Ballpark experience number three: Queens, NY

Stadium number three on my baseball tour was Citi Field, home of the New York Metropolitans. I had just arrived that morning on an overnight flight from LA, and hadn't had much sleep or rest. Check-in time at the Y was 3pm, so I had heaps of time to wander around...and wander around I did. I spent most of my time is a slight trance (only partly attributable to the dehydration caused by 30+ degree heat). I was in awe of the tall buildings in Brisbane...so the skyscrapers in New York blew my mind. I won't bore you with paragraphs and paragraphs gushing over how awesome New York is. I will bore you will a baseball stadium trip report!

I decided to visit Citi Field that night, despite very little sleep the night before, because Jacob DeGrom was pitching for the Mets. He is young and very good and on my fantasy baseball team. Yay! Plus, the Mets were playing the Rockies (who aren't very good), so I expected some pitching domination and a valuable boost to my team ERA and WHIP for the week.

I took the subway out to Queens and managed to find my way to the stadium (New York's subway system is pretty easy to use). I took this photo while waiting in the security check line to get in:

Yes, I suck at taking pictures, but you get some sense of the scene. Citi Field is a relatively new stadium (opened in 2009), and it looks pretty... it doesn't have a lot of character, but it looks pretty. I had a wander around before I ascended up to my seat in the nosebleed section. I wanted to check out what was on offer food-wise.

Citi Field has a Shake Shack concession stand! Shake Shack only has the most delicious and perfect fast-food burgers known to man. I wanted to get one, but the queues were ludicrously long... I did actually want to see some baseball that evening. I didn't end up getting anything to eat at Citi Field, because I had eaten this pizza for lunch:

It was excellent.

Other than Shake Shack, there wasn't anything particularly compelling to sample at Citi Field. This is New York, there are so many great places to eat. I thought it would be a shame to fill my belly with crappy ballpark food (memories of the Dodger dog were still lurking in the back of my mind)

So I went to my seat and took in  the view:

Not as close to action as my seat in Dodger stadium, and the sun setting in my eyes was slightly annoying (didn't bring my hat cause it was a night game). It was pretty cool sitting there though. There was a family (mom, dad and at least three adult children) sitting behind me, and they had the most awesome accents. They were really getting into the game as well. The mom sounded exactly like Kyle's mother off South Park and she kept exclaiming that she wanted to see the big apple. That is literally a giant apple that rises from an area beyond the centre field fences every time a Met hits a home run (unfortunately we didn't see it that night). You can see where the apple emerges from in this picture:

But yeah, back to the family...I just thought that their conversations and interactions were very sweet; and I sat there with a big grin for most of the night.

The stadium atmosphere was pretty good, but as with the Dodgers, this is to be expected because the Mets are good this year. The singing of "Take me out to the ballpark" was a little disappointing. I think this is because the Mets didn't even replace their name for "home team" in the song (I guess it doesn't work out very well syllable-wise). The crowd in LA yelled "Root root root for the DODGERS!" very loudly, whereas I didn't hear much singing at all from the Mets fans.

I left shortly after the seventh inning and managed to find my way back to Manhattan safely. The Citi Field experience ranks 4th on my list, largely on the strength of the stadium atmosphere (and cute family). It would have been nice if there had been a better selection of food (and shorter queues), but all in all, there was nothing really to complain about. Citi Field was pretty solid in all departments.