New to the Citi Field menu this year, the pastrami sandwich is available at a concession stand on the Field Level concourse behind left field. It’s also available elsewhere, but I’m pretty sure this is the one you want.

Every sandwich is made with meat hand-sliced fresh from the brisket, weighed out on a scale to six ounces — plenty of meat for a sandwich on regular-sized bread*. The guy making my sandwich then squirted mustard on one slice of rye and pressed it up against the other, ensuring even mustard distribution across both slices. That’s going the extra mile. Oh, and it comes with a pickle:

I don’t normally eat a lot of pastrami, but even as a novice I can tell this is a hell of a pastrami sandwich. The big challenge I’ve always found in cooking brisket is keeping it moist, but that’s not an issue here. This is meatjuice-dripping-down-your-arms moist. Tasty too, by no means overseasoned but with the flavor of coriander lingering after every bite.

The bread is soft — maybe too soft. I generally prefer rye that’s chewy around the crust, and this wasn’t exactly that. It didn’t take anything away from the sandwich, but I think good, strong, flavorful rye can often add something. The mustard tasted like mustard and the pickle was predictably amazing.

It’s $10.50, which is a lot. But then the touristy deli stops in Manhattan charge way more. They also give way more meat, but that seems like more of a gimmick than an effort at a well-proportioned sandwich.

*- Speaking of which: When I worked at the deli we were told to aim for about 1/3 pound of meat for sandwiches on bread or regular rolls and 1/2 pound for sandwiches on heroes. We never measured it out because with a couple weeks’ worth of meat-slicing experience it becomes pretty easy to eyeball amounts. I always tended to go a little bit over on my sandwiches, figuring people could always take meat off the sandwich.

But one time, in my first week, a guy asked for an “American.” That wasn’t on the menu, but he meant the standard ham-turkey-roast beef-cheese combo familiar from six-foot catering heroes. I kind of lost focus while slicing the guy’s ham and gave him about a full sandwich’s worth, and the roast beef we had was tough to slice thin, so he wound up with a lot of that. Then I wanted to make it look even so I gave him a lot of turkey too.

He wound up with a full pound of meat on his sandwich. I know because he took it back and showed it to my boss after he opened it, and I got my first (and only) stern talking-to about sandwich construction. Looking back on it now: Why’d you sell me out like that, guy? I gave you a pound of meat! You could take half of it off the sandwich and have enough to make another massive sandwich later in the day. C’mon, guy.

You might not know about this one. I’ve only seen it available in the Caesar’s Club, conveniently located right behind the press box. It may also exist at some of the other clubs at Citi Field, but I haven’t spent much time in any of those.

Speaking of, though: If you’re a sandwich enthusiast and Citi Field regular and you know of some less-heralded sandwiches available in odd spots in the park, let me know. I’m going to eat every one eventually. I’ve got my eye on the pastrami and the Mex burger, and I know there’s a Reuben at the Caesar’s club too. I hope all will be better than this:

That’s pulled chicken, cheddar cheese and barbecue sauce on French bread. I ate this one near the end of the Mets’ double-header with the Braves last week and it had clearly been sitting under a heat lamp for a while. But even knowing how it would have been better earlier in the game, this was still a pretty disappointing sandwich.

The bread was OK — toasty, bready — and the chicken was reasonably moist considering the circumstances. But I could hardly taste anything besides the cloyingly sweet barbecue sauce. I should have gussied this one up with some toppings, but by that point they were clearly trying to shut the toppings stations down for the night and I didn’t want to make anyone’s life more difficult.

Speaking of chicken sandwiches available at Citi Field and toppings, though: On Friday I tried the fried chicken sandwich from Blue Smoke again and topped it off with fresh jalapenos and pickles. It was unbelievable — better even than my wife’s pulled pork sandwich, which has never been as good as the first time I had it.

Remember when they used to say they were making Space Balls 3: The Search for Space Balls 2? That would have been awesome. Instead I’ve co-opted the title for this post.

OK, I know everyone always says an elephant with a shark’s face, but I’m going to go with a flying polar bear that spins spiderwebs.

Because how sweet would that be? It could maul you from land, air or sea, and also set sticky traps so it could eat you later just in case it wasn’t around to maul you when you happened to walk by its dam. Oh yeah, it would also build dams and live in lodges like a beaver.

Problem is, the protection offered by the lodge and the convenience of the web would probably allow the Flying Polar Bear that Spins Spiderwebs to get pretty lazy, as is the bear’s wont. And so you’d just have these lodges full of fat, lethargic killing machines filling up on all the good stuff they collected in the web outside instead of fully exploiting all their awesome and terrifying powers.

