Friday, March 30, 2007

new creative, part 2

The other side of the G platform:

it’s just TERRIBLE. blech.

but it’s a nice counterbalance to seeing this multiple times during my commute:

[I don’t have a real problem with Mariano (neither does TBF, for the record), I just find the photo creepy. Not to mention not needing to be publicly exhorted to read the bible by anyone.]
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Thursday, March 29, 2007

opening day tickets!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So I’m slogging through email at work, when an email lands in my inbox from one of the various “benefits” offered to us. I say “benefits” because up until now, I have found the application of that term to be dubious at best.

Until just now.

“Working Advantage has tickets for exciting Mets games this season, including Opening Day on April 9! Be there at Shea Stadium in Flushing, NY to cheer for the Mets as they battle for this year’s championship.”

OPENING DAY?!

So I click and dial TBF at the same moment.  I read him the email.
“‘Upper Level Seats, Sections 44 or 46 available for $29.00 per ticket.’”
TBF: “That’s WAY out there.”
“I know.”
“Forget about pictures.”
“I know.”
“Forget about seeing the Diamondvision.”
“I know.”
“Do we even know what row?”
”’ The general seating section listed above is guaranteed; however, specific rows and seats cannot be requested or guaranteed. You will be assigned the best available seats, within our reserved block, based on the date and time of your order.’”
“Arghhh.”
“I know. But it’s face value - okay a little more.”
I try mets.com in case they suddenly made seats available and didn’t tell anyone, and open up StubHub in another window. The StubHub ticket quantity has taken a nosedive from 1600 seats down to 900 seats. In the meantime, TBF is looking to see what’s available in Seven-packs - and that’s even worse seating locations than what we’re currently being offered.

I bought the tickets.

I am, however, pissed at the Mets that they didn’t make these seats available to the general public, or to account holders. And I should be principled enough to not buy these, given as much as I’ve bitched about things on here.

But I’m not that principled and I want to go to Opening Day. I suck.

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

YOUR TICKETS ARE HERE.

Coop was bitching earlier today about not having gotten her tickets, and then a few hours later, how they had arrived. That sent me to the phone, to the Mets Ticket Office, where an earnest young man proceeded to try to explain to me that, no, they couldn’t give me my tracking number because there were so many people getting tickets.
MG: “Right. You sent tickets to the same amount of people during the playoffs and you did this.”
MTO: “But they’re not coming from here--”
MG: “They’re coming from Arkansas. Again, so did the playoff tickets.”
MTO: *silence* “Let me transfer you to someone in customer service.”

This then involved TBF and I chasing DHL around somewhere off the Gowanus Expressway, in a part of town so deserted TBF refused to let me wait in the car. And then, a very annoyed DHL employee dealing with two highly excited customers happy to wait for them to find their box, no matter how long it took.

Click to continue reading YOUR TICKETS ARE HERE.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

the official metsgrrl spring training report

[Administrative note: I know this post is incredibly long. But this will likely be one of the last posts before the blog moves out of Blogger and onto a proper web site, one that will allow me to have excerpts on the front page and each post on its own page. So I beg your indulgence, but if I don’t post this now, once the season gets started it will never get posted.]

]

Spring training wasn’t about the tickets or the hotel or any of the other innumerable details it took to get TBF and I down to Florida last weekend. Spring training was about that first moment that the gates to the practice fields opened at 9:30am, and we walked down a dirt path in the morning sunshine. The grass was that impossible, improbable green, and instead of watching it from above you were surrounded by it. The sky was blue and gold and ringed with fluffy white clouds. The air was warm and soft and clean, the breeze that blew through the pine trees was calm and soothing. There were birds twittering in the background, and a layer of quiet underpinned it all.

Then the players walked onto the field, the royal blue uniforms the perfect contrast to the green and the sky. They are feet away, relaxed stance, smiling and laughing and decidedly normal. Your shoulders relax another few inches, climbing down from their mundane sentry posts up around your ears. The grass is still slightly wet and sparkling. You lean against a fence, breathe the air, and decide what to watch next. No pressure, though, you’ll be back again tomorrow. Sure, they may clear the spectators after 15 minutes, or after 30, but you’ll be get something you didn’t know you came here for, and you’ll be back the next day. Wait, there’s Carlos Delgado on a different field, practicing short hops with Sandy Alomar, over and over and over, and you can just stand there quietly and watch him. No one else is really paying attention, they’re all over at the other field, waiting with their Sharpies and their clean white baseballs.

