Some people behaved well; some people behaved stupidly. Most importantly, Johan Santana pitched an absolute gem, and despite that, the Mets managed to win the game.

More after the jump.

Since we don’t have a plan and we’re not going to a lot of games this year, we splurged on good seats for tonight. It was nice to be on the field level for this game, although I have to say that in future we need to avoid sitting behind the dugout. I cannot deal with the incessant clamoring for balls. At the end of every inning when I’m trying to watch the players come back to the dugout or get some photographs, there is a massive wall of people in front of me.

There seems to be some rule that the closer you get to home plate, the dumber people get, and the more casual fans around you. After booing the Reyes tribute, the casual fans behind us didn’t have much to say when I asked if they didn’t like to get a raise at work and did they not think that Jose Reyes played well for us while he was here. They had to agree that, yes, well, he sure did.

As soon as the starting lineup was announced, which was immediately after the tribute video, you heard the boos. Later in the game you heard the cries of SELL OUT and HOW’S YOUR HAMMY, culminating at one point when people one section over started waving 20 dollar bills while Reyes was at bat.  That’s when this happened:

People waving $20 bills at Reyes. TBF yells “YOU DO UNDERSTAND HE WASN’T OFFERED A CONTRACT, MORONS?” gets applause.

— Caryn / metsgrrl.com (@metsgrrl) April 25, 2012

There was more applause early in the game, more than I expected, or maybe less booing than I expected. I was thoroughly disgusted at the media narrative at how “deserted” Citi Field was. I’ve had a plan that involved Tuesday games in some fashion since 2006. Citi was fuller than average for a Tuesday night in April, Jose Reyes or no Jose Reyes.

I liked the changes to the park. I think they did a good job moving in the fence. I like the new placement of the pennants, I like the new graphics on the scoreboard. Although I’m generally not a fan of sitting in the outfield, the party deck looks interesting and I think we’ll make an effort to try it out later this year.

It felt good to be back at the ballpark. We are both still so angry at the organization for different, yet similar, reasons, and it was good to know that I can still come to a game and be happy sitting in between the green and the blue and just watch baseball.

This is the first Opening Day in 5 years that I haven’t attended in person. I just can’t spare the vacation day. I thought it would be harder than it was, but it was okay, and I am glad to see that I am genuinely looking forward to Mets baseball.

We took advantage of the “please please please buy a ticket from us for Opening Day” special which gave us free tickets for Sunday. So I will see the Mets and the changes to the ballpark before my first officially ticketed game on June 1.

Things are quiet here because behind the scenes I am getting things ready to move to a new platform, and don’t want to also have to migrate a ton of new content as well. Imagine the old internet “under construction” graphic here.

Hey, look, it’s a presale code for 2012 Mets tickets!

Starting Wednesday, February 29th at 10:00 am, visit this page and use the code “HODGES”.

I will refrain from my usual comments about how the passwords and presale process are so transparent as to be useless and fail at creating any kind of feeling of urgency or exclusivity.

Well, the day has arrived. The day where the scab on the pain of losing my team, the Expos, always threatening to fall free, is ripped off entirely. The twist in my stomach and tears in my eyes because Gary Carter, more affectionately The Kid, #8, lost his battle to cancer today.

When Caryn asked me if I wanted to say anything about this, I felt myself cringe. Would it be right for me to pay homage to a man who in absolute all honesty has been on my shit list since it was revealed he was questioning entering the hall as an Expo when his time came? Should it be me to bring to mind his greatness when the last few times I pumped my fist in the air toward Carter it was the fabulous emotional cocktail of anger spiked with betrayal?

But here I am writing. Because, of course saddened when I followed the stories in the Gazette of the tumours spreading and worsening, robbing him of his life piece by piece, I didn’t realize what would happen when this inevitable end came. And it’s this: I forgive him. No, I more than forgive him. I completely forget about it, who cares, you were an Expo AND a Met, it was me, not you, Gary. I’m so sorry.

It started in the 70s when my dad took my brother and me to a lot of games. We listened to Dave Van Horne and Duke Snyder on the car radio as we ate at the Orange Julep. Springtime and summertime became baseball time. So to me, the 70s Expos are the definitive team. When I think outfield, I think Andre Dawson and Warren Cromartie. When I think infield I think Chris Speier. And more vividly than those, I think catcher and its only Gary Carter. Gary Carter signaling the pitch. Gary Carter springing up with that grin after strike 3 out 3. Gary Carter with the hair sticking out the bottom of his hat and the dimples. Young Gary Carter. Healthy Gary Carter.

