No Land Grab

I'm already on record as being really sore at the Mets about:

• the death of Shea;
• the hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars that paid for the new stadium;
• the endless contrivances that make the new stadium feel more like a baseball theme-park mall than a place to watch baseball;
• the ugly alliance with Citi Corp;
• the clear embrace of rich fans at the expense of working-class fans;
• the vilification of business owners across the street in the Iron Triangle; and the obscenely expensive tickets;

In other words, the manyfold aspects of the Mets' nasty and soulless policy making lo these last several years.

The ballpark itself? I didn't wanna be one of those foamy-mouthed protesters outside The Last Temptation of Christ.

Protester "THIS MOVIE IS SACRILEGIOUS!"
Interviewer: "How do you know? Have you seen it?"
Protester: "NO!!! AND I'M NOT GONNA!!!
Inverviewer: "Then how do you know it's sacrilegious?"
Protester: "BECAUSE IT IS!!!"

Up to this point, it's been fair play to critique the Mets' malfeasant policies. They've done so many bad things -- culturally, politically, fiscally. But the ballpark itself had to wait until I saw it in person.

That happened this Sunday past.

Diane's from Pittsburgh, a diehard Buccos fan. We took the opportunity to purchase a single pair of tickets to witness the Mets-Pirates clash. $45 for two ducats on a Sunday afternoon in May somewhat well after the turn of the century.

It was a gorgeous day: sunny, crisp, maybe a little chilly when the breeze turned to wind. That's always been an issue out at Willets Point. Still, a really beautiful day.

...and the place was several thousand seats short of full-to-the-brim. It's a troubling trend for the Mets -- a sparkling brand-new "world class home of the New York Mets" (their oft-repeated phrase), a beautiful mid-May weekend afternoon, a team on a six-game winning streak, a metropolitan area of 18 million people and all the world's tourists coming to the Big Apple, and the Mets couldn't fill a 45,000 seat venue.

It's gotta be more than simply "the economy." But that's a good place to start. How many people are simply reticent to buy into what is now a luxury item -- a baseball game.

The Mets have diluted the actual game, possibly past the final retrieval point. A half-dozen restaurant clubs patterned after business-class lounges at airports..multiple food courts with endless varieties of trendy cuisine...mall stores galore...kids games sequestered away from the actual field...a never-ending procession of corporate promotional tie-ins involving text-messaging, cell-phone-photo uploading, Pepsi Party Patrols and video-game contests.

So perhaps there were more fans in the house than it appeared. These days at major league stadiums, "in the house" doesn't guarantee "in the seats."

Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, at the height of his insufferable bully-boy arc, waxed malpoetically about "putting fannies in the seats." Nowadays, MLB owners don't care about yours or my fanny, unless they're right next to the wallets in our rear pockets.

The new Mets stadium was weirdly quiet on Sunday. And this was on a day when the home team created some excitement with an 8-2 win. Shea's ballpark buzz has gone missing. Theories have been advanced: fewer people total (57,000 capacity reduced to 45,000), fewer raucous fans due to the paucity of affordable seats, fewer kids (see affordable seats, paucity), the empty seats in the money-bags sections, and the huge number of in-stadium opportunities to not watch the game at all. When there was cheering, it sounded more like an encore at the opera than the roar Shea used to generate.

It is believed that they're having the same problems at that new joint atop Macombs Dam Park in the Bronx.

Before this gets to far on, there are some positives. The new stadium is obviously designed for baseball, not the multipurposes of so many stadiums in the '60s (all gone now). The Mets have made some efforts at the whole thing being more "fan-friendly." (Though replacing ushers with polo-shirted "SECURITY" bruisers works surprisingly poorly as a "fan-friendly" touch.) And early in its first season, fans are excited to see the new place.

But the new stadium is run through with misfires, miscalculations and poorly executed strategies. There's no way this place is a "world-class home of the New York Mets."

For starters, what's that mean, "world class"? Can this new place host bullfights, sumo tournaments and UN General Assembly meetings? Is there an international body that gives out "world class" accreditation?

If there's one new-stadium descriptive the Mets throw around like beads from a Mardi Gras float, it's "intimacy." The problem is that the Mets, their announcers, the media and a lot of fans confuse "intimacy" with "smaller," or "proximity." Just because a venue isn't as big as its predecessor or has fewer seats, doesn't make it more intimate.

Say you're having a drink at at bar. A hottie the very next stool over is also having a drink. Just because you're inches apart doesn't mean the two of you are intimate. A lot more needs to happen before "intimate" comes into play. In fact, a lot of classic stadiums weren't intimate at all -- fans were a long ways from the action, or the joints were simply functional and pedestrian, and nothing more.

In fact, the new edifice's biggest intimacy destroyer the Saturn-V screeching of the new stadium's loudspeakers. Good frakkin' grief! The Mets in 2009 are loathe to let fans simply take in the game. Advert after advert, before and during the games, fill every moment of downtime. Fans aren't trusted to absorb the game on our own. Baseball's a sport that lives and breaths nuance and subtlety. That makes for a lot of downtime. At the post-Shea palace, that means relentless ear-splitting at-bat music, Just For Men commercials, text-messaging contests and theme-songs for every conceivable situation. An afternoon at the new Shea -- or TARP Field, as my friend and fellow Spunk Lad John "Reggie Mental" Sharples calls it -- is like watching a game in a subway station as the express train passes by.

Except louder.