Yeah, the hordes with no manners, clamoring for autographs in the middle of the workout, with their dozen balls in mesh sacks or their game-used base in a plastic grocery bag, toted by a child who is just barely bigger than said base, could piss you off and ruin the whole thing. The beauty of it is that they don’t have to.

Go stand somewhere else, and if you’re lucky, you’ll befriend one of the security guards who got married the year the Mets were born and he and his wife became Mets fans by default. He can tell you stories from 1966 or 1972 or a few weeks ago. Talk to the couple standing next to you with the disposable camera, and you’ll find out that they’re at workouts to get signatures for the wife’s father, who suffers from Lou Gehrig’s disease but loves Jose Reyes and David Wright.

Stroll over to the side field and watch the minor leaguers, who you may see on the adjoining field in a few years. Say good morning to Al Jackson as he strides by, heading for another field, where he’ll shortly be joined by the starting rotation. You can’t stand next to that fence but you can get close enough to watch them take a lesson in fielding.

Baseball happens so fast; Spring Training is where it all slows down. I can watch Aaron Heilman throw tosses or take a dozen photos of Mike Pelfrey pitching because it doesn’t count, because you’re so much closer, because you can be selective about your details. It’s zen meditation in the real world, watching the baseball arc in that familiar movement from home plate into the outfield, as you watch it trace an invisible line through the air and down into the waiting glove of the outfielder. *smack* You can hear the ball hit leather, because it is spring training and you are closer than you will ever be at Shea. You use binoculars to lip read or to see who is doing what in the bullpen or figure out what Lastings Milledge’s batting gloves look like.

That would be a good start to attempt to explain what the whole Spring Training trip was like.

Click to continue reading the official metsgrrl spring training report

Posted by metsgrrl at 08:50 AM | (4) Comments | Permalink

Monday, March 26, 2007

the new creative is here!

First new ads spotted in the subway this morning:

So far, from what I’ve seen, I hate this year’s ads and imagery. I know this is tangentially the business I now find myself in (an internet geek on Madison Avenue) so I am hyper-critical but it seems like the Mets have been in a less-than-creative rut since 2005. 2005 was the year of the great Mr. Met commercials. 2005 was the year of “NEXT YEAR IS NOW” and those awesome radio commercials (remember? they were the pseudo-answering machine messages of the players, the funniest one being Tom Glavine translating for Matsui). The campaign was clever and a little sarcastic and very New York. Attitude without being arrogant.

Last year’s creative didn’t resonate with me at first, and there were far too many bad jokes one could make with “The Team. The Time. The INSERT HERE.” but it was aspirational and it was strong and while I don’t troll eBay looking for the subway ads the way I do 2005’s (remember “Next year is LaGuardia complaining about the noise” or “Next year is a packed 7 train”?), when I was out at Shea last month taking the photos of Citifield, I made sure to get some “The Team. The Time. The Place.” banner shots.

I’ll need to see the whole campaign for 2007 before I pass judgement, but what I’ve seen so far has not wow’ed me. “Your season has come”? Is that the best we can do? Visually, I don’t see any unity or cohesiveness, it seems tentative and not the kind of branding that should be coming from a Division Championship team. The blue and orange juxtaposition seems cheap. And there’s some light blue diagonal lines as a continuing visual theme that I’ve seen on some other items (like the media guide, which was for sale down in PSL) I am especially not thrilled with. None of it is authoritative enough.

But, right now, considering that during my morning commute, I have to walk by a very scary photo of Mariano Rivera doing his best Cheshire Cat imitation (urging people to read the bible) no less than 4 times, it will be nice to be greeted by Messrs. Beltran and Delgado instead.

spring training, day three

MG is sunburned and exhausted and happy and sad and jesus god am I TIRED. Honestly, I expected to come home every night and write long thoughtful missives and carefully process photos but nowhere in my spring training plans did I account for TIRED.

And I somehow have 256 photos from Sunday, between workouts and the game. No, I am not exaggerating. 256. Some are really kickass. I will post them tomorrow. Along with more coherent thoughts.