That image of him in my mind’s eye has stayed true, and will remain. He was part of the team that cemented my love for baseball, the Expos, Montreal and being a Montrealer. His impressive stats and skills were something for us to all stick in our belts and boast, but that smile and joie de vivre made us swell with pride and love.

Every spring and summer I miss it. I miss it in the evenings when my radio is silent. I miss it on Sunday afternoons spent not at the Big O. I miss it, I miss it, I miss it…the hot dogs, the popcorn, the crack of the bat, the delight in yelling at the ump, the love of a team, the roar of a crowd (yes, sometimes there was a crowd). I tried to care about another team but couldn’t. I’m an Expos fan to a fault. At least I had my guys, all my guys, my 70s team to the final team. The comfort of them in the news one way or another. I had them all.

Until now. Rest in peace, Gary Carter. Like the Expos, gone far too soon. My condolences to his family, former teammates and players, Expos fans, Mets fans, baseball fans. #8, I love you. No tears in baseball? Can’t say that, anymore.

By Stephanie Segal, Montreal

RIP, Gary Carter.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Yeah, I got nothing to say. But I do have 6 years of photographs.

Vote for me, so that the Yankees and Red Sox blogs don’t win (and thanks to Matt Cerrone’s retweet earlier today, I’m beating both of them right now).

You do NOT have to register to vote!

Vote early, vote often, and thank you!

Tuesday night, I sat in the first row of the promenade reserved infield, leaned over the railing, held my breath and watched Jose Reyes on third base, a base he had obtained by getting a single and then strolling over to second on a throwing error and then, of course, stealing third base.  This was after watching Jose Reyes make the Home Run Apple light up not once but twice, improbably, impossibly, twice - once was amazing but twice just felt supersonic.

And now he was doing what he does best, which is annoy pitchers as he dances while taking a healthy lead down the baseline. He is dancing down the third base line like he is going to steal home and he totally unnerves Aroldis Chapman, flame throwing Aroldis Chapman, and the fans who are in the ballpark erupt in a cheer without aid of scoreboard idiocy and I murmur, wouldn’t that be something? In this 3/4 empty ballpark on the second to last night of the season, wouldn’t that be something?

Wouldn’t that be something, indeed.

But watching Jose Reyes play day after day for the 7 years I have personally watched Jose Reyes play day after day has been something. He is infectious and electric. As goes Reyes, so go the Mets, and as stale a cliche as it was it was also 1000% true, for better and for worse. I loved the dancing and the handshaking and the triples and the base stealing, the claw and the spotlight and the dreadlocks and Profesor Reyes teaching us spanish, I loved watching him distract pitcher after pitcher as he would take a lead and he would dance back and forth and you can throw over to first or second as much as you like, he’s going and you can’t stop him. I loved watching Air Reyes as he leapt into the air to retrieve errant balls heading into the outfield, loved watching him zoom the balls back across the infield, 6-3 or 6-4-3, you are out, and that is Jose Reyes.

“We have Jose Reyes, and you don’t,” became our watchword at one point. I have sat next to fans at road games out of town who booed him one minute and the next were telling me that they had a tshirt at home with his name and number on it. He is the player every fan disses but in the next breath talks about having on their team next year. He is the guy that drives the Phillies and their fans bananas. He is not Derek Jeter, and we do not care. We don’t want him to be Derek Jeter. We want him to be Jose Reyes, and he is.

I am not going to talk about the things that I do not love, like injuries or errors, because that is not my job, that is not what I want to write about, because that is not interesting to me, because that is not what I am going to remember, because that is not what matters. I am going to remember Jose poised just off of first base and keeping Albert Pujols or Ryan Howard or Mark Teixeira on their toes. I am going to remember Jose sitting on the top step of the dugout, standing on the top step, being the first one up to congratulate whoever was coming back to the dugout. I am going to remember Jose and David Wright, cigars in hand, coming out to the fans the night the Mets clinched the NL East.

I was lucky I was there on the second to last day and not the last day, even though we have been there for the last days since 2006. (It was a day game; work is crazy; it is a holiday week; it is dumb to have all the final games be day games; fuck the Wilpons and MLB, you’re not getting any more money.) I spent the morning being angry at the Mets for pulling Jose, and then still being angry at the Mets for letting Jose take himself out: he answers to Terry Collins, and was there no one around that could have said, hey, I get it, but there are a lot of people here today and they came to see you and maybe we can do this better than the way you are asking us to do this. I also know that no matter what happened, if Jose Reyes had taken himself out of the game because there was an accident on the Grand Central Parkway and there was a burning school bus full of orphaned children and he ran to the burning bus and singlehandedly saved each and every child all we would read was how Derek Jeter would have done it differently.  (Seriously sometimes I think the Mets front office says, “No matter how we play this we’re screwed, so fuck it, just do whatever you want, it won’t matter anyway.”)

