I went to Citi Field to see a game on April 27. I had, essentially, two experiences. One was awful and one was wonderful.
Approaching Citi Field by car from the Whitestone Expressway, getting off at the Northern Boulevard exit, I saw once again that one of the minor disappointments I will probably just have to get used to is that Citi Field doesn’t look so great when it is approached from the way in which I will always approach it. It just looks like a big billboard. It has no charm and none of Shea’s grandeur. Citi Field does look great approached from the subway or LIRR. I parked and will probably plan to park in the future in the lot across Roosevelt Avenue. The stadium is very impressive approached from that direction and, as I was to discover later, all lit up after a game it looks like dynamite.
So I crossed Roosevelt Avenue, said hello to my family’s brick and then entered the rotunda. One thing I noticed is that there wasn’t any hospitality agent preventing people from using one of the two central escalators. This remained true throughout the evening. The Mets may have wisely determined that there was no need to segregate fans in the Robinson rotunda. With both escalators being used by all fans, long lines did not form. Everything was smooth, efficient, and democratic. Yes, there still was a special smaller escalator to the Sterling Level but this is perfectly all right because the Sterling Level doesn’t connect to anything else.
The awful experience I had was trying to go to batting practice. I’d been going to batting practice as a kid, and later, with my kid, at Shea stadium since 1964. It was always a spectacularly wonderful experience. I write about it a lot in my upcoming book, The Last Days of Shea. At Shea, if you got there two and a half hours before the game, you could go right down to the area behind the Mets dugout and watch the Mets close up as they stood around and talked and joked and did their stuff. You could see that there really was a person named David Wright who looked exactly like his pictures and who liked to horse around with a person named Jose Reyes who looked exactly like his pictures too. They weren’t just the indistinct guys people saw from the Upper Deck whom you could tell apart by their uniforms. They weren’t the stars you saw on your television. They were a couple of always surprisingly young men hanging out while Carlos Delgado was taking his swings. The atmosphere at batting practice was always wonderful at Shea People would be taking pictures with all sorts of phones and cameras. People would call out for a wave from players or from “Mr. Minaya” or even “Mr. Horowitz.” You got to see photo ops, reporters, special guests. You felt that you were behind the scenes. If you looked up and around, you could see Howie Rose, Gary Cohen, or Ron Darling bent over papers, getting ready for the game in their little boxes above a frieze that said “Believe Magic Amazin’ Miracle Believe Magic.” People talked to each other and then there would occasionally be a flurry of excitement when a player, usually a bench player or a pitcher would come on over and sign a few autographs. For the most part, though, the ballplayers concentrated on their own tasks. They were doing enough by letting us get so near to them. We stood back respectfully and enjoyed our privileged proximity. When we were told that batting practice was over, we trooped out and went up to our real seats.
Batting practice at Citi Field is nothing like this. It is crap. No one who doesn’t have an actual ticket to a seat between sections 110 and 125 can get any closer to the action than section 110 on the first base side and section 125 on the third base side. Guys in green jackets stand watch over all of the aisles leading to the field from the concourse. A few of them are stationed along the flanks of the protected seat area. They look, with tireless vigilance, over at the straggly little crowd standing around in section 110. If anybody tries to advance into the protected area to get a better camera angle, they are quickly and sharply informed of their transgression. On Monday night (4/27), two hours before the game, there was almost no one in the vast and tightly guarded area of the field level behind home plate between first and third base. There were just long banks of empty seats, except for about five people, including two kids with gloves, standing right behind the Mets dugout. In section 110, I stood with the rest of the people who had come early for batting practice. I recognized a lot of these people from Shea. We could see nothing. The players were at a considerable distance from us and the sun was shining directly into our eyes. We just stood around, shading our eyes, bored, disgruntled, and looking wistfully over at the rows of empty areas behind both dugouts. I saw a kid with a mitt looking over at the kids with the mitts behind the dugout with the same look on his face as you see on the face of the hungry kid watching the rich kid eating his spaghetti in Vittorio De Sica’s great film The Bicycle Thief. It made me sick to my stomach. I felt as if we were in something like a holding pen. I didn’t feel as I had always felt at Shea, as if I was welcome in the bosom of my stadium, welcome to be so close to my heroes.
After standing around for awhile, I noticed that Matt Hoey was leaving his spot in the front row of the holding pen and was walking back up to the concourse. Matt is one of the diehard Mets fans featured in Mathematically Alive, the guy who was always first on line to buy single tickets when they went on sale at the ballpark. He’s always easy to recognize at a ballgame because he’s very tall and always wears a well-autographed blue and orange “Cat in the Hat” type hat. I stopped Matt and asked him how he felt about all of this. He looked back at the field and said, “I feel bad for the little kids. You can hardly see who the players are.” When I said that I didn’t understand why the Mets didn’t just let people go into the areas behind the dugouts the way they always used to, Matt said, “Yeah, it makes no sense. I’m not going to stop loving them or anything, but it doesn’t make any sense.” He’s not going to stop loving them or anything. This is the kind of fan this is being done to. I really cannot believe the Mets intended to do this. But somebody didn’t think something out very carefully. When I complained to a supervisor of the guys in green jackets, he gave me an e-mail address to write and complain to. I’m going to write to this guy and see if anything can be done. If this is what Mets batting practice is going to be for the rest of my life, then trust me, it will not be worth going to. It will become one more reason to miss Shea desperately. There should be no good reasons to miss Shea desperately except obvious and sentimental ones. If there are going to be objective ways in which Shea offered a much better experience of baseball, then something is wrong. I’m hoping that they just have to realize the effect this rule has on people. I’m hoping they will make it right.
