(the view from row 4, Section 436 of Citi Field, Monday, April 13, 2009)
OK, the above headline has been employed before and with good reason. Not only did the Mets sell obstructed view seats at regular (ie. obscene) prices during Citi Field’s inaugural season, but they proceeded to ignore complaints from the same fans they’d repeatedly harassed about buying tickets. When the firestorm of criticism grew, a highly unconvincing liar was dispatched to spew the company line — that Citi’s crap seats were in fact, a byproduct of the venue’s “cozy” configurations (and actually being able to witness the action down below was surplus to requirements).
In Tuesday’s NY Times, Ken Belson noted the club have ‘fessed up that seats like those shown above do not, in fact, guarantee decent sightlines, an admission Faith & Fear In Flushing’s Greg Prince likens to “a sea change”
It’s really quite substantial: an acknowledgment by the typically admit-nothing Mets that what they’re selling isn’t close to perfect, even if took them a year to nod toward the reality that everyone else discovered upon trying to take in the entire outfield from any given seat in Promenade. I assumed the Mets would instead dig their heels in deeper and insist that these were actually the best tickets you could purchase; my wife came up with a fantastically Metsian term for the areas from which you couldn’t clearly make out the left fielder: Vantage Point Seating. We expected to receive a brochure hyping it as New For 2010.
Rebuilding is something the Mets do clumsily when it comes to their roster, so I guess it’s not surprising that building a grandstand (and a case for its drawbacks) would befuddle them. At the very least, they can label the tickets with a proper warning. And they’ve done that.