More Baseball Sadness, and the Mets Home Opener

Just days after Angels pitcher Nick Adenhart was killed in an auto accident, baseball lost two more memorable figures.

Yesterday, longtime legendary Phillies broadcaster Harry Kalas collapsed in the broadcast booth while preparing for the Phillies game in Washington, and died of heart disease. He was 73.

Kalas, who was known for his signature "Outta here!" home run call, had been the Phillies play-by-play man since 1971. He also did voice-overs for NFL Films and also called NFL games on Westwood One Radio. Kalas, however, will forever be remembered for his home run calls, specifically his calls on Mike Schmidt home runs, where he would call out Schmidt's full name - Michael Jack Schmidt.

Kalas was inducted into the Broadcaster's Wing of Baseball's Hall of Fame in 2002. He is survived by his wife and three children, including Todd, who is a broadcaster for the Tampa Bay Rays.

Later in the day, former All-Star pitcher Mark Fidrych, who gained notoriety for his antics on the pitching mound during his five years in the majors in the late 1970s, all with Detroit, was found dead on his farm in Massachusetts in an apparent accident while he was working on his truck. He was 54.

Fidrych, known as "The Bird" because of his resemblence to Sesame Street's Big Bird, was the AL's 1976 Rookie of the Year. Some of Fidrych's more popular antics was talking to the baseball, and himself, while on the mound, and grooming the mound between pitches.

Meanwhile, the Mets officially opened their new ballpark, Citi Field, on Monday night, to much criticism by Met fans, as heard on WFAN all afternoon, not to mention history being made to start the game, and losing the game in unusual fashion.

While the park looks fantastic from the outside, resembling old Ebbets Field, there were a ton of complaints about the park on the inside, such as sight line issues, including people unable to see parts of the field from their seats because the seats are at an odd angle, and some complaining they couldn't see any of the scoreboards in the park. Another popular complaint included people saying they couldn't see the ball on fly balls from their seats.

From watching the game on TV, the park, particularly the field, looks big from overhead, much in the same way PETCO Park in San Diego looks. It looks like a cross between PETCO and San Francisco's A&T Park, maybe with a hint of Citizens Bank Park in Philly or Great American Ballpark in Cincy, with large field dimensions. The park was already gaining some comparisons to being just another big concrete park, which doesn't bode well for the Mets as they just moved out of a noisy dump that was basically a big concrete cookie-cutter cylander block.

Maybe the Mets owners should have let architects design the park instead of trying to do it themselves. Way to go, Mets! You've got yourself an $800MM mess after just one game!

As for the game itself, the Padres' Jody Gerut christened the new park by hitting a lead-off homerun, the first time a lead-off hitter as ever opened a new park with a homerun. But the strangeness came when the Padres got what would prove to be the game-winning run on a balk by Mets reliever, Pedro Feliciano, in the sixth inning.

This is already starting to resemble 2007 and 2008 for the Mets, which bodes even worse for them and their fans than the early complaints about Citi Field. OKay, maybe not, but it's fun to make fun of stuff like this, isn't it?!