G-Fafif

Duda...he got great wood on that homer. We're talking about batting, right?

There is a season, turn, turn...Turner in for Murph. Collin Cowgill � CF Justin Turner � 2B David Wright � 3B Ike Davis � 1B Marlon Byrd � RF Lucas Duda � LF John Buck � C Ruben Tejada � SS Dillon Gee � RHP

Harvey 4.0 Duda 2.0 Buck 2.0 Davis 2.0

Niese to Harvey to Gee...the Padres' sad lexicon.

Another satisfying nine innings at Citi Field, albeit another nine degrees in the stands. But when Harvey is on, it's balmy as all get out. Beautiful young man.

Speak of the devil: Jason and I generate warts-and-all enthusiasm for Citi Field on Yahoo! Sports Big League Stew here. Faith and Fear in Flushing welcomes you to our home ballpark, Citi Field. It took us five seasons, but we can now pronounce its corporate moniker without unconsciously (or otherwise) tripping over our tongues and instinctively referring to it as Shea Stadium. Shea � whose former parking lot provided the space for the current facility � will probably always remain psychic headquarters from a New York Mets State of Mind standpoint, but we�re comfortable at last with what this place is called and, more importantly, what this place is. It is indeed our home. Yes, it lays on the Ebbets effect a little too eerily out front. And it did come off upon its opening in 2009 as about a dozen years late to the Camden Yards wannabe party. It has also yet to host anything remotely evocative of 1969 or 1986. But it has grown on us even as its team-in-residence has made us groan over four postseason-less campaigns. We have fun here. You might, too, if you care to act on some of our blog-tested, fan-approved suggestions. [...] And once you�ve been wanded/patted down and your ticket�s been scanned, pause for a moment and consider Mr. Robinson�s contribution to baseball and America, if not the Mets directly...it�s a sore spot for many Mets fans that their signature foyer is dedicated to a Brooklyn Dodger, but we do our best to big-picture this detail.

Taking on Clayton Richard and the cold: Collin Cowgill � CF Daniel Murphy � 2B David Wright � 3B Ike Davis � 1B Marlon Byrd � RF Lucas Duda � LF John Buck � C Ruben Tejada � SS Matt Harvey � RHP

George Vecsey shares an e-mail from 1964 one-season wonder Bill Wakefield on what it was like to wake up at brand new Shea Stadium. �We were staying at the Travelers Inn as a team,� Bill wrote. �Rod Kanehl took me out the night before and we went to Toots Shor�s, and Howard Cosell came up and said, �Runner Rod, how are you?� and I thought, �Wow, this is the Big Leagues � better than Tulsa. �We then took separate cabs back to the Travelers. I was late going to breakfast and I remember Rod telling me, �I thought somebody had taken you to Brooklyn and I�d never see the rookie again. I�m glad you�re here for breakfast.� �I had a one-day pay check from the Mets. 1st and the 15th. I think it was around $160. I cashed it � in NYC � cash in my pocket. This is the life.� �Game against the Pirates. Saw buddies from college along the stands in right field. Hickman looking at the stands and asking me, �Are we good enough to play here?� �As Chris Cannizzaro used to do before opening day � he went around the entire clubhouse, shook hands with all 25 players and said, �Have a good year.� You, too.� Don'tcha just want to roll around in those images for a while?

Benjamin Grimm wrote: I was in Promenade Reserved section 512, almost directly behind home plate. It's a pretty nice place from which to watch the game, and it's very convenient to the food court that's atop the rotunda. And they're among the cheapest seats in the park, too. Agreed that you can't do much better than roughly 512-517 if you don't mind knowing you can't duck in to a club during a rain delay or cold snap.

batmagadanleadoff wrote: G-Fafif wrote: mark against this enterprise. Plus with three video boards available, none was showing balls in play when you needed them to. Anyway, Cowgill's ball was a homer, to my surprise. Which was great (I loved watching him leg it out just in case), but it would've been nice to have seen it from my seat as it was happening, even on a screen. Of course it would've been nice to see it on the field. Otherwise, the point of attending is diminshed. No doubt. I thought the third screen, installed in August of the first season, was a reasonable fix to an unreasonable flaw. But on OD it wasn't doing its thing.

Emotional attachment to Shea aside, I think if Citi Field came along more or less as was in the late '90s or thereabouts (save for the lousy obstructed views and some other unfortunate drawbacks), I would have greeted it more warmly than I did in 2009. BML cites Coors Field. Coors Field was novel in 1995, when it opened, the fourth of the Retro models. The early 2000s comers seemed to improve on that generation whereas Citi Field felt like a design left in the drawer right around then and dusted off when they got the funding approved a decade later. I really do believe the Wilpons, Katz, Dave Howard, whoever just assumed having Not Shea would be enough to make their fans and customers (particularly their high-end customers) swoon in unison.

