San Francisco Giants @ New York Mets (2)

Today, I had seats in the Metropolitan Gold section, which is right behind the Mets' dugout on the first base side. I'm at the far end of the dugout, in the 4th row. This also means I can use the VIP entrance at the Seaver gate, named after Met pitching great Tom Seaver, whose bust is on display in the lobby area where you wait for the lift to take you up to your level - oddly, I have to go up to the third level - which is "Field Level"! Then you walk down through the rows of seats to get to the front.

As you can see, I had an excellent view from my seat. The crowd was about the same as it was last night. However, as the game went on, people kept turning up and sitting in the seats at the front, and then leaving an inning or two later and other people then came. Perhaps I should not have bothered paying for a good seat but just gone in and sat wherever I liked as well!

I had an excellent side on view for right-handed batters, such as the Giants' catcher and star Buster Posey. Matt Cain started and went 7.2 innings, leaving only on when the Mets finally put a run on the board with a sacrifice fly, after a throwing error by Posey, to finish with just the one unearned run and a 3 run lead with just over 100 pitches. I suspect that the Giants' manager, Bruce Bochy, did not want to use Romo again today, so asked Casilla to close out the game instead, which he wasn't able to do. With the tying run coming to the plate, Romo was summoned and eventually, after a lot of tension, gave up the winning hit. Just before the winning hit, the Mets' third base coach and the runner had, between them, just decided not to try to score the tying run on a fly ball to right field, much to the displeasure of many of the Mets fans in the crowd. However, the Giants' right fielder, Hunter Pence, is one of the best at throwing out runners from the outfield and he had made an excellent throw that would have cut down the runner at the plate and lost the Mets the game.

Being near to first base, I could get good pictures of the runners and fielders there. Here is Brandon Belt, having just reached base, with Lucas Duda of the Mets fielding. The Giants' first base coach Roberto Kelly.

I nearly got a Mets T-shirt during one of the T-shirt Tosses. Here's a picture of Mr Met with his T-shirt shooter - it's really powerful and can fire T-shirts into the upper deck of the stadium!