It’s almost March 15 and I don’t really have much to say. I expect to get into full blogging gear after I visit Citi Field for the first time on March 29, but this year I just don’t have much to say before the season starts. This is to some degree an effect of the past two years. When you have two seasons in a row where you don’t know if the Mets are going to the playoffs after 161 games, you might feel silly expressing an opinion about going to the playoffs before a single game is played. This isn’t stopping others from offering such speculations and I recommend that you check out my colleagues in the blogosphere if you want informed speculation about filling the fifth spot in the rotation.
I’m also backing away from the keyboard for the time being because the really big Mets news is the opening of the new stadium. I don’t want to say much before hand, because I want to go into this entirely fresh. Regular readers of my blog know the struggle I have gone through to accept the physical destruction of Shea. But it is now time to give Citi Field an opportunity to win me over. I’m not going to try to guess how my relationship is going to develop with the new place because I honestly have no idea how I am going to respond to it.
One thing I do know already is that Citi Field appears to be more complicated than Shea, when it comes to buying tickets. Instead of a field level and three decks split into reserve seats and boxes numbered in such a way that you know exactly what you’re going to get when you see the ticket, we are now going to have a myriad of clubs, terraces, porches, boxes, and even an alley and an orchard. We have Olympic-style metals to tell us just how good our seats are, and there are even a few sponsors’ names to designate new and at this point mysterious regions. It will be interesting to see who’s the first person to claim that they have sat in every part of the new stadium.
Since it is almost March 15, I will say that one part of the stadium that particularly amuses me is the Caesars Club. Caesars Palace in Atlantic City is a highly visible sponsor of Citi Field and so they get to put their name on some of the best and most expensive seats in the new stadium. Forgive me, but Caesars Club sounds like the kind of place where you’d sit and watch Christians getting fed to the lions. You’d figure that given all that the Romans are known to have done in stadiums, they’d have avoided Roman connotations in names. But as Fred Wilpon pointed out to the New York Times, “In this economy, you don’t turn down sponsors,” Wilpon said. “Anyone who’s willing to pay. …” Fair enough. But I’d like to know what parts of the stadium are up for naming rights if Viagra comes by with their checkbook. The same Times article points out that Caesars Club has already been booked for bar mitzvahs. Okay. Take that, Romans, for destroying the Second Temple.
So, it’s two more weeks and one day before I have the opportunity to figure out where the hell my baseline boxes are. And I have to find our brick. How weird will it be to go to a game in Flushing and have no idea what you’re going to see, think, or feel?
