or piece of memorabilia celebrating the home team.

 

This season the Mets are making major structural changes to the dimensions and height of the wall.  This won’t have any real affect on the win-loss record, but it’ll probably create more home runs for fans.  At least it’ll create a different seating area that should be interesting.


So what smaller changes can we expect at Citi Field this summer?  The easy one is that Keith’s burger stand will probably become a permanent fixture somewhere and we’ll get some new test product in that space.   Citi Field has an extensive beer list, but what it lacks is local community beers.  While on a Citi Field food tour last season, I was told that some of the concessions were chosen because of their local affiliate.  Cascarino’s is so close that if you called them up and gave them Citi Field’s address, it’d fall within the delivery zone.   Hopefully they’ll take this into account when looking at the beer available next year.  The only local beer outside of the Delta Club was Blue Point’s Toasted Lager at Catch of the Day.  Great beer, but not enough.  Nor is the couple of places you can get Brooklyn Lager.  It doesn’t have to be the perfectly paired beer for Shake Shack, Blue Smoke, or El Verano Taqueria even though it should be.  A handful of craft beer booths around the stadium would work just as well.  Plenty of people in New York love their craft beer and want to drink something more than Budweiser at a baseball game even if Anheuser-Busch is going to brand the cans with a Mets logo this year.

 

Ommegang is a New York brewery from Cooperstown.  There should be a tap of beer from there in every stadium across the country in my opinion.  There’s already some in the Delta Club, so why not make it available to all?   I bet it’d be possible to get Brooklyn Brewery, or a different local brewery, to contract-brew specific beers for the Mets.  How cool would it be to be able to get a Tom Seaver Ale, a World’s Fair Unisphere Rye, or a Home Run Apple Cider?

There Is No Replacement For Jose Reyes

There is an interesting juxtaposition among Mets fans that talk about things like trading Wright or letting Reyes walk.  The same people that justify this with statements about not competing for years and being in rebuilding mode seem offended that some (I’d say many) Mets fans suggest they’ll be much less interested in the Mets if Reyes leaves.

 

There’s always a lot of comparison, as well as attempts to avoid comparison, to the Yankees with the Mets.  They share a city and compete for the same entertainment dollar.   The common rhetoric among Mets fans is that the Yankees fans are front-running morons that only care about yelling about how many rings they’ve won and that Mets fans are truer fans that love the team, good or bad.   If a vastly diverse group of millions of Mets fans can agree on anything, it’s that Jose Reyes is a talented baseball player that’s fun to watch.   At what point does it stop being about watching your favorite players play your favorite game and start becoming about being a consistent winner?

 

What is baseball without the season, with the ups and downs of a 162 game scheduled filled with bad breaks and huge hits and the ebbs and flows of stress and emotion?  I don’t follow the Mets for optimal lineup constructions and high-value controlled commodities.  I watch the Mets because I love baseball and I’ve formed an attachment to the players that have worn the uniform year after year.  Jose Reyes is one of those players.  He’s a life-long Met and it’s hard to imagine him anywhere else.  The Mets have other good players, but there is something special about Jose Reyes and his fun-loving attitude.  Perhaps it’s the way he seems to love playing the game as much as we love watching him play it.

 

Sure it’s possible to make arguments about injury risks and long contracts that suggest perhaps giving Reyes too much money or too many years may be detrimental to the long term success of the franchise, but frankly I’d rather take my chances with Reyes.  Those risks exist with every player in every circumstance, and if you’re not going to take a chance with a fan-favorite and top of the line player at a sparse position, what are you even doing?   Reyes is already bordering on legendary Mets status, and that’s not something that comes along every day.   Mike Piazza came here when he was great, Dwight Gooden left in 1994 and Darryl Strawberry before him.  Ignoring that there is long-term financial value to having legends to invite back to Citi Field in the future, do we really want to let one walk away for what’s some kind of  ‘smart process of value contracts and prospect development’?  A couple more years and the Mets record book will be Jose Reyes’ biography, with a guest appearance by David Wright.

 

The Mets have struggled for years now with collapses followed by injuries followed by just about everything else.  Now you want to take the most exciting player on the team away too?   While I’ll always be a Mets fan, there comes a point when it’s hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel.  It’s easy to say that we need things to stabilize, for bad contracts to work their way off the payroll and for prospects to mature and contribute at the fraction of the cost, but in the meantime other teams are playing baseball and competing for the postseason and doing all sorts of wonderful things.  Taking seasons off is not the way to build a perennial contender.  Every year the Mets spend in rebuilding mode, defined by me as letting Reyes go and not replacing him with at least as much talent, is a year that customers find other ways to spend their entertainment dollar.  Some will go to the Yankees, some will switch to other sports.   Some will stop watching with their kids who will spend more time on video games, movies, or something else entirely.   Husbands will take their wives out to a nice dinner instead of to Citi Field, because maybe without Reyes, and winning, they don’t feel it’s worth the traffic and the rushing home from work.

