The Sports Bizzo

By Christian…

So, little Bizzoteers, your friendly Bizzo staff (or at least two thirds of us) took our first business trip!

That’s right.  Our Editor-in-Chief, Toph, and his grossly underpaid and equally sporadic writer, Christian (that’s me) took a little jaunt to CitiField to watch the Cards and the Mets try not to get too distracted from all the effing advertising plastered all over this dumpy field to actually hit the ball.

Sadly, the Bizzo’s profits (all four dollars) weren’t even enough to buy us a sip of lukewarm beer.  And it’s not like we can expense this mother.  Expense it to what?  The Bizzo business credit card?  Actually, that’s a brilliant idea.  Toph/Jon-we each need a Bizzo business credit card.  Just post the #s and expiration dates below when you get them.  No need to send mine on to me.  Hell, it’s not like any of our loyal Bizzo readers would try to sabotage our savvy business model anyway and swipe that number.  How far would a $2.50 credit limit get them anyway?  Plus, you know how with Capital One you can design your own background?  Think about how great one of our hot chicks header pictures would look on it.  It’d be like an Amex Black card, only way sexier.

Anyway, where were we?  Oh yeah, we were at that great cankersore on the gaping maw of Queens, CitiField.  Hold on to your butts and settle down with a cold beer, because this is gonna be a long one.

To begin, Toph and I met up in the Big Apple and hopped on the 7 train to head out to the game.  We should have known what was in store just by the crowd that accompanied us.  Among many other heinously ugly sights, we witnessed a young Asian couple sprawled over eight seats together, playing grabass and pretending to be asleep.  I’m not sure if these two were professional contortionists or what, but the angles they got their bodies to bend to so they could feign slumber were truly remarkable.  It was like a weird, sleepy, Asian Cirque du Soleil.

As we walked down the steps from the train, we were greeted by CitiField in all of its splendor.  And by splendor, I mean a weird sort of this-doesn’t-belong-here feeling, as this ramshackle, characterless monstrosity rises up from a bed of freshly laid and already Mets-stained parking lots, surrounded by rows upon rows of dilapidated autobody and muffler shops.   You remember back in the 90s when you played SimCity and you tried to put a stadium or something near a residential neighborhood and the game would be like, “the citizens don’t want this here, it’s a bad idea?”  That had to have happened here at some point.

Doing our best to ignore the slummed-out backdrop, Toph and I entered the front gate.  We took a gander at the courtyard, if that’s what you want to call it, and couldn’t figure out for the life of us why the hell the whole thing was dedicated to Jackie Robinson.  That dude didn’t play for the Mets.  Ever.  Our best guess is that CitiField higherups were trying to capture some of that great man’s legacy and thereby make their field suck less.  FAIL.  On the upside, the souvenir shop (one of about 294 in the confines of the park) sells Mets soccer balls.  Of course they do.

Completely unimpressed by things so far, Toph and I made our way up a giant escalator to nowhere and emerged onto the mezzanine level.  And guess what?  More souvenir shops!  It’s a good five to ten minute walk before you find any food.  But don’t worry, the concession people look like monsters so you’re glad to pay the 15 bucks for a shitty dog and a pisswarm beer and get the fuck out of there.

Now, I’ll say that I bought the tickets on Stubhub and they were moderately priced.  Not great, mind you, like for SF’s ballpark where you can spend 5 bucks and sit first or third base side, but not outrageous ($30 a piece, I think).  And after taking 18 more disjointed escalators and arriving at our seats just below Heaven, we found out why.

To our great surprise and joy, Toph and I were seated on one of the upper levels in the outfield in a fucking wind tunnel.  Seriously.  We tried to eat a few peanuts and every time the shells would fly out of our hands and cover all eight fans in front of us.  Secretly, I really relished the chance to coat Muts fans with my snack debris.  But it made it damn hard to get any of those little salty gems into my mouth.

