Unseen

The announced attendance for last night's game was 37,312, which I can immediately tell you is total bullshit because having sat through last night's game, I'm pretty sure there were about 9-10,000 people in the ballpark, tops. Absolute tops.

What we witnessed fortunately went by moderately quick.

Even the lure of Free Hot Dogs wasn't bringing people out on this night. Nope. I went with a colleague of mine (not the infamously insane screaming colleague, a different colleague) and he was absolutely dumbfounded when we got to our seats, looked around, and saw that nobody was there. There were so few people at this game that even the line at Shake Shack was manageable. After much internal debate, I did decide to go to El Verano Taqueria for my pregame meal, and for the first time, I felt somewhat let down. The food was just fine, however the taco shells appeared to be somewhat stale. Not so that it ruined the experience, mind you, but enough to notice. I suppose we can only hope that the quality of the food is not going to begin to mimic the quality of the team. I still have 2 games left to go to this season.

The game was a blur. Much like most of the games I've attended this season. I seem to have an "Every other year" thing, where one year, every game I go to is great and the Mets win a lot, and then the next year, everything sucks. It's been like that for about 6 years now, and this year is, quite obviously, a down year. I've been to 14 games and the Mets are 4-10, including 7 losses in a row. This is unfathomable to me. I've had bad seasons (7-11 in 2005, 8-11 in 2007), but none have matched this year as far as abject suckitude. It seems like every game, the Mets are down 2-0 or 4-0 before they even come to bat, and usually it gets to about 6-0 before the Mets are cognisant that there's a game going on and maybe they should think about playing. Of course, that's what happened last night. Dan Uggla, who, like most of the Marlins I'm just totally sick of, beat out a bad throw from Wright on what could have been an inning ending DP in the first, instead of a scoreless inning, a run is in and we continue, and, as if on cue, Cody Ross hit a 3-run HR, and that was the game right there. Everyone wants to blame the Stadium, it seems, but it's not the stadium. It's the team. When you look defeated, you will be defeated, over and over again.

Then, there was the Hot Dogs. I should start by mentioning that, for the first time, I went to a game at Citi Field and there were concession stands in the Promenade Level that were closed. It was like those Halcyon Days back at Shea when the stands way out in the Upper Deck were almost always closed. But I digress. Given that the vendors at best could have expected 20,000 people at the game last night (no way in hell were 40,000 going to show up for a dopey free Hot Dog) and probably got about half that, why, then, when I went down to a concession stand in the 7th inning, was I told that I would have to wait 10 minutes for a Hot Dog? And there wasn't particularly a large amount of people around waiting for one. Fortunately, I went to another concession stand that had plenty of Hot Dogs. Only this team could hold a Free Hot Dog promotion, get a tiny crowd, and still only be marginally prepared for it. Hell, I would have just kept the coupon for the Free Hot Dog and used it at the next game had it not said "ONLY VALID SEPTEMBER 9."

I shouldn't complain, really. That Free Hot Dog was probably the high point of the game.