Opening Day 2010

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.

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