After spending an evening at the Mets new ballpark for the Phillies first game there, I’ve got some early thoughts about the game, the park, and the Phillies fans who showed up.

1. I plan on writing a more detailed post regarding Citi Field, complete with pics of some specific isses from my perspective, but here is the Cliff’s Notes version.

It isn’t nearly as well designed as Citizens Bank Park, on so many levels. This is not homerism. There are other ballparks that are superior to Citizens Bank Park, including PNC Park in Pittsburgh. This is simply the comparing of one park to another.

Citi Field is a bloated, disorganized, overly modern mess that caters to New York elites who wouldn’t know a bunt from a balk. There were scores of empty seats, most notably the more expensive ones. The average hard core fan has been marginalized in this park. Mets ownership should be embarrassed at the inability to sell this park out despite the reduced capacity vs. Shea Stadium. There were several thousand Phillies fans in attendance as well. Weak.

The out of town scoreboard is above the highest seats in left field, and you need a telescope to see it. The bullpen is covered by tarps. You cannot see the game from behind home plate unless you have grossly overpaid for a seat, or are enjoying the game from The Ebbets Club for $150 a pop. The concourse is completely closed off to the field from behind home plate, and walking through that area is tantamount to being in a hospice. But at least the wine and cheese crowd can drink a nice Shiraz while watching some baseball.

2. There were a lot of Phillies fans in attendance. The vast majority were well behaved and seemed to be coexisting just fine with the enemy.

That said, I was shocked at several vocal groups of utterly obnoxious Phillies fans who walked through the concourse (in large groups of course) with the express intention of taunting Mets fans. Some did E-A-G-L-E-S chants, others let young an old know that the Phillies were “World Fucking Champs”. Others were choking themselves (not hard enough) to every Met fan they saw.

I was surprised at the restraint shown by Mets fans. They did a pretty good job of ignoring these bozos.

Listen, Mets fans have a right to come to Citizens Bank Park, and vice versa. Folks complain about how annoying Mets fans are when they come to Philly, but I have never seen groups of Mets fans seemingly looking to get their asses kicked in our park in such a blatant fashion.

Bottom line: you can go to Citi Field and wear a Phillies jersey and act like a normal human being. Everyone knows that we won the World Series. Marching through the concourse with 20 of your closest friends and yelling “World Fucking Champs!” is just a little unnecessary. I know we haven’t won all that often, but let’s act like we’ve been there before.

3. I was standing on the lower level concourse when Pedro Feliz inexplicably threw to first to try and get Fernando Tatis out in the bottom of the 7th. The only thing I can imagine he was thinking was….absolutely nothing. You could very easily tell from where I was standing that even a perfect throw was not going to get Tatis.

Feliz should have eaten that ball, and allowed Chad Durbin to try and get out of the inning unscathed. Even a single by the next batter wouldn’t have guaranteed a run by the Mets with the slowish Carlos Delgado on second, which is where he’d have been had Feliz not thrown the ball away.