Not overwhelmed. Not underwhelmed. Just whelmed at the moment. And cold. Very cold.

I have now been to my 33rd Major League ballpark to watch a Major League Baseball game, Citi Field, home of the New York Mets in Flushing, Queens. I cannot offer a definitive judgment of how much I love it or how little I like it because I really don't know yet…”yet” being the key phrase. I may not know for sure for quite a while, and that is a very fair way to take Citi Field: slowly.

We don't have to decide right off the bat whether it's the most beautiful sight our eyes have ever seen (which is what Rudy's father called Notre Dame Stadium in Rudy) or whether it's an overpriced, overwrought pile of bricks (which is what I feared from the moment it was etched into our future plans). It's not the greatest thing ever, it's by no means terrible. It is not going out on a limb to refer to it as not bad. Very nice would also do as a placeholder.

The shock of there being no Shea is dissipating quickly. The LIRR, like the Subway system, has eliminated its Shea Stadium stop, opting instead for Mets/Willets Point. That redesignation felt more appropriate than ever when I got off the train, climbed the steps, turned to pace the boardwalk and saw Citi Field on the right, nothing on the left. I somehow expected there to be two parks where there was only one. Oh yeah, I reminded myself, there's not.

My last living remnant of Shea, so to speak, was a pair of rainchecks from September 12, 2008, a horrible night when I was horribly sick. The fine print said they could be exchanged this season or next, meaning last season or this, even with Shea Stadium a goner and Citi Field allegedly in demand. I took my unused tickets to the advance ticket window (it's along the path to the Left Field Gate, FYI) and expected to be hassled. I wasn't. I put their value toward a game in May. Now I have no more tickets to Shea. Why would I?

Finally, I had to make a phone call. With Alex Anthony's warnings about what I could and couldn't take into the Jackie Robinson Rotunda blasting in my ear, I needed a little quiet, so I made my call from the quietest spot in the Citi Field complex: the Shea Stadium outfield, specifically the part that is gravel en route to it being paved. I figured sooner or later I'd stroll over there, so may as well get it out of the way now. Do you know what it was like standing in what I believe to have been short center field at Shea Stadium?

It was like standing in an unpaved area of the parking lot. When I got done with my call, I turned around and headed for the only ballpark on the premises.

Having used the Right Field Gate for the exhibition and the Rotunda for the workout, I tried Left Field on for size (and am testing the Orosco banner for a meetup on Sunday — Gate Jess-E, if you will). I was waiting to be told by the man in red or green, I forget which, that I was doing something wrong by carrying exactly the kind of stuff I've always carried into Mets games. But no, what I was carrying was fine. I was fine. The man in green or red was fine (though I had the sense he really wanted to be cranky). I was through the Left Field Gate and up an escalator and, once more, though this time for keeps, I was inside Citi Field.

Not as weird as it was for the Red Sox game on April 3. Not weird at all. But crowded. Teeming from the Left Field Gate out to center. I thought an hour before first pitch might win me some latitude toward some of the more popular concessions, but forget it. I wondered for all the celebrated width of concourses why it was so tough to get around. Because people were doing what I was doing: searching for something to buy and in no hurry to decide what they would choose. I wound up back at the World's Fare Market and opted for the Cuban Sandwich and Garlic Fries (with half of the latter falling to the ground in a play at the plate, tagged out by some combination of the cashier, my receipt and me).

The Citi Field Cuban Sandwich, in case you're wondering, is bleeping awesome. If somebody wants to tell me they don't go to baseball games for Cuban Sandwiches, I'll retort that they'll play the game whether you have one or not. I bitched mightily for three dozen seasons that Mets games lacked all but a smidge of Japanese food for edibles. I will appreciate what's good now that it's on tap.

That was just the preamble, or pre-ramble. There was still a matter of swinging through the Field Level to get back to the escalator en route to the Promenade on that side of the Citi. Yes, I could have gone upstairs in right field, but I'm still in that fascination stage with the Field Level, which is actually pretty unfascinating to walk through between the bases as there's no view of the field and, you may have heard, no sign of the home team's history to dwell upon. To be fair, I wasn't thinking “where's the Mets museum?” at that point. I was thinking “more people?”

