Yankees Opening Day 2021

 April 8, 2021

We hit hardly any traffic and parking was ample when we arrived for opening day at "Yankee Stadium."  When was the last time you heard anyone say that there was hardly any traffic in the Bronx? Never. There'll be an apocalypse before that actually happens. 

New York State has limited sports' venues to 20% capacity. Tickets to both opening days went to season ticket holders first and then it became a "Welcome to the First Annual Hunger Games" type of event in order to get your hands on tickets. As if getting tickets to opening day wasn't hard enough in past years. A quick check on StubHub put standing room only tickets at roughly $1,500/each. We have to emphasize this fact too: this price does not include a seat for your ass to sit in. And that's without taxes and service fees and all that junk. We tried. We really did. We tried and tried and tried to think of something that we loved enough to pay $2,000 for and it turns out, there's nothing. That's more than the cost of our 5-day vacation to San Francisco and Sonoma in June and that's including airfare, accommodations, and a private driver. Unless we're sitting in the dugout during the game and then going home with one of the players to have a slumber party afterwards, $2,000/each for one game is too much. Go to hell. And have a lovely day. 

This is the first opening day that we've missed in over 10 years. Again, why is there no bronze statue dedicated to us somewhere?

So, here we are. Faux-Yankee Stadium. Truthfully, we didn't hate it. Serena made ribs for the first time ever and she f*cking crushed it. She also prepared grass-fed burgers and grass-fed beef hot dogs. There was quite the spread and truthfully, we probably spent less on food and alcohol and we got way more than we typically do out of it. Unfortunately, we tried to eat all of it, but that's a different issue entirely. 

Another bonus was there were no bathroom lines or concession lines to deal with. Which also led to more drinking than usual. 

The view from our seats were unobstructed for the most part and ideal because we could see the field and the Yankees lose from every angle. 

Baby Emma was charming fellow fan. She kept to herself, remained quiet, and required cuddles occasionally, which we were happy to give her because look at her. She's the f*cking cutest. 

Unfortunately, there were a few rowdy fans in the "audience" and we had to put them in their place. 

Anyhoo, the Yankees lost  their home opener as usual. They did it in extra innings, so we're thankful that they wasted more of our time like that. The Mets didn't play because the Nationals decided they wanted to be a pack of COVID babies. 

And so brings us to the end of our baseball pandemic home opening week story. Stay tuned next week for the Mets' home opener. 

Mets' Opening Day 2019

April 4, 2019

Due to the Opening Day fiasco that required us to be shuttled from Queens Park to Citi Field two years ago, Lisa is now paranoid about the parking lot clothing before our arrival, so she picked up Serena from her place of employment at 10:30 am in order to get to the game. Citi Field opened their parking lot at 10:10 and their gates at 11:10 for a 1:10 pm game start. We arrived at the exit by 11:15 and didn't get into a parking spot until 11:50 am. This is the sh*t show we sat in:

 

Lisa was having heart palpitations from the PTS that she experienced from the shuttle. She thought we'd be on line behind the final car allowed into the lot and therefore be forced to park in the shuttle lot once again. However, that did not happen. We did get into the lot. And we saw why it was so difficult to get cars into the lot in a timely basis.

 As you can see in the photo below, people tailgating were total a-holes and took up more than one parking spot. When your team is god awful and people stop going to games or when you're attending a game that no one gives a f*ck about, you can take up multiple spots in the parking lot. When it is opening day and your stupid team chose to sell SRO seats like royal dick f*cks, then you absolutely, positively cannot take up multiple parking spots because those spots need to be taken by all the f*cking cars trying to get into the lot from the Grand Central Parkway. You stupid, selfish d*ck.

ANYWAY, once inside the parking lot, we popped Lisa's trunk open and started our own mini tailgate the included delicious wine and cookies. And chips. This amazing cooler from Reduce kept our wine cool and tasty. It's amazing. Jess bought it for us for Christmas and it is one of the best tailgating investments ever made. It's genius. Whomever is responsible for this invention is genius.

The Jinx arrived at the game with her lovely son, Ethan. The Jinx also adored the Reduce wine cooler and she enjoyed a cookie with us before we all walked toward the stadium together.

The line to get through the front gate was incredible, but the security check was relatively quick as opposed to the games we went to last season. This is what the crowd looked like from the escalator of the Jackie Robinson Rotunda.

Lisa was unable to take any photos of the Opening Day ceremony except these due to our ADD:

The Nikon booth convinced us that we needed to do a photo shoot with props and we heartily agreed. This featured a moving montage and crowds cheering, but we couldn't get that to save for some reason.

