American McCarver

Just to prove that we here at American McCarver Industries could cover the other baseball team in New York, I flew there earlier this week to catch the Monday game at Citi Field. This was a Marlins/Mets make up game from a rainout in May and it had all the hallmarks of a Monday night just-get-this-over-with kind of game. Book of Mormon it wasn’t.

While neither team has a particularly bad record, both are 10+ games out in the extremely competitive NL East.  The Mets are just plain a mess. Putting aside ownership issues, the team has seen more than its share of injuries — anyone who can hit is on the DL with the exception of Carlos Beltran who just had the flu. Designated late inning Giants killer (but otherwise useless) Scott Hairston was batting 4th and then he got injured during his first at-bat. The Mets clearly needed the day off and weren’t getting it.

Although the Marlins have the worse record, they’ve looked like the better team all year. In fact except for the Posey Curse, they might be in contention right now. Oh, and Hanley Ramirez. He’s kind of a jerk. But otherwise, the Marlins looked like a team that was still playing baseball.

The only people less in the game than the Mets would have to have been the Mets fans. Citi Field was empty, we estimated maybe 10,000 people at first pitch. It was kind of bleak and the predicted game time thunderstorms didn’t help any.

This was my fourth trip to Citi Field and I’m always amazed at how much bigger the park feels versus AT&T, even though the two stadiums seat approximately the same number of people. Citi has seats everywhere you look and is cut up into so many different sections that it just seems big. It plays big — we saw more than one pop out that would have been a home run even at the most unfriendly-to-hitter parks. The air was so thick with humidity that no one was going long anyway.

The rains did come around 8th inning and everyone was hoping they’d call it quickly (the Marlins were up 4-0). The Mets did have a 9th inning rally that might have turned into something but ended up as a 4-1 loss with only a Jason Bay sacrifice fly to give the Mets any offense. None of the few fans left by the 9th were surprised by the outcome but at least the subway was empty.

My biggest take away, beyond the fact that Mets games are not worth seeing this year, is that a Concrete is a bad thing to order “for the road” after a sweaty night drinking beer and watching crappy baseball. It was the only thing I was still tasting the next morning.