 

Building a winner will eventually repair the damage, but even if you could guarantee repeated success it takes time to rebuild a fan base.  The Yankees had a healthy amount of fans show up, but even in 2000 they were 8th in total attendance.  The difference was that payrolls hadn’t yet skyrocketed to the levels they are at now.  The Yankees payroll in 2000 would be  the 13th highest payroll in 2011.  It was still possible for teams to maintain a rebuilding payroll and keep some talented stars while keeping revenues at or above payroll.  The way I see it, the Mets can’t easily get their payroll down that low, so they need to work on keeping revenues up.  Reyes can’t do it all by himself, but coupled with the right moves he could be the difference between the Mets raising attendance to 2.6 million or it dropping to 1.7.   Just in ticket prices alone, a swing like that more than pays Reyes salary per year.  Factor in revenue associated with advertising prices based on TV ratings and fans in the seats viewing them on the walls and it’s an even starker difference.   I find it hard to believe that having Jose Reyes playing baseball in New York can’t be profitable, and it’s certainly possible, even likely, that Jose Reyes can be a part of the success even four years from now.

 

There is never a guarantee that smart moves focused on the long term will lead to continued success.  There is no formula Sandy Alderson can follow that means the Mets will definitely be a perennial contender in 2014 and beyond.  Prospects, even highly touted ones, hurt themselves or flame out.  Free agent acquisitions that look like can’t misses age badly or under perform in a new environment.   Other teams in the division and/or league do a better job, or get luckier, in scouting and signing players and suddenly no one knows what the solution is for out-performing them.  It’s not hard to get into a cycle of suck like the Pittsburgh Pirates, constantly looking for All-Star prospects that maybe have a good year or two and than take off for greener pastures while the team struggles to even play at .500.  The best you can do is put yourself in a situation every year where the right set of circumstances gets you into the playoffs.  For the Mets that means keeping Jose Reyes.  It probably also means hoping Johan Santana stays on the field and is still pretty good at pitching, and that other players stay healthy as well.   It may be a long shot, but if you don’t keep yourself in the game you often miss opportunities.

 

I was at the game this year when Jose Reyes felt that first hamstring tightness and left the game.  It was a packed house for a Subway Series game, and Tejada jogging out to shortstop was like a punch in the gut.  I watched the rest of the game in a daze, barely caring about the result.   Reyes had such a great first half that there were road games in May that I was reminding myself to make sure I turned the game on in time, because Reyes would lead off and I might miss something special.  There are reasons to watch bad teams because even bad or average players hit for cycles, throw pitching gems, and smash home runs.  They can stage remarkable comebacks and rock opposing aces and there’s always the looming possibility that someone will throw that no-hitter.  Without Jose Reyes the chances of something magical happening go down.

 

Faith and Fear in Flushing, in an awards presentation to Jose Reyes, makes similar points and sums up my feelings pretty well in this quote.

except for habit and a lifetime of devotion, I can’t think of a good, rational reason to get squarely behind this team if you’re not on it.

Wall Adjustments Do Not Make Mets Better

I’ve never really cared about the walls at Citi Field.  They are what they are for both teams, and the height and distance have both positives and negatives. My biggest concern is that if they were to change them, that they would do something stupid like just draw another orange line, or construct a makeshift fence in front of it and mess with the aesthetics.  Sandy Alderson’s comments on the broadcast last night seem to suggest that they’ll put a lot of thought into how to meld the chances into the structure if they do make changes.  Alderson mentioned that they’ve done a lot of research on it, and with three years worth of data to look at they’re a little more confident in the decisions they’re reaching off the data.  Opinions about home runs and wall height are one thing, but I’m happy any decision that’s made will be based off hard data. 

Personally, I like the changes Randy over at The Apple suggested.  A row of seating in front of the wall in left, and a fence in right that turns the Mo’s Zone from a forgotten group area to a cool place to watch the game.  Being able to watch the game from what would literally be field level would be a lot of fun.  San Francisco has a similar type area out in right field of their ballpark. 

