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Opening Day in Diamondback Tweets

Baseball is back. And even though we lost, it was perfect. Well, still pretty good. Okay, would you settle for "somewhat acceptable"?

By Jim McLennan
Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports
Think the players were excited?

Pre-game pleasurss

But not everyone was happy...

Hey, at least we had functioning bathrooms, unlike certain major-league parks I could mention... There seemed to be three main categories of irritation according to the Twitter: one, the team could do very little about; one they were somewhat responsible; and one where they were almost entirely to blame...

Parking

Not the team's fault, but Opening Day coincided with a concert by something called an Ariana Grande, who is apparently a big thing in certain circles. Me, I have absolutely no idea. But she apparently had a concert last night at the venue formerly known as US Airways Center. Between that and the sell-out next door, there were likely close to 70,000 additional people looking for parking in downtown Phoenix last night. The results were obvious:

The metal detectors

In a section headed "No inconvenience," the Arizona Republic said, "There was concern by some leading up to Opening Day that the extra security step would add to wait times at each gate, but it was hard to notice a difference." The Twitter would strongly beg to differ on this front, with a litany of complaints like these: From what I heard, part of the problem here did appear to be people either unaware of or not caring about the new security, so showing up with too much metal on their person. So instead of just walking through and the line keeping going, this required a manual wanding and/or patdown, bringing things to a halt. However, the D-backs should certainly have foreseen this, and had sufficient additional security to cope.

Concessions

This was the most popular refrain. Long queues, particularly for the fabled Churro Dog [given the blitz of publicity, you think they might have decided to sell it at more than two locations?]; stands running out of food; staffing issues. It's not the first Opening Day at Chase Field: management and Levy Restaurants should know the score by now, and be able to cope after 18 years. Apparently, not the case: Though probably the most poignantly unfortunate Tweet was this one: And one additional point to note...
But it certainly wasn't all bad
There were just as many Tweets saying what a wonderful time people were having. I think this one, from a certain well-know local songster, will stand in lieu of all those. Though I also liked this: there's a new sheriff in town... And finally, this exchange between the official Twitter accounts for the Diamondbacks and Giants...

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