Tag Archives: mets

Baseball, Pointless Nostalgia

Shea Shea, Blown Away, What More Do I Have to Say?

Pour some criminally overpriced Bud Lite on the curb tonight for Shea Stadium, which officially ceased to exist earlier this morning.

I’ll miss the dump, don’t get me wrong. I saw my first baseball game there, and saw some incredible games there (both in the good and bad senses of the word), but I am more than ready to see games at Bernie Madoff Field.

My only fear is that the fan experience won’t be enhanced at all. Because the aesthetic deficiencies of Shea were only part of the reason why it was not a great place to watch a game. You judged your game-going experience by how few things went wrong. It was a successful day if your beer wasn’t 90% foam, or if you didn’t watch a vendor sigh and huff because you asked them for a pretzel.

Sure, the new ballpark is supposed to have spiffy restaurants, games for the kiddies, and other neat amenities. But that won’t mean much if said amenities are run by the same incompetent, apathetic morons who ran Shea’s concessions.

It’s not that I need extra bells and whistles to enjoy a game. I’d watch the Mets in the middle of an active volcano if that’s where they played. However, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that, when you pay a lot of money to enter a ballpark, your customer service experience should never be described by words like “insane,” “frustrating,” and “ordeal.”

If you want a glimpse as to how the Mets treat their fans, look no further than Jason of Faith and Fear and Flushing, and the condition of the genuine Shea seats he ordered. That’s how the team treats treasured memorabilia bought by loyal fans at $869 a pop. You can extrapolate from there how they treat folks who spend a mere $15-20 dollars for a hot dog and a beer.

Baseball

The Metrics of Met Fans

As I’ve noted before, the MLB Network has done a pretty good job so far, particularly with their Hot Stove show. But that program annoyed and disappointed me last night when host Matt Vasgersian brought up the subject of the Mets and how they can’t “buy a headline” right now and how the Yankees have been dominating the back pages.

He queried ex-Met-and-Yankee Al Leiter on the subject, and the ol’ lefty insisted that New York is a National League town. This brought stunned, laugh-filled reactions from the assembled host: Vasgersian, Harold Reynolds, and recently retired first baseman/molasses imitator Sean Casey.

The other guys on the show had no counter-argument. They probably didn’t think they needed one. Just the notion that NY was an NL town, to them, was so ridiculous that it didn’t warrant a rebuttal.

jacket.jpgI don’t agree with Mr. Leiter that NY is an NL town. It’s a baseball town. And within that universe, there is enough room for large, rabid fan bases for two teams. There are more Yankee fans than Mets fans (26 championships and a 60-year head start will do that), but to paint the Mets as some poor widdle stepsister is ludicrous.

Continue reading The Metrics of Met Fans →

Baseball

The Talented Mr. Silver, You’ve Done it Again

Nate Silver’s predictions for the 2009 baseball season are here, and they predict the Mets will win 93 games and the NL East crown.

Now, I am way too superstitious and emotionally traumatized by the last three seasons to make anything remotely close to a prediction about the upcoming season. But I would like to point out that when we last heard from Mr. Silver, he predicted the outcome of the Presidential and Congressional elections spot-on.

Actually, calling it spot-on would be understating the case. More like, he came as close to calling the exact results as you can without a crystal ball.

So I’ll just say the man’s math needs to be respected, and we’ll leave it at that.