I’m thrilled, honored and humble that the Mets Police is becoming a place where Mets fans feel they can be heard. I’m also appreciative that people seem to get where we’re coming from. We love the Mets, but sometimes the ownership drops the ball. At the end of the day, all we want is for our team to win.
This came in as a comment, but is lengthy enough that I thought I’d share it as its own post, which also allows more voices to be heard.
In response to “I Loved Citi Field. Review and Notes From Night One…“:
I’ve now been to 3 games and sat in 3 different locations: field level in centerfield (between left foul pole and the home run apple), 13 rows up in the promenade on the 3rd base line (my Sunday plan seats), and field level in right field just before the Pepsi porch. Got there early for all 3 games and did a fair amount of wandering around, sampling food. Also walked around during the games, checking out the action/views from different spots. The best part of Citi, especially compared to Shea, is that you can actually see the game as you walk around – you’re not glued to your seat. And you can stand just about anywhere for just about as long as you want and the ushers don’t chase you away. For me, the best food was the Shake Shack double burger – very tasty and a decent amount of food for the price – unlike the pulled pork sandwich at blue smoke that cost a dollar more than the Shack burger but was about the size of a poker chip. The ribs at Blue Smoke were a better value than the pulled pork sandwich but were only OK, not great. But unless you get there 2 hours before game time, you might as well forget it. The lines – especially for Shake Shack – are insanely long and the whole area gets claustrophobically crowded. This is true in a number of places on the concourses, the width of which are greatly reduced in a lot places to accomodate concessions, causing bottlenecks and forcing people to shuffle along in a tight pack to get by.
As a tall person with long legs, I was really looking forward to the new seats, which the Mets kept hyping as being more spacious and comfortable than the seats at Shea. That sort of depends on where your seats are. There’s definitely more leg room on the field level, but up in the promenade, where my regular seats are, it’s just as cramped. The seats seem a little bit wider, but not much. They do sit a little bit higher off the floor, which for me means I only have to stand up every other inning to keep my legs from cramping up.
The view from the centerfield field level seats (where I sat for opening night) were the worst of the 3 I sat in. Because the wall is so high, your view is blocked starting about 20 feet in front of the warning track. Any ball hit to the track or the wall, you have to turn your head 90 degrees and look up at the overhead TV screens to see what’s happening. The infield feels like it’s a mile away and everyone is the size of insects. Terrible seats. I’ll never sit there again if I can help it.
My regular seats are OK but not at all as good as my old Sunday plan seats at Shea (3rd row of mezzanine reserve right behind home). For all the talk about the “intimacy” of Citi, my new seats 4 rows from the back of the promenade are a long hike up, and while the view of the field is totally unobstructed (except for a tiny little piece of the left field corner), it’s all rather small and distant.
The best were the right field level seats I sat in for the last 5 innings of the Sunday game against the Brewers, courtesy of a friend who had scored 4 tickets and was only using 2. The view was pretty much unobstructed and although far from home plate, close to the field and IN THE SUN – a welcome relief from the promenade, which is in the shade the entire game and coupled with the breeze was very chilly. Thursday night, in an effort to get warm, I was walking around and “discovered” the promenade club. I walked in and was amazed: enclosed, warm, great views of the field, tables, two full bars and food. But when I tried to go back on Sunday to warm up, I was stopped at the door and told that only promenade club (i.e., box) ticket holders are allowed. Bummer.
Funny how you don’t miss your water til the well runs dry, but there are definitely things about Shea that I already miss: one being the way you could walk all the way from foul pole to foul pole on the walkway between the box seats and the reserved seats in every section. No more colorful characters in costume with funny signs, no more cowbell man (which may be a relief to some, but not to me). As odd as it sounds, I also miss the ramps – a much nicer way to get in and out than climbing up and down the low-ceiling-ed, concrete stairs.
Look, it’s a nice place, and has a whole lot more charm than Shea (which is easy since Shea had none), but the glitziness and exclusivity (the multitude of off-limits, “private” club areas), smaller size and higher costs of Citi make it feel less an everyman experience – a day at the ball park – than it does a somewhat artificial, day at an amusement park that happens to have a baseball game being played in the middle of it.
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