Seriously though I don’t think we spend enough time talking about how great spiders are. I’m not trying to sound like some creepy bio teacher with a big collection of arachnids or anything, but man, that’s one bug that figured it out.

Though it’s tempting to imagine TedQuarters favorites Lucas Duda and Val Pascucci on a defensive line, I happen to know that Willie Harris turned down a football scholarship to Florida State to play pro baseball after high school. So it almost has to be him, even if Bobby Parnell might make a nice successor to Brett Favre as the NFL’s best quarterback with an awesome arm that doesn’t really know where it’s going.

If I didn’t know that about Harris, I’d say Jose Reyes could make for a pretty fine wide receiver. Good size for it, great speed, good hands. It pains me to imagine Reyes going up for a pass across the middle though, knowing what Ray Lewis might do to him.

As for Jets that could be Mets, I’d love to see what Darrelle Revis looked like in center field. I’ll just assume he’d be an awesome hitter, too, because what can’t Revis do?

I’m not interested in crapping on any small businesses, so I’ll stick to chains. And I’ll amount that I will probably eat at several of these places again. Sometimes you wind up in a group of people going someplace and you don’t want to be that guy so you just roll with it. Anyway, here we go:

– Subway: Many of my negative feelings for Subway come from its haphazard use of the term “sandwich artist,” which I believe should be reserved for true sandwich artists. That’s not to say there aren’t some potential sandwich artists working at Subway, but I know from talking to ex-Subway employees that they’re given set amounts of each ingredient to include on sandwiches (four half-slices of cheese, eight olives, etc.), which seems more like sandwich building than sandwich artistry.

– Pizza Hut: The (literally) red-headed stepchild of Yum! brands and worst of the major pizza chains. The last time I ate pizza from Pizza Hut I was three weeks deep into a trip to China and desperate for familiar food, but all that did was remind me that I don’t much care for Pizza Hut. Notable exception: Breadsticks.

– Taco Time: Never again.

– TGI Friday’s: The younger brother of one of my best friends worked at Friday’s for a long time. Since his brother could comp us stuff, my friend always wanted to go there. Everything they serve at Friday’s tastes primarily like Friday’s, and after enough trips you grow to really dislike that taste.

– Hale and Hearty Soups: Similar to Friday’s in that my distaste for it grew due to too-frequent visits, this time perpetrated by some work friends at an old job. For some reason I tend to think of soup as a vaguely healthy lunch option even when it’s chowder or bisque, so Hale and Hearty always burned me twice: What you think is going to a healthy alternative to pizza turns out to be just as bad for you, plus it’s so greasy that you can’t even think about actually tasty food for hours afterward.

My wife and I hit up Catch of the Day at Citi Field on Sunday as part of my enduring quest to eat and review every sandwich available in the stadium. She got a lobster roll, of which I took a bite. That sandwich will be reviewed here after I’ve discussed it with her at greater lengths. She is a distinguishing eater of sandwiches and trusted source on such matters.

I ordered the crabcake sandwich: A crabcake on a potato bun with tartar sauce. The Catch of the Day menu actually calls it “tarter sauce,” but I follow the Wikipedia’s American English spelling. Either way, whenever I start talking about tartar sauce I inevitably say, “Let the fools have their tar-tar sauce,” in my best C. Montgomery Burns.

The damage is $15:

Crabcake sandwiches always feel a little funny to me, since you’re putting the crabcake on bread but there’s already a lot of bread in that crabcake. No disrespect to bread, of course. And it’s not anything like as strange as shoving a perfectly portable Jamaican beef patty inside a thick hunk of coco bread (which is delicious, it turns out).

The crabcake here is good. It’s not quite as crabmeat-heavy as I’d like, but when I think about it, I’m not sure I’ve ever had a crabcake that was. Maybe they just don’t make ’em that way. And this one maintains a pretty good crab flavor.

The downside to this sandwich is that whoever put it together went very heavy on the tartar sauce, so the whole thing got pretty goopy. The tartar itself is better than the standard deli mayo-mixed-with-relish concoction, but it’s still decidedly tartar sauce: tangy, thinner mayo to complement seafood.

On the whole, this isn’t a bad sandwich. But I’d say that if I were in the mood for seafood and a) I weren’t out to review every sandwich available at Citi Field, b) I could eat a whole lobster roll without getting sick and c) I was willing to spend upwards of $15 on a sandwich at a ballpark, I’d probably opt for the lobster roll instead. The lobster roll is $17, so the markup from real-world price to stadium price seems slimmer than it is on the crabcake, plus you get a good amount of lobster meat. But more on that will follow.