The real purpose of Citi Field is not the dinner menu or how construction necessitated a whole new parking lot but watching the Mets. Section 527, Row 7 would be the key to whether my first official impression was a dream date or a dud. It wasn't a dud, but everything you've been hearing about obstructed views is true enough. From seven rows up, the left field line is a rumor. Not a little, but a lot. There's still a whole infield and a lot of outfield to garner your attention, but there's enough fair territory blocked by concrete to make you wonder how three years of planning and building missed or, more likely, dismissed this little detail.

Before the game got underway and I settled in, my overriding thought was how small this place is. Never mind intimate. It's small. It's smaller than Citizens Bank. It's smaller than new Busch. It's bigger than Wiffle Park at Chapman Yards, but that's only got eight seats and its one club (the back porch) requires no special ticket. It's not a criticism to identify Citi Field as relatively minute. It's an observation. After a lifetime of large, this felt tiny. I spent a while looking for the rest of the stadium. It wasn't there. This is all we get.

The good news is pitch by pitch, minute by minute, it all felt a little less strange. I adapted to Citi Field in person better than I've been adapting to it on television. You look toward the pitcher and the batter and it's a Met versus an opponent. That's not strange. You've got Mets fans sitting around you. That's not strange. The scoreboards and such…a little strange because they are so different from their predecessors, but by the eighth as opposed to the second, they were the scoreboards where the Mets played. And by the eighth, I was as cold as I'd ever been at a baseball game in Flushing.

That's why Row 7 of Section 527 couldn't hold my host Sharon (by providing admission to my official debut at Citi Field, she became Camp Avnet for this millennium) and me. First we were gonna get a hot beverage and come back. Then the line was long and it was growing colder. Colder and windier. I'm almost certain this space in Flushing Meadows Corona Park is more frigid than our previous space in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. I'm bringing a thermometer next time to check for evidence. Anyway, once Sharon got coffee and I got pudding (Kozy Shack survived the move), we decided to try our luck in those generally unattended seats that are scattered about, presumably intended for the differently abled. Well, there was nothing marking them as forbidden and nobody had claimed them and, most importantly, nobody was stopping us, so we sat down in two of them for an inning. And an inning became three innings or so. It was there we watched Ramon Castro validate his presence on the roster. It was there we felt a legitimate “Let's Go Mets!” rise from this shoebox of a ballpark. It was there I grew used to watching the Mets come back on the Padres at Citi Field or at least try their half-assiest.

We shifted our act to the right field Field Level corner for the ninth, partly to get a jump on the exit after we managed a rousing come-from-behind walkoff victory and partly because of the shock that you can do that at Citi Field. In a way this was self-defeating because I wanted to experience the game as a regular game, watching it mostly from my assigned seat. But this is Citi Field, where you're allowed to roam, so it's hard to resist the temptation. It's April; it's cold; we roamed where we wanted, standing still long enough to watch Carlos Delgado — he who bombed Jake Peavy in the first — stand still and take a pitch that was too close to argue to close out the night.

Except for two homers, the game totally, totally sucked. We lost to Chase Headley & Co., which was hard to ignore, even on this personally historic occasion. But I gained a little more feel for the ballpark that will be mine even as the feeling in my legs began to grow icy by the sixth. I'd like to try Citi Field when it's more familiar and less frigid. I'd like to see the line score next to Mets overshadow whatever's above it, too. Until then, everything's pretty good, not bad, generally incomplete. That'll be filled in eventually. For now, I can fill in this:

It's just the first line in The Second Log, the first night of the rest of my Metgoing life. More whelm presumably to come.

How did we get to Citi Field? Retrace our steps through Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.

I've felt the strangest sensation this week that I'm watching neutral-site games. It feels like those March mornings when I struggled to stay awake as the Mets and Cubs visited Tokyo to open the 2000 season. Even a little like the time Dallas Green led his ragtag troops to Monterrey as guests of the Padres in '96 (though nobody from San Diego has copped to nausea or Snickers bars this time around). Everybody in 42 was weird enough last night, but at least that gave me instinctive flashbacks to Butch Huskey hitting and Ron Taylor pitching — no kidding, I actually thought both at stray, inattentive moments. But the place where the Taylors and Huskeys were suddenly activated, on TV…where the hell was that?

