2017 Mets Opening Day Recap

Another Opening Day is here! Maybe I’m just extremely lucky, but in the five home opener’s in Citi Field History that I’ve been to (2012, 2013, 2015, 2016 & 2017), the Mets have won them all, so I’m fairly happy.

As I always do, I get really nervous during these Opening games, and today’s game was no exception. I’m not a big fan of the ceremonies, even though they don’t last too long, only because I want the game to start.

When it did start however, I was brought back to the NL Wild Card game, when Noah Syndergaard took down hitter after hitter after hitter. In the seventh inning, Asdrubal Cabrera hit a single up the middle, and Flores scored on a play at the plate that was overturned.

After O’Flaherty blew the game, I was able to calm down, and saw some of our bullpen arms, and Robert Gsellman (which was a nice treat), and the game was sealed.

However since I was at the game, there were a lot of other (mostly non-game) things I noticed that I’m going to highlight here, in a new segment called “Hits & Errors”

First, here are the HITS: 

1. Amazing crowd, over 44,000, which was the second largest regular season crowd in Mets history.
2. The metal detectors, three years after they were supposed to be “mandated” have only been selectively installed, so I still haven’t gone through one.
3. The Elevators & Escalators were all working properly, and on-time, which was a big plus.
4. The ballpark still looks pristine and is in perfect condition, which is pretty good for a ballpark that is almost ten years old.
5. The staff was very happy and very pleasant, which they always are.
6. The Seventh Inning Stretch sequence, Piano Man and Back In The New York Groove remain.

Next, here are the ERRORS, and there are a lot of them:

1. Michael Conforto wasn’t introduced, someone’s going to be in trouble over that.
2. The right field scoreboard wasn’t working until the sixth inning, which prompted them to revert back to the 2016 version of the scoreboard until they could fix the problem. (Personally I prefer the old 2016 version.)
3. The Citi Vision board wasn’t displaying the correct statistics, if they were showing them at all.
4. The audio of the PA, at least at my section, was almost in-audible.
5. Neha Joy and her other female host’s microphone wasn’t working through many segments.
6. There wasn’t an intro montage that I saw, which was odd. When Syndergaard took the mic, the THUN-DER chant didn’t work whatsoever.
7. Have of the games weren’t even playable thanks to the scoreboard glitches, which might have been a good thing, as it provided time to check the out of town scores.
8. The game felt strange without David Wright, a mainstay in the Opening Day lineup.

Finally, I wanted to end this post with a segment that Anthony DiComo used to do on his blog a long time ago, Three Up, Three Down, something that I will do everyday (even if I don’t post about it).

Three Ups: 1) Noah Syndergaard (+1), Lucas Duda (+1), Asdrubal Cabrera (+1)

Three Downs: None Awarded