"Open" was the first word that came to mind when walking into Citi Field before Saturday's exhibition game. Where Shea Stadium greeted you with a warren of ramps, escalators and assorted industrial detritus, Citi Field spits you right into the action. That choice was a winner by the Mets, as was the decision to cut seating down to 42,000.
Limiting the seating hasn’t made the park cozy, exactly, but it has taken away the vastness that made Shea seem like such an uninviting place unless every seat was filled. The decks are closer together, the concourses provide a steady stream of traffic and there’s just a life to the place that is a welcome change from bygone days.
They’ve even found a way to make being on LaGuardia’s flight path bearable. Planes make their approach behind the two scoreboards in center field, lazily heading toward the ground one after another. It doesn’t sound like much, but when Oliver Perez is walking batter after batter, as he did in his brutal two-thirds of an inning on Saturday, it’s nice to have something to divert your attention.
Not that the stadium lacks for ways to keep you occupied all on its own. The wide concourses funnel fans from food stand to team store to food stand, all of which had long lines on Saturday. The ease of movement and variety of places to go is familiar to anyone who has been to one of the new ballparks in other cities, but for New York fans used to being penned in it will feel something like being released from prison.
In fact, the only reminder of Shea Stadium came when Perez was booed off the mound in the first inning. If visitors to Mets games this season are unconstrained by a stadium, they remain constrained by the past because the wounds are still fresh. And if this year's team rubs salt in those wounds it will get just as ugly inside the beautiful new park as it was in the outdated old one.
Josh Alper is a writer living in New York City and is a contributor to FanHouse.com and ProFootballTalk.com in addition to his duties for NBCNewYork.com.