And I know what you’re thinking.  “So, you’re in a wind tunnel.  Who cares?  You’ve got a great view!”  Well, yes.  We had a great view of the opposing stands and the blinding amount of flashy, ridiculous advertising smeared all over the fucking place.  I mean, there’s nothing quite like looking at the scoreboard and seeing, on either side of it, exactly where I can purchase used construction equipment.  But as for the actual field?  No, no, my friends.  From where we were sitting, you couldn’t see left or centerfield.  At all.  And apparently this is a design feature they’ve incorporated into the entire park as when we moved around later on, you’ve almost always got an obstructed view no matter where you sit.  Stellar planning.

When Toph and I started laughing about this and wondered what the hell happened to a ball hit into the leftcenter gap, we were greeted by an atrociously ugly guy in front of us turning around and saying, “Just look at the scoreboard!  Plus, you can tell what happened by the fans reactions!”

You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.  The fans reactions?!?!?!  It’s tough to imagine a fanbase that’s more brainwashed and offensively unattractive.

We toughed it out as best we could but, before long, the beers started running low and Toph and I got a little frightened at the airplanes that fly within arm’s reach of the bleachers as they’re coming in for a landing; so much so that it looks like every single one is going to crash land into the bullpen.  On the plus side, your beer is at least 50 percent jetwash in about five minutes and that shit gets you wrecked.

So, we finally gave up and tried to find better seats.  After maneuvering around the seating Nazis (they’re like the fucking ticket-checking Gestapo they’re so serious and numerous), we finally found seats down a level that were back behind third base.  At least from here you could see the outfield, though now any grounders up the left side were totally occluded from view.  But, to our great joy, we were sitting right in front of the handicapped section and a charming couple of retarded St. Louis fans (seriously, they were actually retarded – Toph even called them that to their faces a few times) managed to blanket us in a warm covering of their own peanut shells.  Except this time, it wasn’t the wind or jet engines’ fault.  I’m not sure either of these two crippies actually got any peanuts into their droopy mouths at all because they all ended up down the back of my shirt and chest-high in our overpriced beers.

Needless to say, we gave up on these seats, too, before long, though it was to Toph’s great dismay that we had to abandon our view of the one and only hot Asian chick in the entire place.  For what it’s worth, she was jerking off her boyfriend the entire time and he looked like Ryan Church with cerebral palsy, so it wasn’t really that big of a loss.

At this point, we don’t know what the hell’s going on in the game.  And, of course, it’s not like we care because it’s the Mets, for shit’s sake.  No one except the 98 inbred fans within the confines of this stadium from hell cares what the Mets do, and even these fans don’t really give a shit.  They’re too busy figuring out how best to tuck their t-shirts into their jorts.

But we finally figure out, through sheer intuition (because it’s not like you can see the scoreboard through all the advertising), that this is a close game and maybe we should watch the finale.  So, we actually make the 53 minute escalator-riddled trek back up to the seats by the hot Asian chick.  To Toph’s delight, she’s deep-throating a hot dog and has mustard all over her pouty little lips, so it kind of made the trek worth it.

And we arrived in time to watch K-Rod get Pujols to ground out with the bases loaded and all the Muts fans in the place revel in one of the few moments of joy they’ll find in the rest of their pathetic, orange-and-blue-stained lives.  The plus side of this was that our two retarded friends were still there and continued showering us with their peanut shells, so we didn’t really have to eat for the rest of the night.  On the downside, I’m now officially allergic to peanuts.

Perhaps the best part of the night, though, was walking away from that bunghole of a ballpark knowing now that I’m totally justified in my unmitigated hatred of the Mets.  Their fans are all gremlins with tech holsters.  Their stadium is like a bad, overpriced infomercial.  And best of all?  Fernando Tatis, mister retread himself, batted cleanup.  Gotta love a lineup that couldn’t hit its way out of the NL East if it tried.

The only thing that made the entire night even mildly redeeming was the fact that we went to Rudy’s in Hell’s Kitchen, got hammered on extremely cheap beer while sitting in booths made of duct tape and watching the toilet in the men’s room boil over like the Trevi fountain, and then went to another bar close by and met a retired Atlanta Braves relief pitcher.

All in all, my incapacitating hangover let me know the Bizzo’s first business trip was a complete success.

Now if someone would just find a way to get one of those 747s flying overhead to crash into CitiField and put it and everyone in it out of their misery, all would be right with the world.

A guy can hope…