Some great stuff in the mail today:
I posted some thoughts about whether or not baseball teams should just call games early (so people can go about their lives) instead of torturing fans. Is it not better to inconvenience 50 players than 30,000 paying customers?
DyHrdMET has left a new comment on your post “Would You Rather The New York Mets Just Not Play?“:
good question. this year, the Mets certainly won’t care for the fans. but wait ’till next year. when people stop going to games in the numbers that they were suckered into buying into ticket plans this season, maybe they’ll think differently about doing things for the fans.
myself, i was at Sunday’s game. i wrote about it during the 1st inning of the game i had a ticket to. I got there a shade after noon, just before the rain, got through the non-line at Blue Smoke, and moved under cover just before it started pouring. my friend’s little girl decided it was time to leave around 2pm, and i went with them, and i was back in NJ in plenty of time to see the entire game on TV. what do i get for it?
another time, maybe 20 years ago, maybe they would have postponed the game and played 2 on Monday. it was an option. they did have the window on Sunday when they did play and it was fine, but how do you handle 40,000 people on the concourses for 3 hours during the rain? there was no way i could have stayed walking around for that long, and not many seats under cover like at Shea to sit in to avoid standing (even the ones in the Upper Deck were cleared when the lightning started). i’m not gonna walk around sampling the cuisine or the clubs. even with Casey Stengel Plaza exposed behind the Promenade Club, it got lots of people stuck on one side of the concourse or the other. at least you could move all around Shea without getting wet (leaks aside)
I have gone to three Met games this year and have had an obstructed view at two of them. In the “Pepsi Party Porch” I couldn’t see a large portion of right field. Last night, on the field level in section 138, row 16 (centerfield), I couldn’t see large portions of center field and right field and could not see the main scoreboard at all.
Also, whatever happened to Jeff Wilpon’s claim that all seats are pointed towards home plate? This is not the case at all.
I know the Mets are more proud of their food concessions than they are of anything else (as if offering decent food at a baseball game at exorbitant prices is a difficult or noble accomplishment), so I made sure to bring a turkey sandwich from a local deli with me.
I’ll tell you, not being able to see 2 of the outfielders from my seat last night annoyed me. I think I have a solution to the plexiglass problem (will post in a few days), but I won’t be able to solve problems like these.
Whether or not he played any games in the minors, the choice of college says a great deal about Jeff Wilpon.
By the time he was finishing high school, his father was already relatively wealthy and influential. If Jeff had a lick of smarts, he’d have gone to a better college than Palm Beach Community College. Hell, if his only goal was to play ball in school, there are better schools for that, and his father certainly could have used some influence to help him get into some of them. Of course, if he’d been that good a ball player, he would have gotten a leg up on getting into a school with a better baseball program.
So, he’s a not-so-smart guy who’s a not-exceptional ballplayer who’s now taking over a major piece of the family business, which happens to be a (roughly) billion dollar enterprise that includes the need to balance up front needs (fielding a competitive team and making enough money to pay them while attracting and satisfying fans), medium term needs (making sure there’s enough talent in the farm system to keep the team competitive), and long term needs (making sure my kids are won over as Mets fans for life). So far, he’s failing on all three…
Posted by jmp to The Mets Police at August 4, 2009 10:12 AM
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Regarding Frank's comment, I wonder what Jeff Wilpon considers the oversized apple in centerfield? As we have seen, they built this part of the wall up to accommodate the apple that cannot handle back-to-back jacks, and therefore block a good portion of the outfield if you happen to be sitting near it. The more I think about this stadium, the more irate I get. Some (including me) still want to call it Shea, but that is insulting to the old home. They blew it and we have to live with it. I
@Frank Nunziata, the whole idea of the Pepsi Party Porch is that it overhangs the playing field, and are touted as such. There is no way for a seating section to overhang the field without creating an obstructed view for the people in that section.
It's supposed to be an homage to the old Tigers' Stadium, which had an upper deck that went all around the stadium, even with the wall in left field, while overhanging the field in right field. In that ballpark's last season, I had the opportunity to attend a game there, sitting in the front row of the upper deck in left field, with my knee against the foul pole. When there was a play in the corner, I had to stand up in my seat and lean over the front of the deck, to look straight down on the play. The hundreds of people sitting behind me had absolutely no way of seeing that play. The Mets have touted the Pepsi Porch as overhanging the field. That people are then surprised that they can't see all of right field owes either to their not having heard what the gimmick of those seats is, or not having a firm grasp of geometry.
Likewise, there are issues with being able to see left field from the upper deck in left. It's basic geometry. In order for there to be line of sight to the entire field, right up to the wall, there would either have to be no upper deck in left, or the upper deck would have to be substantially lower and/or farther from the field, essentially sitting behind the lower deck. Is there any ballpark in the majors with an upper deck in the outfield from which you can see the entire outfield from anywhere other than the front row?
While there are very legitimate problems with sightlines at the staircases throughout the promenade, the sightlines from the upper deck in the outfield are nowhere near as egregious. The other embarrassing sightline problem is that the seats are so close to the line in the corners that there isn't a direct line of sight from the broadcast booth behind the plate to see plays in the corners. You should never have to listen to the home broadcasters apologize for not knowing what's going on because they lost sight of the play.
Please note that the seats I sat in for Monday night's game were field level, not upper deck seats. And they are priced as such.
Went to Citi Field for the second time today. Section 506 in the "Promenade" – that's "Upper Deck" in WilponSpeak. Sightlines weren't too bad, but here's what struck me…WHERE IS THE METS LOGO? Painted behind home plate and on top of the dugout, barely visible. Under the HUGE "xxxx Field" logo in CF, it states "Let's Go Mets" in a font only an accountant could love. It's not very obvious – until the Apple appears- who the home team is.
The Wilpons and their field suck.