THE
WORST BALLPARK IN THE WORLD
I first saw
Shea Stadium in the summer it opened,1964, when all the world
was still young. My parents were taking me to visit the World’s
Fair, which was just across the elevated line in Flushing Meadows.
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, garrish colors and flimsy new materials; 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 to be vaguely disappointing once we got inside,
with endless lines and nothing that really seemed all that amazing.
Perhaps the trouble was that, even in 1964, the future was no
longer what it had once been.
The same,
alas, would prove to be 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 is situated amidst a sea of junkyards, and auto
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, rightfield—only to stop some twenty yards
short, dribbling fans out onto a cracked, asphalt sidewalk.
There has
always been something about the place that speaks of the tawdry
and the second-rate, right down to the battered apple that rises
grudgingly out of a gigantic top hat just beyond the centerfield
wall, whenever a Met hits a home run. Few would argue that, since
the eradication of all those football-friendly, astroturfed excrescences
of the 1960s, Shea has been the worst major-league ballpark extant.
But right from the beginning, Shea was fun. 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.
There was a poker-faced individual known as “Sign Man,”
who held up exclamations after every key play, and for years,
everyone was invited to march on the field, showing off
their own, homemade signs, on Banner Day. (My all-time 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. It almost seemed designed to
send up the lordly crosstown Yankees, with all their ponderous
tradition. Of course, many in the crowd—including my uncle—were
rooting for the visitors. In those days, thousands of fans still
came 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 they were, the Mets had established
an identity that jibed perfectly with the city’s as the
1960s wore on—embattled, ragged, but facing the long odds
against them with a certain, brave wit, and style. When the team
miraculously won the World Series in 1969, behind a fine young
pitching staff headed by Tom Seaver, all of New York reveled in
vindication. Fun City, indeed.
By
the time I got back to Shea, in the late 1970s, the first bloom
was clearly off the rose, for both the team and the city, with
their seemingly perpetual crises. New Yorkers only enjoy being
underdogs for 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.
In truth,
the best was yet to come—the Mets of Doc Gooden and Darryl
Strawberry, Gary Carter and Keith Hernandez, and Mookie Wilson,
et al., a wonderfully cocksure squad that would set team record
for wins and brawls, on and off the field, and captured the 1986
World Series after playing some of the most astonishing games
in post-season history. The fans flocked back, screaming and dancing
along between innings to a scoreboard video tribute to the Three
Stooges, called “The Curley Shuffle.” That year, I
watched from the upper deck as a Dodger relief pitcher with the
perfect monicker of Tom Niedenfuer, surrendered a decisive grand-slam
home run to George Foster. Having given up more, Niedenfuer proceeded
to deck the next batter, Ray Knight, with a pitch—whereupon
the pugnacious Knight jumped up and raced for the mound. Within
seconds, both teams had poured onto the field, embroiled in a
melee very much akin to the Curley Shuffle.
The great
Mets teams of the 1980s, and their flawed stars, went into an
untimely decline soon after. But another pattern had arisen—one
of bust and boom, despair and irrational exuberance, that also
reflected the New York of the 1980s and 1990s. And always, one
could expect the amazing, the unlikely, the goofy.
During the
phenomenal 1999 National League Championship Series against Atlanta,
I had the privilege to witness the third longest post-season game
ever played—an incredible 15-inning affair that started
in the afternoon but went far into the drizzling, October night.
The Mets trailed in the series by three games to one now, and
a loss would end their season. But a sense of sheer euphoria grew
steadily around the park as the game went on, even with Atlanta
threatening almost every inning, and two different Braves runners
being thrown out at the plate. The organist led the crowd in a
second, “seventh-inning stretch” in the middle of
the 14th inning, and everywhere you could see the grins on fans
happy just to extend the season by another inning.
It
was a wholly different sort of feeling than I have experienced
during big, close games in Yankee Stadium, where everything is
magnified by the burden of history. That is a more raw, visceral
sensation, and one that I cherish as well, but here at Shea people
seemed like they were actually having fun—like it really
was a game. As the game and the rain continued, and the
weak of heart departed, my friends and I kept improving our seats,
until we actually ended up sitting next to Bud Harrelson, the
superb one-time Mets shortstop, coach, and manager. Here was a
living link to the legacy of 1969, and 1986, as it might only
appear in Shea. We sat next to Bud as if clinging to a lucky icon,
and watched the Mets rally to win in the bottom of the fifteenth,
on Robin Ventura’s game-winning grand slam. Even here, the
quirky interceded. Ventura’s hit was famously reduced to
a “grand-slam single” when Todd Pratt, the runner
just ahead of him, stopped and embraced him in the basepaths.
One could hardly picture Derek Jeter behaving in such a manner.
The Mets would
go down to another, plucky defeat in that series anyway, and again
the next year, in their one and only Subway Series against the
Yankees. Shea has continued its slow rot, and my friends and I
joke about the hokey promotions (Greek Night!), or the once infamously
small, foul bathrooms that drove the Jets to New Jersey (good
riddance), or the themed concession stands such as “Beers
of the World,” which might be more aptly titled, “Beers
of Your Local Bodega.” Last year, we were unable even to
sit in the seats we had purchased because of a steady rain of
roof water on a perfectly cloudless night—bilge that seemed
to be pouring right down through a hole in a steel supporting
beam above us.
Mets management
was unruffled by the news, but who can blame them? They will have
their new stadium by 2009, and if the recent stadium-building
craze around America is any indication it will be a much better
(if more expensive) place to watch a game, combining modern comfort
with all the trappings of official baseball nostalgia. Until then,
I will be happy to indulge my own nostalgia, sipping a Beer of
the World and gazing from the airy, open exit ramps of Shea toward
the Manhattan skyline, or the silver Unisphere that still remains
from the Fair…even if only because my seat is underwater.
The worst ballpark in the world is still a very good place to
be.
©
Copyright The
New York Times