So I went over and ate my dinner by the old Home Run Apple. If you ever feel disillusioned, if you ever wonder why the hell you are still a Mets fan, just go to that area and watch the people taking pictures in front of the Apple. It will restore your faith in the human race, and it will show you why you still love the Mets.
The wonderful experience I had at the ballpark was the game and boy is it great to say that. I had a $15 ticket in Promenade 515 and that was just fine. The crowd up there was filled with all kinds of people and everybody was loud, rowdy, fun, and generous. I felt like I was in Shea and that is the highest compliment I can give to Citi Field at the moment. The game was a gem and filled with all sorts of wonderful pleasures. An unhittable John Maine. A catcher hitting his first home run that turns out to be the first grand slam hit at Citi Field. Sheffield redeems his error. Daniel Murphy hits a triple. David Wright hits a triple. Everybody hits a triple! The bullpen shuts it down and Frankie Rodriguez strikes out batters on change-ups that nobody nowhere no-how can hit. There is still the new annoyance of the never-ending wave. There is still the offensiveness of “Sweet Caroline,” which is a dud in the crowd, but they make it look good by putting the one or two people dancing to it up on the screen. I’m still getting used to the light, to a lot of the stadium being in shadow, to a kind of spooky glare that is very different from the green-yellow brilliance of Shea. But I realized, as I watched a wonderful Mets game with a crowd that was into it, that what we will ultimately feel about Citi Field will depend on what the Mets do here. This place could win us over real quick if the Mets 1) tweaked some things that need to be tweaked (more of our history, access to batting practice, opening up access to the clubs and restaurants to everybody after the fancy people have gotten their first shot, bringing back rituals, colors, and totems that reminds us of Shea and the 45 years we spent there) and if the Mets 2) relax, get used to the space, and start winning as many games as they have the talent to win. After the game ended, I walked out of my section to the common area of the Promenade and over the top of the food stands I saw Queens and the Unisphere beautifully illuminated. I missed my ramps but the feeling on the stairs was fun. As I left the stadium, I visited the brick once again and walking towards Roosevelt Avenue, I looked back on an illuminated building with genuine style and glamour. The Mets are still here. We’re still here. We’re still in Queens. It can happen.
Hi – I completely agree with you about the things that the Mets could do that would help make Citi Field more like home. I would love to see photos of Mets highlights through the last 46 years everywhere at Citi Field. I’d love to see a wall of team photos from 1962 to the present and photos of memorable moments big & small.
Allowing everyone access to batting practice seems essential to me for a lot of reasons. Are you willing to share the name of the person that you were told to email by the supervisor so that other people can write to him?
I guess the good news is that there are a lot of great new things about Citi Field. Now we just need some of the old things from Shea to help connect the two.
Funny, the area you were sitting in is right near my season-ticket seats and I had the same feeling about the crowd there. It was almost like the Promenade deck feels like home and the rest of the stadium is an amusement park that you visit. I also find that I too have started a Citifield ritual of visiting my family’s brick as I come in and saying good-bye to it as I leave. I like that ritual and thankfully our brick is centrally located so it’s a nice and easy ritual to keep.
Just to clarify from earlier posts, the “exclusive” escalators were always the ones to the Sterling level – never the big ones in the middle. I still don’t think it’s ok though – it’s literally right in the middle of all the quotes from Jackie Robinson about inclusion and breaking down barriers. They should have put their exclusive entrance somewhere else.
I wonder if part of the reason that they’re restricting BP in that area is that those are the prime, expensive seats – that are mostly unsold. Thus, if you don’t skeedadle after BP, no one will come and kick you out b/c no one has bought a tix for that seat. So you could buy a promenade tix and end up sitting in an expensive seat. Of course, they could just check the tix after BP and toss all those who don’t have the prime seats.
Subie, I had read on a couple of blogs (certainly The Eddie Kranepool Society) that at some point at least one of the two main escalators was dedicated just for people with certain tickets. This is what appalled me. The Sterling level is not such a big deal because you have to get up there somehow and the escalators don’t take you anywhere you could go with an ordinary ticket. I still have a problem with so much of the stadium being taken up by exclusive areas. It is a permanent blight on the atmosphere of the stadium, but it was the idea of one of the main escalators being off limits that really seemed offensive.
MetsMom, you may be right, but what does that say? Let them lower the prices of those tickets, sell them, and let the great unwashed go there up to an hour and a half before the game.
Dana, I couldn’t have summed all this up better myself. And I’ve tried. I feel a good post about BP at Shea coming on my blog now. I always liked coming in early and just touching the top of the Mets dugout.
Janie, it looks as if he didn’t write down an e-mail address. He wrote down “Craig Marino” in charge of Guest Relations. I’ll post an e-mail address if I can find it.