Thursday Applesauce

Raises some good points about the new stadium, but parts of it definitely rubbed me the wrong way too.

Citi Field will hold about 42,000 fans, 15,000 fewer than Shea. The park is enclosed and many seats wrap around the outfield, so it feels much cozier than Shea’s open-ended bowl, which favored watching football.

“Cozier” is good, I guess, but 15,000 fewer seats is just blatantly manipulating supply and demand to drive prices up and there are going to be a LOT of people who can’t find tickets when the team is good (e.g., now).

During an extensive tour of Citi Field on Tuesday, Jeff Wilpon, the team’s chief operating officer, spoke in the Acela Club, a restaurant in left field that will have 550 seats, table service, a bar and wine cabinets for frequent patrons.

"There’s all this light and air, and then you’re looking back at the field," Wilpon said. "We want to make people feel they’re in a living room."

WTF? What’s wrong with feeling like you’re in a baseball stadium?

The seats throughout the stadium are angled toward the center of the infield, reducing the need for fans, particularly on the field level, to crane their necks toward home plate.

Unequivocally a good thing and corrects one of the worst flaws of Shea.

Sitting in their seats, few fans will see the chop shops in Willets Point, the cars roaring past on the Van Wyck Expressway, the subway yards to the south or the U-Haul sign. They will still get a crystal-clear view of the planes on their final approach to La Guardia Airport. Some things never change.

Did anyone really care about that stuff? It’s a city, what’s so bad about seeing city things? Though personally I still think my idea to put the Mets new stadium on the Red Hook waterfront was a better idea if you wanted a nice view.

Citi Field has many nooks and crannies that are nothing like Shea’s tired symmetry. The grandstand that hangs over right field, for instance, was inspired by the old Tiger Stadium, which Wilpon visited with his grandparents as a child. Fans in center field will get a bull’s-eye view of the bullpens, with Aaron Heilman only in the visitors’ half, which is on a slightly raised level, with some protection from fan saliva.

Why are contrived quirks any better than symmetry? Why is symmetry “tired”? Old Yankee Stadium has a symmetric outfield, and new Yankee Stadium has the exact same layout, yet I bet the NYT would describe it as “classic” if they were writing about the Yankees.

Going for food or a bathroom break will be a lot easier. The concourses are far wider, bathrooms are more numerous and beer drinkers will not have to wander far for a microbrew.

Wider concourses are absolutely a good thing. Better selection of beers is good (though I’m going to guess that there will still be a number of concession stands that still only have cheap beer). “Bathrooms are more numerous” is something of a distortion though; there are a lot more women’s restrooms and family restrooms, but actually fewer men’s restrooms. (That’s mitigated by there being fewer people, of course.)

The chance of a plumbing malfunction has also been reduced: the Mets have installed waterless urinals, an eco-friendly touch.

That’s cool.

The walk from the subway station to Citi Field’s front entrance will take about as long as it took to reach Gate E at Shea, but an acre of planters, trees and other landscaping will usher fans to the new park’s brick exterior and ornate rotunda named for Jackie Robinson.

I’m getting bored of this exercise. It just seems like there’s been plenty of needless Shea-bashing over the years and this is just more of the same.