We left home today with our GPS system [we named her Darlene], and our radar detector [named Willy], and they guided us successfully to Shea Stadium in Queens, NY.  We did have some traffic, but we still managed to get a decent parking space, in a wooded area, on the grass, outside of Shea.  We got a cop to take our picture outside the stadium, then we went in to take pictures from a lot of different angles.  Since we've been to Shea already, this wasn't a novel experience. But we still felt like we were on a road trip, taking pictures of everything, paying attention to the stadium architecture, nature of the fans, food, scoreboard, and field appearance.  Shea isn't the nicest stadium, to say the least [check out our ratings in the stats section].  But, Met fans are some of the most knowledgeable and passionate of all baseball fans.  It pains us to say this, but we have to give credit where credit is due.  The Mets are also an exciting team to watch this year; the Yankees... ugh.  At least the first home run hit for our fund [2 were hit by the way] was by a struggling Hideki Matsui. 

Pettitte started out shaky, but calmed down to pitch a pretty nice game.  7 innings, 3 runs... you would expect a $200 million team to be able to score enough to give him the win.  Oliver Perez thought otherwise, as Neal said throughout "they make all lefties look like Sandy Koufax this year." He got the win after going 7 2/3 innings and only giving up 5 hits and 2 runs.

We sat directly behind home plate, but it was the second to last row in the whole stadium.  Nice perspective, but still very far... so we moved in the middle of the 6th. We went to sit with Alon's cousin David Mass. Since we were keeping score [and we will do this every game, along with getting a beer, eating a hot dog, buying a program, and a sticker for our sign], we needed to run down so that we didn't miss a pitch... but since Shea stadium is so confusing, we ended up having to run all the way down to the ground level, and then come back up to the loge level.  This impacted its architectural ratings, as you will see... and we unfortunately missed one batter.  At least we got some good exercise. 

The game was great, from a baseball standpoint, though it was extremely short [thankfully, since it was frigid outside]... 2 hours, 18 minutes.  56,337 people in attendance [98.1% full]. 

After the game, we got out pretty quickly, which was good considering the attendance.  We stopped off at Shop Rite to get a cooler and beer for tomorrow's Preakness Stakes at Pimlico Park, in Baltimore, MD.  See you all there!