My two preseason trips inside Citi Field blessed me with a touch of working knowledge about what's where when actually there, which will come in very handy tonight for my regular-season debut (FYI, a new Log has been secured for the occasion). I'm glad I got my walkarounds in two weekends ago because I don't want navigation to be shrouded in mystery tonight. I want to watch the game. I think I know how to do that.

Yet watching on television is far more bizarre than I would have imagined. And that's where I'll be taking in most of the Citi Field action for the rest of my life. I won't have to worry about a Mets museum being constructed in some far-off nebulous future when I'm looking in from home since I live in something of a Mets museum (albeit amid a mostly uncatalogued collection), but getting a feel that I'm watching the Mets where they play is going to take some doing.

I had Extra Innings on my digital cable for five years partly for the thrill of watching clubs in their new surroundings. I loved the peeks at the parks that opened between 2003 and 2007. It was fascinating to ascertain “wow, Kentucky sure is close to where the Reds play” or “too bad the Philadelphia skyline isn't closer to Citizens Bank” or “who knew there was a city in San Diego?” I've watched the Mets play twice at home on SNY and all I can think — after incidental exposure to the black fence, the brick backstop, the powerful lights and everything else on the camera picks up — is “where the hell is this being televised from?”

Time will take care of that, as I imagine it will all of our concerns that can be achieved via addition as opposed to renovation. During my dry runs at Citi, I saw how one couldn't see all from certain angles. That'll be a tough fix. It is, however, the nature of the Mets fan to adapt. We adapt to surroundings, we adapt to disappointment, we adapt to devastation. Then we queue up and ask for more.

When Stephanie and I attended the open workout, with thousands of other Mets fans happy to be in our new venue on the eve of our new season, all of us wearing our old colors (blue and orange, in case anyone's forgotten), I was thinking we're either the most loyal people in the world or the biggest chumps in captivity. The Mets, as has been well documented, pulled one of the most Amazin' choke job in baseball history the September before last. They replicated the feat to a certain degree a year later. Both times made us miserable and angry and swearing that we couldn't take it anymore. April 2009 has arrived, and we're gonna take it; yes, we're gonna take it…as long as we can find it and afford it.

Paid attendance last night was 35,581. Pretty good by traditional standards for the second chilly date of the season. Lowest home gate since May 2, 2007. That's not a function of Mets fans not coming. That's a function of building it small and thereby assuring not as many will come. But that's just another quirk to grow accustomed to. It's a brave new Met world on TV, a brave new Met world in person. Still, I feel that old sensation of leaning forward toward 7:10 tonight. Some things never change.

Oh, we Mets fans…read all about us in Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.

We're all of us — players, announcers, staff and fans — trying to figure out how Citi Field plays. But this much is for sure: It plays weird.

Two days after the inaugural saw a lead-off home run, a normally reliable outfielder drop a fairly routine fly ball, a speedster overslide second, a fine spot of middle relief spoiled by a two-out balk, and a cat on the field, there was poor Edward Mujica playing Human Turnstile at home plate on one of the nuttier plays I've seen, a 10-second tragicomedy starring one perplexed reliever, two small Dominican middle infielders and baseballs going here, there and everywhere.

Ball gets by Hundley! Here comes Castillo to the plate! Hundley throws it past Mujica! Mujica and Castillo are tangled up! Reyes coming around third! Throw by Gonzalez gets by Mujica! Reyes scores!

If you're scoring at home that's … oh, just draw a big hairball or a cross-eyed clown face or something. Mujica looked tired and dispirited when it was over, and who could blame him? David Wright looked vaguely confused, and who could blame him? If you'd told him 10 seconds before, when there were runners on first and third, that he would not hit the ball, that no throw would be made anywhere but to home plate, and that when the next pitch was thrown those runners would be gone … he might have concluded the Rapture was nigh because, really, how much less likely was that than what actually happened? (And, of course, everybody was wearing 42 and Oliver Perez was good. Because things weren't confusing enough.)

