Citi Field

The entrance rotunda to Citi Field, Jun-2009.

The ball field and seating bowl, from the Pepsi Porch in right field.

From the next-to-last row of the upper deck, a view as close as from the lower boxes of the upper deck at Shea. This photo is from Mar-2009.

• Location: Roosevelt Avenue at 126 Street, Flushing, N.Y.
• Opened: 2009
• Home team: New York Mets, National League (2009-present)
• Capacity: 45,000

Chronological Tour: Stop 341

Rating: 4 baseballs

The first base hit in park history came at 1:19 in the afternoon, when Hoyas shortstop Tom Elliott singled to center off Red Storm starter Brendan Lobban with one out in the home first inning. Georgetown catcher Greg Pustizzi knocked in the first run in the history of the park in the second inning, with a single to left scoring first baseman Dan Capeless. An inning later, Sean Lamont followed with his ninth home run of the season and the first ever at Citi Field, a solo shot to left.

As I arrived at the ballpark, I tried to figure out what was different. I started out by figuring what was missing, in comparison with the now-demolished Shea Stadium:

1) The old scoreboard. That thing was a classic. In its place are two large matrix boards, both of which usually display the score, and I think it's rather redundant for them to be as close to each other as they are. Then again, they were having trouble with the larger one for much of the game.

2) A very irregular outfield wall. Yes, the simple wall is gone, replaced by a monstrosity that could be at home in any number of other MLB parks of recent vintage. At the college game, the distance markers were missing, but they were in place by the time I got there in June for a Met game.

3) The out-of-town scoreboards, which used to flank the main scoreboard at Shea, are now mounted atop the left-field bleacher. They show the runners on base and the number of outs, as at many new ballparks. At the college game, the dot for which team was batting was missing; again, it was fixed when I saw a Met game.

4) There aren’t too many escalators in this building. Shea had them all over the place. Again, though, a lot of the new parks rely on stairwells. I’m sure design engineers have concluded that this is a more efficient way to move people into and out of the park, but the walk from the upper deck to street level was excruciatingly long after a MLB game.

5) The multicolored seats are gone. Instead of a different color for each seating level, which I admit is so 20th century, Citi Field’s seats are green. Green is probably the most common color for stadium seats nationwide, but it’s not a Mets color. They could have done just as well with royal blue. To its credit, the tread (room between seating rows) here is much wider than at the old park.

Most importantly, though, Shea was missing. This place doesn’t look anything like Shea Stadium, and that’s certainly deliberate. It even has a new home-run apple (the old one is near street level just inside the bullpen entrance gate). They seem to have incorporated design features from many parks, old and new, into this park. The main entranceway, the Jackie Robinson Rotunda, is modeled after the home-plate entrance to Ebbets Field. The bullpens are stacked up in right-center field, copying several new parks, and they jut out into the outfield, creating a short porch that might well pay tribute to Kiner’s Korner at Forbes Field (Hall of Famer Ralph Kiner went on to be a Mets broadcaster for over 40 years).

I ran into an old friend and Shea denizen in the eighth inning, and he turned around, looked at the pile of rubble that remained of Shea (and which was gone by opening day), and said, “So much of my childhood ... it’s gone now.” Am I that emotional about not having Shea? Hardly. And the commute to this park is exactly the same as the commute to Shea. The look is different, but the feel is similar because they put this park in the same place as the old one, give or take 600 feet.