May 18th, 2007
New York Mets vs. NY Yankees
Mets win 3-2 Pics
Here
Day 1. After
much anticipation, publicity, planning, and anxiousness, we finally went to the
first game of our 75 day, 22,000 mile, 30 stadium road trip. As Yankee
fans, we were all geared up in Yankee jerseys, hoping they would at least win
one game for us tonight. That didn't happen, but we still had a great
time...
We left home today with our GPS system [we named her
Darlene], and our radar detector [named Willy], and they guided us successfully
to Shea Stadium in Queens, NY.
We did have some traffic, but we
still managed to get a decent parking space, in a wooded area, on the grass,
outside of Shea. We got a cop to take our picture outside the stadium, then
we went in to take pictures from a lot of different angles. Since we've
been to Shea already, this wasn't a novel experience. But we still felt like we
were on a road trip, taking pictures of everything, paying attention to the
stadium architecture, nature of the fans, food, scoreboard, and field appearance. Shea isn't the nicest stadium, to say the least [check out
our ratings in the stats section]. But, Met fans are some of
the most knowledgeable and passionate of all baseball fans. It pains us
to say this, but we have to give credit where credit is due. The Mets are
also an exciting team to watch this year; the Yankees... ugh. At least
the first home run hit for our fund [2 were hit by the way] was by a struggling
Hideki Matsui.
Pettitte started out shaky, but calmed down to pitch a
pretty nice game. 7 innings, 3 runs... you would expect a $200 million
team to be able to score enough to give him the win. Oliver Perez thought
otherwise, as Neal said throughout "they make all lefties look like Sandy
Koufax this year." He got the win after going 7 2/3 innings and only
giving up 5 hits and 2 runs.
We sat directly behind home plate, but it was the second
to last row in the whole stadium. Nice perspective, but still very far...
so we moved in the middle of the 6th. We went to sit with Alon's cousin David
Mass. Since we were keeping score [and we will do this every game, along with
getting a beer, eating a hot dog, buying a program, and a sticker for our
sign], we needed to run down so that we didn't miss a pitch... but since Shea
stadium is so confusing, we ended up having to run all the way down to the
ground level, and then come back up to the loge level. This impacted its
architectural ratings, as you will see... and we unfortunately missed one
batter. At least we got some good exercise.
The game was great, from a baseball standpoint, though it
was extremely short [thankfully, since it was frigid outside]... 2 hours, 18
minutes. 56,337 people in attendance [98.1% full].
After the game, we got out pretty quickly, which was good considering the attendance. We stopped off at Shop Rite to get a cooler and beer for tomorrow's Preakness Stakes at Pimlico Park, in Baltimore, MD. See you all there!