Our delay also meant that we missed the ceremonial first pitch thrown by Gil Hodges Jr. Since we missed the entire ceremony, we figured, "why not stop and get food?" Lisa had screenshot a lot of new options for us to try:
Pizza cupcakes
Cheeseburger dumplings
Chocolate covered marshmallows
Mini Nathan hot dog sliders

It turns out that the pizza cupcakes and dumplings can only be found in the Jim Beam Highball Club, which we did not have tickets to. Horse sh*t. So, we had to improvise, but not before we took a video of this chump being suckered into doing pullups at a baseball game.

We found a burger stand that we'd never seen before in right field, but the line was annoyingly long. Luckily for us, there was a second burger stand with no one on the line.

We also noticed that the rice ball stand added new rice ball options, so while Serena paid for our delicious burgers, Lisa got on the line to buy rice balls. The mushroom steakhouse burgers cost $12.50 and the rice balls were six for  $13.50. The new flavors we chose were french onion, pizza ball, and strawberry cheesecake.

One bite of the burger and we knew something was off. It just didn't taste like a normal burger. It wasn't bad. It just didn't taste like it normally does. Then we questioned what that giant "V" stood for. Victory? Vaccinate? Vengeance? No. None of those things. Vegan. In further examination of the stand's sign, we noticed that cheese was listed in quotation marks. As in, "cheese." How did we not notice any of this? Also, the strawberry cheesecake rice balls were horrendous. French onion delicious. This creepy pile of pink goo was not.

After food, we finally went up to our seats. The Mets were already losing to the Nationals 1-0. We're not sure how that run scored because we were too busy eating vegan burgers.

 

The people sitting behind us were worse than we are in terms of ripping apart their home team. They had nothing nice to say about anything except Jacob deGrom, who wasn't even pitching. Everyone loved Lisa's Elmer Fudd hat (another gift from Jess). Someone even offered her $10 for it, but she simply could not part with it.

We left in the bottom of the 8th inning with the Mets losing 3-0,  no one out, and men in scoring position because Lisa had no faith in her team. Before turning her back on the stands, she shouted a slew of not nice things at Jeurys Familia, who'd gotten the Mets into that particular predicament. We also snapped this photo:

The Mets ended up losing 4-0. Lisa was somewhat positive about it though. Since the Mets have the best Opening Day record in baseball, but not such a great track record at following through for the rest of the season, perhaps losing their home opener means that they'll have a successful season.

Yankees Opening Day 2018

April 3, 2018

Originally, this game was scheduled for Monday, the 2nd. On the morning of, we awoke to a legitimate blizzard. In April. Regardless, Serena has sat through opening days she deemed worse, so we continued on regardless of many warnings from Serena's coworkers. In fact, we made it all the way to Yankee Stadium before realizing that the Yankees had actually postponed the game. This is because we chose to do a Bon Jovi sing along rather than listen to the radio. The game was rescheduled for Tuesday evening. The snow cleared by noon on Monday and the temperature ended up being quite nice.

Lets flash forward to Tuesday evening. When it was FREEZING and wet and never stopped raining. How was this an improvement from the previous afternoon???

Because we were so enamored with our little travel Mets' hot cocoa cups, we felt like we needed Yankees' ones as well, so our first stop at the stadium was to get ourselves hot cocoa. We ordered our cocoas and stepped aside to wait for them. For some reason, the machine wasn't working so Miss Ruby had to make large quantities of hot cocoa by hand. We had to wait 20 minutes, but were constantly reassured that Miss Ruby makes the best hot cocoa. Guess what? She does. It was the best hot cocoa we've ever had.

Afterwards, we went in search of food. We ended up at Mighty Quinn's and Bare Burger. Serena ordered a crispy spicy chicken sandwich for $11.99 at Mighty Quinn's and Lisa ordered a SoCal (turkey burger with pepper jack cheese, pickled red onions, and guacamole on a sprouted wheat bun) for $12.49. Then we shared a plate of dirty fries from Mighty Quinn's for $13.79. The fries were topped with chili, burnt ends, and lime sauce.

 

 

Serena's chicken was very good, but the bun itself felt like it had just come out of the refrigerator, which ruined the whole experience. Lisa's turkey burger was good, but not the kind of burger that needs a repeat visit. The fries, however, were DELICIOUS.

We made it to our seats in time for opening ceremony only to discover that because of the weather, they wouldn't be doing an ceremony at all, which was seriously disappointing. They just removed the tarp from the field and started the game like it was any other game in the season. It just depressing.

 

 

 

 

The game itself was pretty exciting. Didi hit two home runs. He's becoming quite a beast this season. Giancarlo Stanton struck out 5 times. People booed. Naturally. More on that next week.

