The Citi Field crowd was announced as a sellout at 41,053 — plus another 1,000 tickets donated to Sandy relief — although there appeared to be pockets of empty seats.
We have a mystery!
The Mets, as you know, never ever lie. They never exaggerate. If they say it was a sell out then they must have sold out.
Which leads us to our mystery. I took some photos at the game. Perhaps you can help me solve this riddle.
Let’s look at this first picture. Clearly all the people below are from some sort of organization that all goes to the bathroom together. Perhaps a daycamp was on a trip and the counselor took rows and rows of children to the bathroom at the same time.
Next, we have the seats of some enthusiasts of the new Steak Sandwiches place in the uppers. These folks all decided to go get steaks together.
Are there any mathematicians out there? These don’t seem like randomly distributed empty seats to me. They seem quite clumped, as if entire clumps of seats went unsold.
Here are the seats of some more fans enjoying today’s sold out stadium. These fans all went over to Kiddie Field together.
These fans would have sat right in front of me the entire game but they got stuck in traffic and never made it, but clearly the seats were sold.
Finally we have this beautiful panoramic shot. Go ahead, click on this bigger version. It’s a pretty picture with some unexplained green.
Congratulations Mets on your sellout! I am sure you are as proud of this feat as you will claim that the $63 price point held even if you and I know that it was the $50 price point that moved the seats last week.
Enjoy the attendance from here on out. I look forward to more sellouts like Opening Day.
Expect a straight answer from a Wilpon? Maybenew/old spinner David Newman … hello, Newman … can shed some light on this. Plausibly sold out!
I did notice that as of last night Stub Hub had 1199 seats for sale. Just a thought.
There were large clusters of empty seats in the $39 Prom. Outfield section as well. Could it be they were not sold but held back to force the purchase of higher priced seats?
If you’ve ever looked in the bus parking lots on opening day, you realize a lot of people don’t actually make it into the game. I know about 60 people from two buses that just stayed in the parking lot boozing. It’s all about hanging out. There’s a lot more people that go and don’t make it in because the tailgating is good.
Still about a million times better than this scene:
http://deadspin.com/yankee-stadium-caught-opening-day-fever-and-died-464896022
Seriously. I know it was the ninth inning of a game they were down 9-2 in, and it had started to rain, but….wow! Opening Day for Yankees-Red Sox?
Citi was almost as empty at the end of the game. The temperature dropped about 40 degrees.
Wow Mike, that’s unreal, especially considering how much people paid to get into Yankee Stadium!
But re the Mets, I don’t know how you could not sell out Opening Day in the biggest market in America. The Mets have problems that I don’t think a great Pat LaFrieda sandwich is going to fix.
A lot of fans like to walk around as well, so this could explain some of the empty seats.
there were hundreds of fans at the lounges and bars and walking around. any pics of Shea bridge? always packed and with two park benches there who would want to go up to their seats? maybe they didn’t sell out completely but close to it. mike francessa is a jerk plain and simple. I walk around it was crowded in stores and food lines while the stadium looked almost packed. such ignorance in this world I swear. many forget that citi field offers many many places to go and things to do then boring yankee stadium.
This article is stupid. I never sit at my seat at Mets game, i’m always walking around and hanging out in the standing room areas. The bridge is always packed. Just because you see some empty seats doesn’t mean those people aren’t in the stadium. Amazing a Mets fan would get offended enough to write about this after a big win.
Well, nobody likes to be lied to, and the Mets obviously lied. If you can get 12 seats together in the third inning for that day’s game, it can’t be a sellout.
Wondering, does everyone just have to take the team’s word for it? I mean, can they just lie like this and that’s that?
This article is (bleep) ridiculous.
Shea Stadium = a (bleep)hole where getting up during the game to take a leak was a trial. Get your hot dog, italian sausage, or (bleep) bubba burger, and plop your keister down for 3+ hours cuz you’re not going anywhere. I was once forced to get soaked from head to toe in the field level box seats because there was nowhere for everyone to fit in the corridor when they went for shelter during a surprise downpour.
Meanwhile at CitI Field my party can buy tickets and never sit in our seats once because of the wide corridors, generous sightlines, and a wide variety of good options plus a much more accessible Mets hall of fame.
What the (bleep) is the point of this article you (edited) piece of trash?
….
This comment was edited by Shannon.
Interesting about the rain and Citi Field vs. Shea. I haven’t been to Citi yet. It’s the exact opposite in Philly. At the Vet, you had a big overhang over the lower level and there was also some cover up in the 700 level (the very top of the stadium) all around the full circle of the stadium. At the new place, there is a ton of open space (in particular, in CF) and there isn’t nearly as many places to escape to when it rains. I stood in the first level concourse during a rain delay a few year ago t Citizens Bank Park and it was just packed, wall to wall people.
To me it didn’t look like a sellout, as Shannon’s pix suggest…having said that, I stood almost the whole game by the Shea Bridge, and that area was packed…..
What is the actual capacity of the stadium?
box score shows 41,053 as attendance .
According to the Mets site, official capacity is 45,000 – which includes standing room.
Seating capacity is 41,922
We know they sold SRO tickets so the 41,053 isn’t a seated attendance.
Either way you measure it, they did not sell out
Shannon, you should be interested in this. After reading your recent blogs, I decided to try something yesterday during the Mets opening game. I kept trying to buy tickets for opening day on the mets.com web site even after the game started, and I was still able to get groups of 12 tickets together AS LATE AS THE BOTTOM OF THE THIRD INNING of the opening day game. There is no way, given that, that this game could have been a sellout.
wow!
Thanks Shannon, well done, lets stay on top of them, maybe some fan protests in the near future.