You can read all the opening day impressions here.
Jack Flynn attended the opener at Shea today.

Opening Day at Shea Stadium is a lot like taking the ugliest girl in your high school to the Senior Prom. For that one special day, when she’s wearing a nice dress, has some makeup on and has her hair done nicely, you almost forget just how bad she looks like the rest of the time.
Unfortunately, you can only do so much with the big ballpark in Queens these days. Shea is 40 years old now and she’s not aging well at all. It doesn’t help that the organization isn’t exactly bending over backwards to try make the stadium more aesthetically pleasing either; sure, the usual bunting was hanging from the rafters and the grass was sharply cut as always, but the seats are still dirty, the bathrooms are even worse and the scores of exposed rafters give the stadium the feel of an abandoned warehouse.
You’re really not getting the Shea Experience unless you’re sitting in a small, dirty seat that’s not even facing home plate as the wind whips in from Flushing Bay hard enough to chill your bones. Sure, you could go wait on line for 25 minutes to enjoy watered down tap beer and some of the worst ballpark food in baseball (I’ve visited 14 stadiums in the last three years, so I know from what I speak), but you’d only be making things worse. At some point you’ll have to visit the bathrooms, which are either impossibly crowded, stomach-churningly disgusting or simply flooded out and unusable.
In case I’m being too subtle here, let me be more blunt – I still love the Mets, but a visit to Shea Stadium is a terrible experience. Everything about a Mets game in Flushing is infuriating to any fan who expects some justification for the exorbitant ticket prices. But hey, the Mets smacked Mike Hampton and the Braves around on the way to a 10-6 victory today, so all is well in Wilpon-land!
It was a gray, chilly day in Queens and the demeanor of the parking lot attendants reflected the weather as they took $10 to pay for stadium parking. The parking lot was already a mess as the tailgaters were out in full force; I’m thinking the place will be all cleaned up by mid-July. By the time I got to my seat, it was just about time for the first pitch to be thrown. Unfortunately, when I got there I recoiled in horror – none of the seats in the section had been cleaned since (presumably) the end of last season and all featured a sickening layer of dust and grime on each one. This was a new low even for Shea – how do you not power wash every seat at least once in the offseason!?
Having attended roughly 200 Mets games in the last 15 years, I know better than to eat any of the food, but it was Opening Day and it would’ve been simply un-American of me not to have a few $6.25 beers. Big mistake. Of the 50,000 people in the stadium, 40,000 of them were men who also wanted to show how patriotic we were, and the lines to the men’s room were (I’m not kidding) close to 100-deep by the third inning. Another curious quirk of Shea is that it features nearly twice as many ladies’ rooms and mens’ rooms, which certainly didn’t help matters. By the end of the game, at least two mens’ rooms had to be closed because the plumbing had failed and water was streaming from the bathrooms. Lovely, I know.
Lest you think there weren’t any positives, I should mention that there were some minor improvements worth noting, especially the new scoreboards in right field and along the foul lines. They look more like silent radio now and are now longer reliant on the individual flash bulbs that are still used to display the out of town scores. Two other features are also nice additions – the scoreboards in left and right field now picture a head shot of each player next to their names and the main scoreboard keeps a pitch count with balls and strikes included.
In the end, these minor cosmetic improvements don’t obscure the fact that Shea Stadium may well be the ugliest and dirtiest open-air park in major league baseball. It doesn’t help that the surrounding neighborhood is a jungle of auto-body shops and expressways and has about as much charm and ambiance as a demilitarized zone. There is no franchise in baseball, with the possible exception of the Expos, in more dire need of a new stadium than the Mets. Don’t hold your breath – unless you’re entering one of the bathrooms, that is!

I first visited Shea Stadium in 1970. I remember my dad really liking it. Unlike Yankee Stadium at the time, there were no obstructed seats. In fact, they used to boast that there wasn’t a bad seat at Shea. Of course, we were there with the Cub scouts, so my Dad and George Shawah spent the game taking the boys back and forth to the bathroom, because the den mothers couldn’t. The Braves were in town that day, so I got to see Henry Aaron play. Unfortunately, he didn’t get the ball out of the infield. It’s sad to see a park that was once considered a jewel fall into such disrepair.