Citi Field is the new “state of the art” home of the New York Mets. Last year, Shea Stadium was the home of the Mets. Combine the two and you get “Shiti Field” which is what I’ve affectionately been calling the new stadium.
Ok, so it’s not really shitty. It is, after all, state of the art. But if I was a baseball loving Alien from Mars, dropped into the middle of Citi Field, I’d have no freaking clue who played there.
This month I have been there 3 times. April 4th for an exhibition game against the Red Sox, April 18th against the Brewers and April 26 against the Nationals. I’ve noticed more and more additions to the park since the first game, but barely any are Mets related! (Advertisements, now that’s another story)
The main attraction is the “Jackie Robinson Rotunda” dedicated to the Brooklyn Dodger who broke the color barrier. As a female engineer, I totally get how what he did was HUGE for African Americans and baseball. (As I still get looked down upon only because I’m a girl in the field!) But shouldn’t it perhaps be the Los Angeles Dogders paying tribute to him? Since after all he WAS a Dodger (albeit before the team relocated) Perhaps it wouldn’t be as much of burn if the rest of the stadium actually had Mets memorabilia to balance everything out – or even just more blue and orange.
One of my favorite parts about Shea was the colored seats. It was a heck of a lot easier to remember Orange, Red, Blue and Green. Now all the seats are green. And on top of that – there are like 1800 different sections you could be sitting in. Not just Field, Loge, Mezzanine and Upper Deck. At the last game we came up the escalator and there were arrows pointing which way we had to go – but I had no idea where our seats were! There is so much information crammed on the tickets.
Apparently, the green seats are a ‘shout out’ to the Polo Grounds, where the Mets played when they were first formed. Personally, I think it is cheaper to get seats all of a same generic color. The outfield wall is BLACK and with an orange foul line. Apparently this is a ‘shout out’ to how we got our orange, from the New York Giants. (I’ve also read that they couldn’t figure out how to get a Mets Blue to stick to the material of the outfield wall, which I hope is not true because, this place is STATE OF THE ART!)
A huge FAIL, imo, is all the RED at the stadium. Ticket booths outside say TICKETS in Red and a non-Mets blue. It would have been SO easy to throw together a Mets blue and Orange for these signs. That same blue and red follows into the stadium, as each section marker is a round red and blue plaque. Hello! How freaking simple would it be to make that blue and orange?
At the last game my friend and I (who share similar feelings about the stadium) were talking to one of the ushers. He told us there is a ramp that has Mets players pictures on it. We didn’t go check it out, but I’m pretty sure that this ramp has the back side of the images outside the Left Field entrance. Totally doesn’t count.
He also told us that they were working on adding more Mets stuff. Well, it would have been nice if they worked on the Mets stuff FIRST, since, afterall, that is the team we’re going to see play… and threw in all the Dodgers stuff afterwards.
I already know how we got our colors and where we came from. I want to know where we are GOING. And where we’ve been as METS. Citi Field is a museum to where we came from and how we got here. But that is all in the past. The Mets are here NOW. The Dodgers and the Giants are long gone. Wilpon, get over it already.
(I sat 10 rows behind little wilpon last year at Nationals Park. If I knew then what I know now, you can bet I would have been telling him MORE BLUE AND ORANGE. MORE METS! But who would have thought that something so obvious would be left out!?)
Katie