I love trains. And subways. More than you would think for someone who has lived in west coast suburbs his whole life.
Amtrak brought me from Philadelphia to Penn Station (well, the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Train Hall, to be precise,) and then a short C train subway ride to the West Side YMCA on the west side of Central Park.
After checking in and a short rest, two more subway rides (you don’t even need an MTA card anymore, just Apple Pay at the turnstiles) brought me to Citi Field, the Mets Stadium built in 2009 out in Queens.
And it was raining buckets.
But after hanging out under the subway overhang for 20 minutes, the sky cleared, and I made my way to Tom Seaver’s statue.
This is a nice ballpark, and the ease of walking from the subway and the grand entrance are striking. There’s a nice Mets museum (snapped a photo of Willie Mays for my dad) and a Jackie Robinson quote engraved above the entrance doors: “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”
Like most of the new style parks, there’s a plaza/terrace for gathering out in the outfield. Food options have been the best so far. More kids’ stuff than Camden Yards, but less than Citizens Bank Park in Philly. The Mets also have a wiffle ball field for the kids that I would have drooled over as a 10 year old.
Do you see me in the wiffle ball picture? There’s the big screen on the outside of the real stadium in the background, but down low there’s a scoreboard for the wiffle ball stadium, and it’s got a camera tuned to the batter’s box. For me, you just see me taking the picture; but a kid would see themselves up on the scoreboard as they swung the bat!
And that theme of scoreboards and camera and technology is my big takeaway from the stadium here. The view doesn’t have much of a skyline, so instead they have chosen to go all in on screens. The scoreboard is HUGE, and very high resolution and quality. And, there are little screens along every line of the park, covering it, and all very well coordinated with graphics that make the whole stadium feel alive with virtual visuals. It’s like sitting inside a television with the best graphics team at work the whole time.
It’s very well done for what it is. But I’ll risk sounding like an old curmudgeonly purist and say it wasn’t my favorite. It feels like it is the signature thing for this park, and if you like it, you’ll love the park.
After talking for years about meeting up somewhere for a baseball game, Mikayla and I finally did it! She is family to us for years, after being assigned as Natalie’s locker partner at the beginning of sixth grade. We were UHaul partners, taking turns driving all of Natalie and Nolan’s stuff to Philly, and this was just pure fun.
My childhood team the Giants took a 1-0 lead, and then fell behind 5-1. A rally made it close at 5-4, but the Mets closed it out with a 8-4 victory. It is a nice stadium!
It’s funny thinking back about the technology process on my last 2007 baseball tour. I would take the pictures on my camera flip phone, email them to a special Flickr address that uploaded the pic to my account. Then I would use a program called Ecto to write the blog post, which integrated with another program called 1001, which pulled the pictures from Flickr and shoved them in the blog post, and then finally uploaded to the blog. There literally was no way of conceiving doing it all from your phone, or without a wifi connection.
Now people sit in the stadium watching one game in person, while streaming another game on their phone, while posting selfies and TikTok’s for all the world to see.
Tonight I visit the new Yankees Stadium (by myself, sadly) and then it’s time to begin the journey back to Philly and then home.
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