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Saturday, March 24, 2007

spring training, day two

TBF and I were up this morning promptly at 7:30, bright-eyed and bushy tailed. We headed over to Tradition Field, the plan being to watch the open workouts and then get back in the car and drive down to Jupiter - split squad playing the Marlins at Roger Dean Stadium.

Rule #1: Don’t go see the split squad on the road. I know you’re all going to write in and tell me that you knew this, but ya know, we didn’t. And it seemed like a good idea at the time, let’s watch David Newhan take four at-bats and let’s watch Lastings Milledge somewhere outside of Shea Stadium, and heck, what’s bad about watching Johnny Maine pitch from seats right behind home plate?

Yeah, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Sitting behind the mesh meant that I couldn’t even really get any good photos. Which is okay, I think, but I like taking baseball photos, I have discovered. I started going through them to see if there was anything worth posting, but not really. (Aside from the photo of TBF with Billy the Marlin, which he will not let me post.)

More, likely on the plane home tomorrow night. Tomorrow day, back to Tradition Field, and the Orioles.

P.S. Chan Ho Park drives a Durango. Shawn Green drives a stylin’ brand new black Lexus LS400 with super-black-tinted windows.

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Friday, March 23, 2007

spring training, day one: mets v. cardinals, 3-25-07

Tomorrow we are off to Jupiter—it’s a split squad, with the Orioles in Port St. Lucie while we watch the whoever gets sent to play the Marlins. We’ll hit open workout again in the a.m., and then off to Roger Dean Stadium.

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Thursday, March 22, 2007

credit where credit is due

Did you see this??? David Wright wants us to vote for his at-bat song. (I forsee disaster here, but that’s an entirely other post.)

This is my idea. No, seriously, it is. (MG says, stamping her feet.) Here, let me take you through it:

At the beginning of Spring Training, I was reading the Post’s Spring Training blog, and at the end of the first column, the reporter said: What questions do you want asked?

You can read my response for yourself by following the link, but to make a long story short, here it is:
3) Have any of the Mets thought about what their at-bat music will be this year? Is Lo Duca keeping the Saturday Night Fever theme? How will David Wright possibly pick his songs without input from Mr. Cliff Floyd (or at least, pick something remotely cool without Cliff’s help)?

The next day, it continued with this post:
Metsgrrl, who commented after first posting, is definitely onto something. How will Wright pick his songs now that Cliff Floyd is not around?

By the next day, it had evolved into ”HELP DAVID WRIGHT” with both the Post’s blog and Adam Rubin were asking fans to reply with their responses.

And finally, the final post, with my shoutout.

The problem is that I want these songs to be a representation of DAVID WRIGHT.  I wrote about this last year, and I know I am obsessed with this stuff, but I am obsessed with music, generally, no matter where it is. But especially in the case of the Mets’ at-bat songs. This is probably because when I first started going to games, the at-bat songs were something familiar, something in my territory, something I could latch onto and identify and think about. As my fandom evolved, that grew into trying to figure out what the song was, why that player would use that song, why someone changed their song.  I could like or not like a player just based on what their song was. (I mean, god love Chris Woodward, but *only* Dire Straights? eck.)

So, yeah, D. Wright. We’re going to end up with Third Eye Blind or something vapid and mainstream, and I could deal with vapid and mainstream if I thought it was a representation of what the guy standing in the batter’s box truly wanted. But it’s going to be what the frat boys in the upper deck want. And, you know, eck again.

Someone needs to use James Brown this year. He lived in Queens until 1969. That’s enough of a connection for me.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

guess where i’m going tomorrow?

BASEEEEEEEEEEEEBALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL

FLOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIIIIDDDDDDDDDAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It’s ridiculously cold, my car is still snowed in, but TBF and I are off to Port St. Lucie tomorrow evening. FINALLY!

There’s a 16 pack of AA’s for the camera, a new laptop backpack for the iBook, and I signed up for Gabcast, which will allow me to audioblog via cell phone. (This experiment may or may not be successful - we’ll see how it goes. :) ) We have free wi-fi at the hotel and a whole lot of nothing else scheduled (deliberately) so expect updates & the full spring training report while I’m gone.

And if you’re going to be in PSL, look for the sneakers!!! Which will make their debut on Friday morning.

xo
MG