And now I am doing the thing I didn’t want to do, which was write about the things I wasn’t interested in writing about. I do not want to write about what might happen next, because we don’t know, no one knows. I have gone from “He’ll be back” to “They don’t have the money” to a kind of calm acceptance. There is nothing I can do about it. TBF has gone through a similar continuum, but we both end at the same place, which is that it will be very hard for us to give the Mets any money for baseball tickets next year if Jose Reyes is not back.  It will be hard to go to games, it will be hard to watch games, it will be hard to watch him with whatever other colors he has on his back—and of course, there is a continuum there as well, with pinstripes and South Philly red being a fate worse than baseball death.

I scored Tuesday’s game so carefully because I wanted to make sure I had that scorecard from the last night I saw Jose Reyes as a Met. Jose Reyes made me proud to be a Mets fan, made me cheer, made me scream, made me jump, made me love baseball even more.

Buena suerte y gracias, Jose. Muchas gracias.

Dear Commissioner Selig:

Your actions at last night’s Mets-Cubs game at Citi Field on 9/11/11 were reprehensible. Not allowing the Mets players to wear the NYPD and other First Responder hats - at a meaningless game you co-opted as a platform to grandstand MLB’s relevancy - was inexcusable.

Learning that you not only denied the Mets’ official request to wear the hats, but that a MLB representative went the extra yard to confiscate them from the team at the conclusion of the pre-game ceremonies, so that no one could defy your order and do the right thing and wear them anyway, makes me ashamed to be a fan of Major League Baseball.

As a result, I will not purchase one new item of MLB clothing, whether a New Era hat, a Majestic Athletic shirt or jersey, or any other officially sanctioned MLB item, for the duration of 2011 and for the entire 2012 season, and very likely beyond that. My household could previously be counted on spending significant dollars in MLB merchandise every year; I can assure you that will no longer be the case.

Sincerely,

Caryn Rose

==

NOW WRITE YOUR OWN LETTER. You have the address. Don’t email, don’t tweet, don’t just blog about it, don’t comment, don’t sign a petition - write your own letter and put it in the mail. That will count. That will make a difference.

WORD, Largehearted Boy, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn are pleased to present a night of baseball storytelling (and free beer provided by our pals at Six Points brewery) featuring readers Jens Carstensen, Jason Diamond, David Gutowski, Sean Manning (Top of the Order, Things That Need Doing), Howard Megdal (Taking the Field), Caryn Rose (B-Sides and Broken Hearts). Attendees may be required to sit according to team affiliations.

Details here. Hope to see you there.

We knew it was bad.
We knew there were rumblings.
I had people coming to this site and posting comment after comment insisting that the Wilpons had no money problems, that to say otherwise was bullshit (and worse).
We heard the rumors that the Mets were wholesale dumping blocks of tickets with ticket brokers at deeply discounted prices, who were then recycling them through StubHub and the other broker sites, which was why there were so many cheap tickets out there for so long.

And now, this. This is just about as far rock bottom as you can get. (I was originally going to say “Even the Astros aren’t selling tickets on Groupon” but oh, yes, they are.)

As someone who still holds tickets to six games this year, it’s infuriating. Friday night against the Braves is a discount ticket? When I paid full price (at the season ticket holder discount) earlier in the year? Do you know how much it upsets me to think about the obnoxious calls to and from the Mets ticket office earlier this season, with their arrogant attitude, about why aren’t I renewing my ticket plan? 

Everything I want to say isn’t nice, isn’t polite, isn’t anything except the result of a world of anger and disappointment and misery - the same world that you are all living in. It’s not new. It’s just the bottom of the hole.

Last night I said that I was looking forward to see how the Mets were going to some how spin, obfuscate or otherwise justify the ticket price increase next year. TBF insists they wouldn’t dare. I say, just wait and see.

Six more games. I suppose we will still go, because we bought the tickets, we spent the money, and when baseball is gone for the year, I will miss baseball.

But they’re not making it easy on the fans to show up or give a damn.