Still, the changes do not make the Mets better.  If the Mets move the fences in, they’ll move the fences in for the opponent as well.  Jason Bay will still need to hit the ball hard consistently, and his failure to do so for much of his Mets tenure is not because of the walls.  The Mets still have some work to do to make the 2012 team a contending team, and all moving in the walls does is change the configuration of the boxscore.  David Wright and the Mets still need to hit the ball over them more often than their opponents to win a lot of games.

A side effect of this is that we can no longer call it the Great Wall of Flushing if it’s changed, and I was starting to really like that nickname.  I thought it was a fun inside joke.

New York Mets Oktoberfest

The Mets are having their annual Oktoberfest on September 23rd. It looks like decent fun, although I’d pass on the lederhosen.  If you pay attention at all, I’m almost as big a beer fan as I am a Mets fan, so things like this are right up my alley.

 

The Mets Oktoberfest is pretty good.  The food menu features Wiener Scnitzel, Beer Braised Bratwurst & Onions, German Style Fried Potatoes, German Potato Salad, Coleslaw, Soft Pretzels and a delicious Cookie Platter for dessert.  Of course, it doesn’t list the beer menu.   It’d be a shame if it was just the normal stuff off the Citi Field Beer List.  There needs to be at least a couple of Oktoberfests there, and a local variety like Brooklyn Brewery’s would be a great place to start.  Unfortunately, I’m busy next Friday and will be unable to go.  If someone is going and doesn’t mind reporting back to me, send me an email at ceetar@ceetar.com.

 

The price for the Oktoberfest party at Citi Field is $54 to sit in the Big Apple Reserved and get a free ticket lanyard.  I’m not going to quibble too much about something that includes free beer, but that’s $12 more than the Big Apple Reserved seating is for Premium games.   Normally, group sales get a discount on pricing.  The Social Media night the Mets held was $41 for the same seats, and including $18 of food and beverage credit.

 

I think the Mets could make more of this event.  This is New York, and as Sandy Alderson said about our farm systemeverything should be top of the line, not middle of the pack.   One example to follow might be the Houston Astros Oktoberfest.  The Astros event is two hours prior to the game, whereas the Mets event starts an hour early and goes until the 7th inning and conflicts with the game.   It’s a full-fledged party with polka music, folk dancers, and your own Astros beer stein!  Included are 12 2oz pours of 12 different beers available; many of them Oktoberfests and pumpkin ales.

 

The Astros event is separate from the game, so they allow you to buy a ticket to any section.  Obviously tickets in Houston are much much cheaper than tickets in New York, but they even discount them for you by about 40%.  They do tack on another $20 for the Oktoberfest package, but that’s still a great deal considering it’s an admission to a two hour party and you get at least a pint and a half of beer, and your own stein.  You could get all this, AND a baseball game, for as little as $27.

 

I’d love if the Mets followed the Astros example in 2012.  I know the Bullpen Plaza isn’t big enough for a full on party, but there are other options.  They could close off the Caesar’s Club for one day before the game, or block off a suitably sized section of the parking lot.   Another option would be to have a Mets Oktoberfest away game viewing party.  Have the event when the Mets are on the road.  The Caesar’s Club certainly has enough televisions to  tune to SNY.   I already own a Mets beer stein purchased the conventional way, but if a 2012 design was created, I’d certainly buy another one.

2011 Mets fading into the Sunset

The local football teams played Sunday night, marking the beginning of the end of baseball.  With the Mets eliminated from the NL East and almost eliminated from the Wild Card race, Mets related traffic and discussion has slowed to a crawl outside of the die-hard in Metsopotamia.

 

But we’re going to miss them when they’re gone.  The New York Mets now have as many games remaining as the New York Giants; another sign of the end.  Time is ticking down, the Mets are playing poor, sloppy and uninspired baseball and even Reyes isn’t hitting like he was for most of the rest of the season.

 

As much as it’s not much fun to watch lately, I’m going to watch.  You never know when something crazy will happen, and this team probably still has a couple of fun wins in them.  I’m going out to Citi Field tonight for Star Wars night, which should be interesting at least.

 

Much thanks to the Mets for including Optimistic Mets Fan in the final issue of Mets Magazine. It’s very cool to see this blog in the Mets program. If you happen to buy the final issue of the season, flip over to page 153 and check it out. Then turn to page 154 for Faith and Fear in Flushing‘s entry. I love that there is a Spanish translation as well, although anyone that needs it isn’t going to find the site too readable. Maybe I need a ‘translate to Spanish’ widget for Fanáticos Optimista de los Mets?