That cheerful bit of tomfoolery aside, we got to see balls find various other parts of the yard, from Adrian Gonzalez' Modell's special to Carlos Delgado's second-deck blast off poor Luis Perdomo, facing his first batter in the big leagues. (Sorry, kid.) Daniel Murphy had a rough night in left, letting a runner tag up from first and doing whatever that was involving Reyes and Wright and a runner who should have been out at home, while Gary Sheffield (the man on the other flank of a presumably jittery Carlos Beltran) was blissfully unexposed. I think I speak for all Met fans when I say I felt a lot happier once Ryan Church and Jeremy Reed were on patrol.

Anyway, Mets win. Rachel Robinson looks better at 86 than I did at 26, no cats were frightened in the course of events, and no fans in the front row wound up in a Padre catcher's headlock. (Though if Nick Hundley had throttled that douchebag who spent three entire innings waving on his cellphone, I would have sent him a case of beer.)

All in all, not a bad night's work. Though after these first two games, can Thursday possibly be any stranger?

Jack Fisher throws one to Jesse Gonder

We've only just begun

“I obviously have great memories of Shea on the field and in the clubhouse, but this is quite an upgrade,” David Wright told reporters before the first exhibition game at Citi Field on April 3. “And I think it’s good for us mentally, too, to get a clean slate. There’s a lot of energy and excitement surrounding the new field and with that comes a new attitude where we can put the last couple of years aside and focus on this year.”

This year is already in focus, but considering the home season is only now at hand, there's one last chance to reflect on there where we used to stand without any other structure obstructing our view. So many images from the final week in the life of Shea Stadium stay with me…

There's too many Cubs fans.

There's the threat of rain.

There's rain.

There's a broken bat that bats a ball after the ball has broken the bat of Johan Santana.

There's Johan Santana coming back three days later and missing bats altogether.

There's invigorating cameos from Robinson Cancel and Ramon Martinez.

There's quiet disappearance for Damion Easley.

There's Pedro Martinez dramatically exiting.

There's Jose Reyes scoring.

There's Daniel Murphy standing on third.

There's David Wright not doing anything about it.

There's an evening in the picnic area that goes from sublime to ant-covered.

There's a Carlos Delgado grand slam going to waste.

There's Marlins crawling under our skin.

There's Carlos Beltran homering.

There's Wes Helms and Dan Uggla doing the same.

There's that damn bullpen gate.

There's booing and shrieking and laughing and crying.

There's Shea Stadium, its final bows. A 3-4 week. A win shy of continuation. A benediction for the ages. A sweet-sorrow parting. Those images will fade but they will never fully dissolve. I'd say the same for the 36 seasons I went to Shea.

But now, the next place.

Bring on Citi Field. Bring on that clean slate David Wright has been talking up. Bring on the now. What's past is past. The past endures, but in a spot set a little further back from where it sat before. It's not first row center anymore. No point pretending that it is.

The single most undeniable fact of Met life in 2009 is, as of this evening, our team plays its home games at Citi Field. I like watching our team play. Hence, I now greet the opening of Citi Field with nothing but enthusiasm. I count the hours until it transforms from the subject of speculation to a matter of record. I can't wait for the list of all-time Mets home parks to total three because it means our team is playing ball and has last licks, just as it did at the Polo Grounds, just as it did at Shea Stadium. I'm psyched to be going to my first Citi Field game that counts this Thursday. I expect I'll be taking plenty of mental notes all season regarding what's great and what's not — but mostly, I'm going to be watching our team play baseball. Ultimately, that's what Citi Field is for.

I can't promise, given my tendencies, that I won't occasionally backslide into Shea nostalgia, but I'm otherwise turning in my well-worn sentimental-indignation card. I spent the past three seasons praising and preserving the memory of Shea Stadium so it wouldn't evaporate into dust without a proper bon voyage. I bemoaned the impending arrival of its successor for reasons both genuinely heartfelt and probably petty. I didn't want Shea to vanish without expressing my appreciation for what it meant to me, what it meant to all of us. Consider it expressed. There is nothing left for this Mets fan and Friday Night Lights viewer to do except embrace Citi Field in the most Metsian way possible — clear eyes, full heart, hope we don't lose.

C'mon Big Pelf. Let's Go Mets.

Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.

No two words are any more Amazin' in the Met lexicon than Game Six. The '86 playoffs. The '86 World Series. The '99 NLCS. You can throw in the 2006 version while you're at it.

