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:
- Amazing crowd, over 44,000, which was the second largest regular season crowd in Mets history.
- 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.
- The Elevators & Escalators were all working properly, and on-time, which was a big plus.
- The ballpark still looks pristine and is in perfect condition, which is pretty good for a ballpark that is almost ten years old.
- The staff was very happy and very pleasant, which they always are.
- 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:
- Michael Conforto wasn’t introduced, someone’s going to be in trouble over that.
- 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.)
- The Citi Vision board wasn’t displaying the correct statistics, if they were showing them at all.
- The audio of the PA, at least at my section, was almost in-audible.
- Neha Joy and her other female host’s microphone wasn’t working through many segments.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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