The boy in front of us crop dusted us. The smell was so bad that he actually stood up and left his seat. We basically ate it.

The Yankees ended up defeating the Rays 11-4, but that's basically because the offense (aside from Stanton) crushed it. Their pitching basically sh*t the bed, which has been their MO all season thus far.

Mets Opening Day 2018

March 29, 2018

Since we got locked out of the main parking lot two years in a row and didn't see the opening ceremonies for the last two years, we left for Citi Field this morning at 9:30am. Can you believe that? 9:30 for a 1:10pm start time. Our overwhelming sense of paranoia paid off because we were able to get into the parking lot by 10:45 am (parking is up to $25 now, by the way). It was perfect. It was pouring, gates opened at 11, and we had plenty of spots to choose from. We pulled into one and enjoyed a pair of Stella Atrois cidres like a pair of basic bitches while we waited for the rain to ease up.

Again, because we're overwhelmingly paranoid, we headed into the stadium at 11:45 because we didn't want to wait on those ridiculous security lines and potentially miss opening ceremonies. Once inside, we did a lap around the main concourse to determine what we'd be partaking in during feeding time. Serena decided that she'd get a chicken parm hero from Nicoletta's and Lisa chose the Bash Burger from...Bash Burger. We agreed to go separately and reconvene at one of the hi-top tables in center field to eat. Lisa was not even halfway to the Bash Burger stand when Serena discovered that Mr. and Mrs. Met was out for photographs. Lisa came right back. It was, in fact, an emergency. It needed to be done. Please notice our sign that Lisa whipped up in a jiff. You'll probably have to zoom in.

After our amazing photo op, we returned to the original plan of feeding. While on line, Serena noticed something called, "loaded pizza fries." This felt extremely important, so she ordered a platter of the fries in addition to a chicken parm hero. The hero was $14 and the fries were $9.50.

The game began and since we wanted to actually see opening day ceremonies, Serena rushed to meet Lisa at her food line, which she abandoned because it was too long. We stood behind the rows of seats with a bunch of drunk ass clowns to watch the ceremony. We ate all of the pizza fries. They were a little cold, but AMAZING. Here is a photo:

What's noteworthy about our time in this location has nothing to do with the actual ceremony and everything to do with the drunk ass clowns. The man standing directly next to Lisa kept spitting. Not just a little spit. Not just once in a while. By the time the ceremony was complete, there was a legit puddle of phlegm sitting on the floor next to Lisa's shoe. We've never seen so much spittle in one place. Ever. We would've taken a photo, but Lisa was too busy dry heaving and when Lisa dry heaves, it makes Serena want to dry heave, so we had to bail.

Lisa finally got her Bash Burger. Her burger was a Pat LaFrieda patty topped with onion and bacon jam, pickles, American cheese, and special sauce. All for the glorious price of $13.50.

We ate at one of the hi-top tables in center field where we watched the start of the game on the large television screen behind the scoreboard. Both sandwiches were pretty cold so we couldn't decide if we weren't that impressed with them because of their temperature or if they just weren't that great.

We made it upstairs to our seats just in time to witness a Yadier Molina 2-run homerun, allowing the Cardinals to take an early 2-1 lead.

 

From our seats, we could see that the Mets had added the number 10 to the pitcher's mound in memorium of Rusty Staub, who died earlier this morning at the age of 73. You can see it in this picture if you look very closely. Maybe blow it up on your computer or something. Zoom in. It's totally there.

An honorable mention goes to our delightful hot cocoas in a travel Mets mug. It's adorable, warm and cozy, and roughly $10/each.

We actually enjoyed our seats until our neighbor finally arrived in the 4th inning. He was a real piece of work. For starters, he was a large man, which we aren't judging him for. Things happen. Okay? We've gotten slightly larger over the years and it's totally not our faults. It's certainly not a result from our poor diets. Or lack of physical activity. It's definitely someone else's fault. Anyway, we digress. So, he's large and takes up a shit ton of space and kind of sort of invades Lisa's personal space, but that's not why we strongly disliked him. He slammed himself quite obnoxiously into his seat and immediately started chewing Lisa's ear off, which is simply rude. Dude, we're here to watch the f*cking game. Exchange pleasantries, of course. But this is not lunch period. We're specifically here for one reason and that is to enjoy a baseball game. Thank you very much. He kept trying to get Lisa to buy some of his season tickets. Then he made it a point to mention how difficult it is to find single girls who also like the Mets (because apparently they're all Yankees' fans - what? That makes no sense). Lisa slickly mentioned our boyfriends to get him off our backs and then the guy turned into a total a-hole. Like a child who doesn't get their way or a sore loser.

