Pour Me Another One, My Good Man!

Blogging at you Live, from Citi Field tonight as the Mets are wooing the Baseball Muse before starting their series with the Diamondbacks. It's a rare Friday night appearance for me, and even rarer still that I'm present when they're giving something away. Tonight is Collector Cup Night, where all the hearty fans are treated to this little plastic cup.

Back in those Halcyon days known as the 1990s, and even through the 2000s, up until Shea Stadium closed, the Collector Cup used to be rather prevalent at Mets games. Every time you bought a souvenir soda, you got a cup. I liked the cups. I have a reasonable collection of them at home. They used to have the season schedule on them, and on special games, like the Subway Series, they even had extra special collector cups.

When the Mets moved into Citi Field in '09, the collector cups were still around. But they had changed. They were smaller, and made of a harder plastic. There was supposedly a series of three collector cups for '09, but for some reason, I've only ever seen one of them. Even worse, when I ran them in the dishwasher, the color on the cups faded out into a disgusting yellowy mess. Nonetheless, a collector cup is a collector cup.

But something disturbing happened beginning in 2010. The cups vanished! No more collector cups were to be had at Citi Field. Nobody seemed to notice, or at least nobody seemed to be up in arms about it that I could tell. But I noticed. It made me less likely to buy a soda, since now it just came in a dopey paper cup that fell apart. This trend has continued ever since, with the only plastic cups around being for beer, mostly useless and not collectible. All we have now are these promotion dates for our Mets cups. It's just not the same.

Hasn't someone written a letter to someone important about this? Where have the cups gone?!