One thing they never addressed well and may not be able to is how much of the field one misses from too many seats -- an old gripe but a relevant one if you were sitting in left field Promenade, down the third base line, and tried to watch Collin Cowgill's extra base hit on Monday. Is it out? Is it in? What happened? You are just cut off from too much, which I've learned to roll with, except earlier in the game, when I'd dropped by a friend who was also sitting upstairs but basically behind home plate, I marveled at how much better the view of the field was. Not different, better. Not for panoramic reasons, but for baseball. How they couldn't get the geometry to work in so much of the park is the functional black mark against this enterprise. Plus with three video boards available, none was showing balls in play when you needed them to. Anyway, Cowgill's ball was a homer, to my surprise. Which was great (I loved watching him leg it out just in case), but it would've been nice to have seen it from my seat as it was happening, even on a screen. Then they cut the replay short (perhaps to discourage the Padres from arguing...though it was the right call, I could confirm after the game) and then, when they did the Delta promo wherein a kid gets an autographed ball from the player who just homered, we saw Cowgill swing and we saw Delta featured but not the actual home run fly over the wall. As the 10-year-old girl sitting behind me observed, "they won't show us the home run but we get to see an airplane."

Jay Caspian Kang in Grantland appreciates Dodgers Stadium, but includes a passage that I think nails a couple of other parks pretty well. Since 1992, when Camden Yards in Baltimore ushered in a new era of stadium design, nearly every ballpark in America has been built under the same principle � old-timey knickknacks like manual scoreboards get stapled onto a gleaming hulk of scalable, corporatized concrete and metal because nostalgia is a powerful purchasing device and drives fans to buy all sorts of useless stuff, from miniature bats to the now-$8 hot dogs they ate when they were kids. This is not to say that every ballpark built in the past 20 years is some horrific monstrosity that callously manipulates our most tender memories, but I do think we pay a psychic toll whenever we access nostalgia through a modern, corporatized avenue. [...] When I lived in New York, my friend Eric and I went to dozens of Mets day games at Shea Stadium.1 The Mets were unreasonably bad back then, trotting out some combination of Cliff Floyd, Mike Piazza, and a bunch of Triple-A players. But Shea Stadium was a comfy old heap that fit the team's personality. Citi Field, which opened in 2009, is a different sort of dump: the most cynical ballpark in the major leagues, complete with a Jackie Robinson rotunda (Robinson, of course, never played for the Mets), silly constructions like "the Great Wall of Flushing" and the Shea Bridge, a faux-industrial walkway modeled off the Hell Gate Bridge that connects Astoria and Randall's Island. There is a history of New York in Citi Field, but the same could be said about the New York-New York Casino in Las Vegas. When you go to a Mets game now, you're not so much reminded of the past or Shea Stadium as much as you're reminded of corporate strategy. It's a horrible place. I know the typical response here is to talk about the need for luxury boxes and modern amenities and walkways that make any sort of sense. And if you're a Wilpon or if you're the sort of person who needs to watch a baseball game from inside a luxury box, I'm sure you see the necessary evils of Citi Field. But if you're one of the millions of people for whom this is neither an option nor a desire, what, exactly, do ballparks like Citi Field offer other than efficient escalators and better garlic fries? I'll strike an old refrain here: Given the amount of money coming into baseball teams through television revenue and the always-escalating price of tickets, why would the average fan ever care about the fiscal viability of a ballpark? And for those who would argue that the next generation of kids will connect with a place like Citi Field and create their own memories, let me say that not everything is quite so relative. Everyone loses from corporate cynicism � Shea Stadium might have been a dump, but it was, at least, a colorful dump. I made my peace with Citi Field once they turned the outfield walls blue and human-scale. It's no longer on trial in my mind. The probationary period is over. I bought in, it's my ballpark. But the Wilponian cynicism, as Kang expressed it, remains baked in.

The one thing we will not have to tell Matt Harvey tonight is "chill".

Niese 3.0 Cowgill 2.5 Byrd 1.0 Tejada 1.0 Buck 1.0 Wright 1.0 Rice 0.5

Literally, a playoff atmosphere.

Good seeing Lundy (second year in a row, I believe) and many others. Only down note to whole beautiful day was overzealous security guard who reinforced for me the folly of Jordany Valdespin not wearing a cup at the ballpark. Because with this guard on duty, you really needed one. No kidding. Very strange. My theory is with two openers happening at once, they had to bring in non-ballpark types who were probably not given proper instructions. I'm pretty familiar with the friskers and wanders where I enter and this guy was a new face/pair of hands. Or maybe he was just happy to see me.

Lupica misplaced Ojeda's hedge-trimming mishap by a year. It was 1988. Perhaps Christie conflated all the bad stuff into one run-on anecdote and Lupica was so taken by the governor's charms that he didn't fact-check.

It's going to be cold and I'm going to be there as Matt Harvey's high heat looks to burn some underknown Friars.

I'm in for stupid Cubs.

Should you see Filip Bondy's throat is on fire, please hesitate to urinate down it lest it be extinguished. Even when he's pretending to be nice, he's a world-class MFY dick.

Johan Santana threw a perfect game? Time out, New York, indeed! Years ago TONY did a story on NY baseball history and informed its readers that the Baltimore Orioles moved to New York in the early part of the century and became the New York Giants. So there ya go.

New reality show, Anybody Here Can Play This Game, that promises one lucky fan a chance to be a New York Mets outfielder. You'd be foolish not to try out.

Turner pronounced fiddle-fit. Lutz optioned to Triple-A.

Projected Padre lineup: Chris Denorfia RF Everth Cabrera SS Carlos Quentin LF Yonder Alonso 1B Jedd Gyorko 2B Nick Hundley C Cody Ransom 3B Cameron Maybin CF Edinson Volquez RHP