The Hopp Stop

Trip to Citi Field for a Mets game

Vanessa and I are out in the NY metro area for her older brother's Saturday wedding. She's a big Mets fan (go Jose Reyes!), so we asked the Papa Hopp ticket connection if it could deliver some seats to the Thursday afternoon game between the Mets and the St. Louis Cardinals. Sure enough, he came through with some pimp seats that were 13 rows back of home plate, slightly to the third base side.

I was excited to see Albert Pujols, linchpin of my fantasy team and object of my man-crush, in-person for the first time. Vanessa was excited to wear her new home whites Mets/Jose Reyes jersey. And off we went!

Well, first we had to deal with some great Long Island traffic and difficult parking in Port Washington, such that we jogged from the car to the Long Island Railroad station. But anyway.

Citi Field is a nice stadium with an appealing brick facade. I believe this is supposed to recall Ebbets Field. The historian in me gets a kick out of that, because Robert Moses, master builder of New York, blocked the Dodgers from replacing Ebbets Field in Brooklyn (leading to their departure for LA) and then had Shea Stadium built in Flushing Meadows as part of the World's Fair complex.The main entrance is called the Jackie Robinson Rotunda. Our seats entitled us to take an escalator up to the Sterling Level (ha ha ha) and into the fancy-pants restaurant and bar. Marble bathrooms, plush seats, Stella Artois on tap--is this my fancy health club in San Francisco or a ball park?

As expected, our seats were great, right on top of the field. Citi is one of the several parks in the bigs that have installed additional netting behind home plate--the low nets--to supplement the standard tall net directly behind home plate. The net did not adversely affect our view, so seems like a good call given the screaming liners that can hit the close seats.

In the photo you can see super-plush padding on the seats. Danny Meyer, a big-time NYC restaurateur, is in charge of the food at Citi. I say, good job Danny Meyer, as my pulled pork sandwich was excellent, the fries were crispy good and Vanessa gave a thumbs up to her Shackburger.

We were pleasantly surprised to see that Johan Santana was throwing for the Mets, marking our second time (in two Mets games) that we were treated with an outing by Santana. When we saw him in San Fran, he was not very sharp, and that was how he started out yesterday as well. The key moment in the game was in the second inning, when Pujols came to the plate with two outs, bases loaded and the Redbirds up 1-0. One long fly out later, the Josh Kleinbaum-soundalikes surrounding us were audibly sighing in relief and the best threat of the game for St. Louis had passed. Johan settled down and threw great for the rest of the game.

Tony La Russa did his best to straddle the "manage the hell out of it/over manage it" line, with four pitchers used in the bottom of the 8th. Despite that, the great pitching (Chris Carpenter was outstanding for St. Louis but for one bad inning) meant that the game was over in less than three hours. Good news for my pale skin, as it was very hot when the clouds broke.

And so we departed for Glen Cove with one happy Mets fan and one happy Tigers fan (comeback win for their seventh in a row).

Slideshow from Flickr: