Over the weekend I made a new friend.  His name is Shawn and he is the General Manager of McFadden’s Citi Field.   He was kind enough to invite me out so we could chit-chat about some ideas.

This was more of a business meeting then a reporter session, but Shawn was great and showed me around and told me all about the place – what I am sharing here is from memory and because I’m honorable I asked if he minded if I shared what I saw and he was all about it.  I think the quote was “we have no secrets.”

I”m very very excited about having McFadden’s at Citi Field.  It will give us Mets fans a place to meet before games and a place to hang after games.   Shawn even floated the idea of watching the last two innings of a blowout on the TV feeds in the bar…I can totally see it.  They’ll have the SNY feed and the raw in-house feed that you see at the concession stands.

The bar is on 126th street, to the right of the bullpen entrance, and the space is very big.  Surprisingly so.  I asked what was there before.  Nothing.  Shawn said there’s similar space on the other side of the stadium (I believe he  meant the right field side but I might be wrong).

When you come in they’ll make an educated guess about where to send you – so when I show up with Mrs. Mets Police and the kids, they’ll profile us toward the tables – and when three 28 year olds in black Franco jerseys show up they’ll be pointed to the bar.  Makes sense to me!

Although it somehow got in my head that they’d have batting cages, Shawn mentioned that they might do pitching games instead.  If I owned the place I would go for the option that omits bats.  Either way it sounds like fun.

As I spent time in the huge unfinished space, I could totally envision the possibilities beyond game day.  I lived in Queens for a long long time, and I could see McFadden’s being a great place to gather for a big road game, or even just to hang if you didn’t have tickets for a playoff game.

Now on to the pictures – you’re going to look at the unfinishedness and wonder how they’ll be done in time.  Relax.  Ever remodel your kitchen?  It’s amazing what construction guys can do in two days.

Thanks to Ben (metsiesandothermusings.blogspot.com) for two of those pictures.

Some answers to questions that came up when I mentioned I made a trip to Citi Field:

• no David Howard did not have coffee with me.
• I did not see a blue outfield fence.  I wasn’t inside-inside, but I think a blue fence would have been reported by now.  In theory there could be a yellow fence or no fence at all.
• I was not inside the Mets museum.  I openly would love to be invited to the sneak preview of that.

I’ll have more about McFadden’s very soon.  In the meantime, sign up for the Blue Cap Army if you haven’t.  It’s helpful for meetings like this if I have an actual quantifiable number of “followers” – hopefully some cool BCA announcements soon, a website for it, and I did set up the twitter @bluecaparmy.

Media Goon, who is much better at taking photos than I am, sent this over.  I like it a lot.  Fred, Jeff and Dave: ditch the black and go blue in 2011.  There’s money to be made.

I wanna go to bed but there’s so much blogging to do – I have been procrastinating on the St. Patrick’s day gear, I gotta get cracking.

In the morning  – pictures from McFadden’s Citi Field.

Ben who has his own Mets related blog at metsiesandothermusings.blogspot.com was kind enough to send over some of his photos from Citi Field on Monday, and I added one more of my own –  the man at the ticket window.  It’s a funny shot of one guy buying tickets but let’s be fair…it was 6pm.

I forgot to mention my reaction when I got off the subway. The main staircase was closed, so I had to take the “normal subway station” one on the left as you exit. I wasn’t really thinking, and walked down those side stairs like I have done hundreds of time and I looked up to see Shea and there was nothing there! The emptiness caught me by surprise! I don’t know if my brain expected Shea or thought Citi was further over or what….anyway Citi was over on the right.