But after a miserable, swift, embarrassing 10-0 shutout in Philadelphia, I do not want to see him yukking it up on social media. I just don’t. Especially not so close to the end of the game (given, that end came VERY EARLY LAST NIGHT, but still).

Is it just me? Probably.

For $41:

 
• Seating in the exclusive Big Apple Reserved section  
• $18 food and beverage credit [so essentially your ticket is $23, which is about what the Big Apple seats are worth in my opinion]  
• “Connect” T-Shirt and name tag sticker [Generic MLB shirt with Mets branding]  
• Automatically eligible for in-game Twitter giveaways during each inning

I hate the Big Apple seats and find them to be very, very overpriced, even with a $18 food and beverage credit (because they only do that because they hope that most people won’t use all $18 of theirs) and the rest of me says, “NO ONE ON AT&T WILL HAVE SIGNAL ANYWAY.”

Let’s take a look at what other teams are doing for Social Media Night.

The Phillies have done two versions of this event:

For $70:

 
• Game ticket in the Terrace Deck (Sections 430-434) [These are even worse than the Big Apple seats in my opinion]  
• A Social Media Night t-shirt  
• Admission to an exclusive catered buffet pre-game tent party  
• Access to a Q&A session with Tom McCarthy (Phillies Broadcaster), John Brazer (Phillies Director of Publicity), Todd Zolecki (MLB.com Phillies beat writer) and hosted by Scott Palmer (Phillies Director of Public Affairs)

A series of different events, priced at $26:

 
• Game ticket for the Rooftop Bleachers [Worse than the Big Apple seats]  
• $10 food and beverage credit included with your game ticket  
• A unique rally towel  
• And the chance to win prizes throughout the game!

I think the $70 was a little too pricey but at least it was interesting. The $26 version seems pretty low on value.

Cardinals:

“The Cardinals are excited to announce their first 2011 Social Media Night. The $20 price includes a T-Shirt*, Lower Left Field Box ticket and access to a pre-game Social Hour.”.

They had the best t-shirt out of all the social media night shirts: “Tweet Me In St. Louis.

$20 is the right price for this kind of event in my opinion, and these seats weren’t in the upper hinterlands. Plus, the shirt is pretty neat.

Mariners:

$23 
Includes:

• View Box seat for the game
• $5 TicketPlu$ concession stand credit (must be used on this date)
• Access to the pre-game happy hour event at the Patio at the ‘Pen
• FREE Social Media Happy Hour T-shirt!

Thanks to the crappy new MLB standard for stadium maps, I can’t even find View Box unless I know what level and section it is, so I can’t comment on the quality of the seats. It’s again in the right price point, however, and puts a focus on a happy hour where you could, you know, actually put faces to tweets.

Astros:

Tickets cost $45:

• A game ticket in the Budweiser Patio — the area contains three rows and seats a total of 108.

• A Social Media night t-shirt (and like last year, we’ll offer an array of men’s and women’s sizes)

• Dinner: what we serve will be up to the fans. We’ll invite fans to vote on three choices through Twitter, and whatever gets the most votes is what we’ll serve. We’ll also throw in kettle chips and popcorn, and a half-pint of Blue Bell Ice Cream for dessert.
• An appearance by an Astros player. For the April 16 event, Pence will join us from 5 p.m. to around 5:15 (the game starts at 6) and will help hand out prizes — autographed baseballs and other signed items — that we’ll give away during our Twitter trivia contest. The contests will be conducted solely on Twitter.

• A mix and mingle with other Social Media fans. We hope you’ll take lots of pictures and post them on your Facebook pages as well as tweet about the fabulous time you’re having with your tweeps at the game.

You can laugh at the Astros, but they were doing these events last season too, and work hard (in my opinion) to make them interesting and worthwhile. I do find the $45 price point to be a little high, but they are feeding fans and they’re having a decent player show up.

I feel like these types of events are empty unless there’s been some attempt to embrace or integrate into the existing social media community. Having a Twitter account and doing Trivia Thursdays does not equal engagement. I know, it’s New York; I know, they don’t need to do it - but I’d argue that right now, especially right now, the Mets need to hire someone to do social media engagement full time at full throttle, and give the fans a reason to feel like they are part of this team. Because we could use that right now.

From a West Coast correspondent: Carlos Beltran shirts in the AT&T Park store.

It’s just wrong.

Murphy out for the year, Reyes to the DL, and the New York Times with the breaking news that casual fans might not have a lot of reasons to go out to Citi Field.

It’s not a lot of fun right now, I’ll give you that.