Citifield, May 30,2015

As much as I love going to baseball games I have mostly been to see the Brooklyn Cyclones and Staten Island Yankees in recent years, largely due to price and convenience.  Also, my son Gideon, my wife Susan and I go mostly for the beauty of the game (absent from televised games) and don't worship particular players or particular teams.  In addition, the playing by the minor league players is often as skillful, and sometimes more so, as that of the major league players.

Citifield is a pain to get to from Bay Ridge, one has to go through Manhattan.  Saturday Gideon and I met my brother and his two sons for brunch and then took the LIRR from Penn Station; it took about twenty minutes and cost $4 for the comfortable ride, my first time using this method of transportation.  I had always toughed it out on the 7 train on my many trips to Shea Stadium.

I don't find Citifield much of an improvement over Shea Stadium:  the sightlines are often inferior and the place, totally enclosed, has a claustrophobic feeling.  Perhaps the food is better, but since I don't partake of the overpriced offerings I can't accurately say (I usually bring a peanut butter sandwich). The loud and annoying music and games between innings was a considerable impediment to the discussions about the game Fred, Gideon, Jeffrey and Greg and I attempted; the constant attempts by the scoreboards to get the crowd to cheer were also an irritant (are people so used to canned laughter and applause they can't figure out when to cheer?)

Our seats Saturday were down the left field line on field level and we did have a good view of the grounders fielded by the third baseman (Ruben Tejada playing in place of the injured David Wright) and the shortstop (Wilmer Flores) and thrown across the diamond to first base.  One gets a sense of the timing and effort necessary to throw that distance; on TV one sees a cut from fielder to first baseman.  It's also clear how fast the pitches are, something also lost on the flattened telephoto image of TV.  What made the game less than exemplary were the number of pitchers used (eleven, four of them Mets), the number of hits (fourteen for the Marlins, nine for the Mets), the number of errors (four), and the number of runs (Marlins 9, Mets 4).  Even a poorly played game, however, cannot distract me from the balletic beauty of baseball as seen in its entirety (on each pitch each player is responding) on the huge field of green grass on a gorgeous Spring day.