Shea Stadium Memories

Kevin Baker wrote a piece for today's New York Times where he shares his memories of watching games at Shea Stadium. Many consider the home of the NY Mets the worst park in Baseball today.

I have my own Shea Stadium memories. My first game there was in 1967 when I was six. My father took me and my brothers annualy to a game each year between 67 and 71. I remember the 71 game, one that was against the Cincinnatti Reds and played in a light drizzle. At one point during the game, there was a rain delay and my father almost decided to leave but we stuck it out. The Reds won 1-0.

Is Shea Stadium the worst? My one experience at Yankee Stadium didn't impress me, so I'd rank that park below Shea. The only other stadiums I been to are Joe Robbie(or whatever you call the Marlins' home today), Atlanta Fulton County Stadium, and Crosley Field back in 1968. While visiting in Ohio my family went to 2 games there. Ron Swaboda on the second night said to you. "You guys are back again." My brothers collected autographs of all the Mets over those two days. I was a little shyer, but got Jerry Koosman, Ken Boswell, Cleon Jones and Ron Taylor.

If you're not a New York sports fan, I suggest you skip the following. I posted the first half of the story, the rest you can use the link above. Enjoy.

I FIRST saw Shea Stadium the summer it opened, 1964, when the world was still young. My parents were taking me to the World's Fair, which was just across the elevated line in Flushing Meadows, Queens. This was appropriate because Shea, like the fair, was supposed to be a showcase for the world of tomorrow. You could tell this because it looked breezy, and fun, and half-finished - all bright, garish colors, flimsy new materials and unadorned concrete and pipes and steel cables laid out in that functional, neglected-housing-development style that modern architects used to assure us was the best future we could hope for.

I remember that the fair proved disappointing once we got inside, with endless lines and nothing that seemed all that amazing. Perhaps the trouble was that even in 1964, the future was no longer what it once had been.

The same would prove true of Shea. In fairness, no stadium ever started life with more strikes against it: a baseball park without any real bleachers, built in the flight path of an international airport, on the site of a gigantic ash heap. The bad symbolism abounded. Shea sits amid a sea of junkyards and chop shops. Subway riders from the No. 7 train approach it along the curious "Ramp to Nowhere," a concrete walkway that appears to lead directly from the elevated station into Shea's green, beckoning right field - only to stop some 20 yards short, dribbling fans out onto a cracked asphalt sidewalk.

There has always been something tawdry and second-rate about the place, right down to the battered plaster-and-lath apple that rises grudgingly out of a gigantic top hat whenever a Met hits a home run. Since the eradication of all those football-friendly, synthetic-grass excrescences of the 60's, some would argue that Shea is the worst ballpark in the world.

But now, with the planned construction of a new Mets ballpark next door that may also be used for the Olympics, Shea's days are numbered. And so, despite the stadium's flaws, it needs to be said: Right from the beginning, even the worst ballpark in the world was a great place to be. I went to my first game there with my Uncle Bruce, in 1967, to see the Mets play the San Francisco Giants, and it felt like a carnival as much as a ballgame.

The Mets were in last place, but there was a full house, with many of the fans cavorting merrily in the aisles. A poker-faced individual named Karl Ehrhardt but known as Sign Man held up exclamations ("Yikes") after every key play, and for years on Banner Day, the fans were invited to march onto the field and show off their homemade signs. (My favorite: "I'd Bet My Testes On the Metsies.")

This was something altogether new in New York sports, fans defiantly embracing a team of scrappy, lovable losers. The attitude almost seemed designed to send up the lordly crosstown Yankees, with all their ponderous tradition.

Many in the crowd, including my uncle, were rooting for the visitors. In those days, thousands of fans still turned out in droves whenever their beloved West Coast transplants, the Giants and the Dodgers, stopped back in town. But most New Yorkers had moved on.

Bad as the Mets were, they had established an identity that jibed perfectly with the city's as the 60's wore on: embattled, ragged, but facing the long odds against them with brave wit and style. When the team miraculously won the World Series in 1969, behind a fine young pitching staff led by Tom Seaver, all New York reveled in vindication. Fun City, indeed.

BY the time I got back to Shea, in the late 70's, the first bloom was clearly off the rose, for both the team and the city, with their seemingly perpetual crises. New Yorkers enjoy being underdogs for only so long. The Mets had sunk to the bottom again, and even Tom Terrific had been banished for insubordination by the decidedly unlovable and un-scrappy club president, M. Donald Grant. In those years, you could buy a ticket to the cheapest seats in the upper deck, and for an extra dollar an usher would take you all the way down to a lower section. At night, Shea had begun to take on a decidedly spectral mood, cavernous and empty, one more patch of blight and squandered chances.