But there was another sixth game not that long ago, in 2005, to be precise. It wasn't in October. It was April — April 10. It was the 0-5 Mets taking on their archnemeses, the perennially defending Eastern Division champion Atlanta Braves. And it was a doozy. John Smoltz could not be touched in any meaningful fashion for seven innings: 103 pitches, 15 strikeouts, 6 scattered hits, no walks, no runs. His opponent was Pedro Martinez. Pedro Martinez was everything the Mets thought they were signing. His only troubling inning through seven was the fourth: a one-out walk to Chipper Jones, a two-out RBI double to Johnny Estrada. Smoltz led 1-0 heading to the eighth.

The eighth was Smoltz's undoing. Jose Reyes singled. Miguel Cairo sacrificed him to second. Carlos Beltran walloped a two-run homer to right. Pedro now led 2-1. Exit Smoltz. Enter Cliff Floyd, homering off Tom Martin. After a Doug Mientkiewicz double, David Wright homered off Ramon Colon. Suddenly Pedro had a 5-1 lead and he was a possessive dog with your shoe from there: a complete game, 9-strikeout 2-hitter. The Mets were in the win column and the first note of a hopeful new era was successfully struck.

That was the sixth game four years ago. It was a classic. And it might not have been as good as today's sixth game, even if we did lose this one.

Marlins 2 Mets 1 isn't what we wanted to pack up prior to the Super Home Opener (FYI, we didn't win our last game prior to entering the Polo Grounds or Shea Stadium either), but this isn't the sixth game of the World Series or the League Championship Series. It was the sixth game of a season, that has 156 remaining. We're 3-3. We can live with being on the wrong end of 2-1. It's not often you don't feel like a chump for saying that.

Today's sixth-game classic was brought to us by Johan Santana and Josh Johnson. Each was better than the other. Johnson got the win. Santana, who's done quite a bit of breath-taking versus the Marlins, took the loss that had to be assigned based on the score. But neither outshone either. They both sparkled in that way you want to show every baseball fan who has ever bemoaned the demise of starting pitching and every non-fan who wonders what's the big deal about a game in which almost nobody scores.

Santana hooked up in a perfectly respectable 2-1 game with Aaron Harang on Monday. It wasn't a duel, though. This was a duel. This was the best pitcher in baseball and one of his most talented counterparts. This was the master working change, slider and fastball versus the kid going away, away, away and hitting his spots hard. They made their opposing batters look clueless, yet somehow nobody (outside of the vapor-locking security guard who touched a live ball) seemed particularly foolish in this. These were good and occasionally great major league hitters being overmatched by unquestionably stupendous major league pitching. Isn't that how baseball at its purest is more or less supposed to work?

Sure, the decision rested in the hands — or off the glove — of Daniel Murphy, but that's just a break. The Marlins got the break the Mets didn't. Without it, maybe the Mets get the first break in the ninth when Carlos Beltran, who looked awful all day, finally got to Johnson for an RBI (driving in Delgado who'd had no luck prior…but got a bit of a break when Bob Davidson didn't call give Johnson strike three). But it happened. We've seen Murphy stumble a bit toward the left field fence and come down with the ball. This time we saw it bounce away. That's baseball.

You wish this was baseball every day. You wish a 2-1 double gem wasn't a diamond in the 162-game rough. You wish your guy could strike out 13 in seven innings more often. You wish your guy could go the distance the way their guy did, too. You wish you could watch both lineups hang tough against state-of-the-art pitching the way ours did in the ninth, running out everything and finding places to hit the ball toward the way Delgado and Beltran (and Wright and Church) did at the end. You wished, as a Mets fan, that Brett Carroll would have as much trouble with Ryan Church's sinking line drive as Daniel Murphy did with Cody Ross' deep fly. It wasn't to be. Santana and Parnell — it seemed an injustice to turn this afternoon over to a reliever, any reliever — combined on a 14-K 3-hitter and allowed no earned runs (a mere coincidence Doc Gooden was in the stands?). Johnson went all the way, giving up one run on five hits, yet quoting even that stellar line diminishes his accomplishment.

We lost the sixth game of the year. But if you watched it intently, consider yourself a winner for 2 hours and 4 minutes.

Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.