We headed down to the main concourse at the top of the 8th because we wanted to try the new Wowfulls stand. For $12, you can choose from one of the following options:
Home Sweet Home
Chocolate Heaven
Strawberry Fields

Home Sweet Home had vanilla ice cream topped with Fruity Pebbles, chocolate sauce, whipped cream, and sprinkles. Chocolate Heaven had chocolate shake ice cream topped with Oreo crumbles, chocolate sauce, sprinkles, and whipped cream. Finally, Strawberry Fields had strawberry cheesecake ice cream topped with French Toast Crunch, caramel sauce, sprinkles, and whipped cream. All were tucked in a delicious waffle. Lisa went with Home Sweet Home while Serena chose Strawberry Fields.

The line to the stand was so long that we basically ended the game here, watching the game on the small television attached to the wall. While Serena continued to wait online, Lisa ran over to document the last out of the game and Mets' first win of the season.

Final score 9-4. After the game, we sat in the car playing Disney Emoji Blitz and answering emails while we waited for the parking lot to clear out.

Yankees Opening Day

April 10, 2017

Have you ever played Never Have I Ever? Well, we're going to today. Never have we ever experienced a beautiful day for both teams' opening days. We did this season. Never have we ever experienced wins for both home teams. We did this season. Never have we ever missed both teams' opening ceremonies. We did this season.

Based on our experience at Mets' Opening Day, we chose to get to Yankee Stadium super early. Or so we thought. We got to the ballpark so early that not only did we make a pit stop at Target to buy Funk Pop Mystery Minis, but we also drank wine.

We started walking over to the stadium from the car at 12:15 (for a 1:05 start time). The lines to get into the stadium wrapped around the building. Confident that only the gate closest to the subway lines had the greatest crowd, we circled the circumference of the stadium in search of a shorter line. There was none.

By the time we reached our seats, we were sweaty, tired, cranky, and had missed the top of the first inning. As well as the opening ceremony. No, we don't know who threw out the first pitch or who sang the National Anthem. Sure, we could Google it, but what's the point? So can you.

 

 

 

Like our new socks?

We didn't want to miss a chunk of the game like we had at Citi Field, so we chose to wait on food. Another mistake.

In the 6th inning, we decided to check out the new kids' fun zone and get food. Lisa wanted to try some of the newer menu items that she'd researched. She talked incessantly of a sandwich called, "The Classy Pig."She also convinced Serena that what she needed was the traditional Chinese BBQ dish found in the Toyota Terrace. The kids' zone was located right near our seats in the 300 level near right field. We were so excited to play and take stupid photos. Unfortunately, as soon as got in there, we were c*ck blocked. "Sorry, you can't come in unless you have kids." Which is totally prejudiced. We fell prey to ageism.  And lack of childrenism! We'd call our lawyer about it, but we're no longer talking to him because he's an ass clown. At least she let us take photos of the set up. We're going to need to steal Lisa's niece for the next game. And then make her take photos of us crawling all over the playground. She's very smart. She'll take good photos.

 

 

 

 

The concourses were so crowded that navigating the area proved difficult. Instead of searching for the Toyota Terrace and the location of the Classy Pig, we decided to settle for the ole' reliable sausage sandwich. Luckily, there was a stand right near our seats. AND the line wasn't very long. Only three people ahead of us! What good fortune!

Then we found out why the line was so short. Ageism was alive and well in the kids' zone, but there was no ageism to be found anywhere else in the ballpark. No one thought that allowing senior citizens to man the concession stands on opening day might possibly be a bad idea. Never have we ever witnessed such slow service in our lives. It was like watching the sloth DMV scene in Zootopia. Only we weren't watching it. We were living it. When we finally reached the cashier, we stood there for several minutes before she took our order. We ordered two sausage sandwiches each. Her reply? "No."
What? What did she say?
"Oh, no. You're not having that today."
What? Is this lady putting us on a diet? We didn't think that we had let ourselves go that badly. 
"There are only hot dogs left."
How is this even possible? It's a sausage stand. That's like Taco Bell running out of beef or a bar running out of booze. Whatever. It's not what we wanted, but we'll settle for it. We're hungry. And so, we agreed on hot dogs.
"Only foot longs."
Jesus Christ. Fine. We agreed on foot long hot dogs.
Twenty minutes later, she brought us our unwanted foot long hot dogs. By the time we got back to our seats again, it was the middle of the 8th inning and the Yankees were winning.

Normally, we can't complain about the food at our home ballparks, but for two straight games, our teams disappointed us. Our hot dogs were pretty pitiful.

 

The positive? The Yankees won 8-1. Afterwards, we went home, ate Chipotle, and took a nap.