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.