The Lovable, Awful Old Ballpark

My first memory of Shea Stadium is of a warm, bright June afternoon in 1987. My grandfather took me to Van Wyck Lanes to go bowling and then we took the expressway to the Grand Central to the best place in the entire world. Dwight Gooden pitched a complete game; Kevin McReynolds hit a home run and then broke a 2–2 tie in the bottom of the 9th with a sacrifice fly that plated Lenny Dykstra.

Thirteen years later I went with a girl I'd been dating for a month to the home opener against the Padres on a gray, cold afternoon. We were sitting in the very highest row of seats in Shea, where you can feel the wind swaying the whole structure. The players looked like ants. We shouted as loudly as we could for Al Leiter to pitch Tony Gwynn inside and break his hand, not because we didn't love Gwynn, but because it seemed wonderful to express such perverse sentiments from heights so removed from the field, especially as your typical leather-lunged Mets rooters were doing the same thing with no evident irony. Leiter busted Gwynn inside and hit him, and I ended up marrying the girl. Last year we took our son to his first Mets game, with his grandfather; they beat the Brewers.

Millions of other people have similar memories of Shea, and so millions of other people will share my pure, delirious enthusiasm for the fact that next year's season opener will be the last played there. Baseball may bind father to son and child to man, and our verdant memories of chop shops and the Budweiser scoreboard may tie us to the wistful days of our passed youth, but Shea is the worst park in baseball. After next year, no child taking in his first game under the pure bright sun of a May evening will have to contort himself at a 63-degree angle to actually see the field from his box seats up the left field line; no father, taking his son's hand in his and showing him how to score the butcher boy, will have to do so amid a haze of mysterious swamp gases, with "Our Team, Our Time" blaring at a volume unheard since the great tank battles of Kursk.

Think of this: Yesterday, it is safe to say, a boy woke up hating Jimmy "we are the team to beat" Rollins with the fervent intensity only a child in elementary school can muster. His father took the day off from work and brought his boy to the field — Christmas in April! The sights, the sounds, the pageantry. The Mets are down, danger looms — suddenly, in the bottom of the eighth, Rollins boots the ball, and as quickly the Mets have scored 7 runs! The villain has been thwarted, balance restored to the world, an eternal memory struck in a young mind. How much more wonderful would it be for that memory to have been struck in a building without a giant neon man glued to its face? To ask the question is to answer it.

Still, the countdown to the end of Shea Stadium is also a countdown to the beginning of Citi Field, and that's dicey. Appreciation of the fact that the young Mets fans of today will not have the fond memories of their innocent days scarred by architecture designed, as far as I can tell, to ensure that a beer vendor will pass through their sight lines every 15 seconds should not necessarily translate into enthusiasm for the Mets' new park.

Citi Field is designed to make the Mets money, and that will extract some costs. As compared with Shea Stadium, there will be 22% less general seating, and 29% more luxury boxes. Rich people and corporations will be better off; the average fan's ticket will be much pricier than it is now. The young David Wright fan may have a better time at the park, but unless his parents are fairly well off, he'll probably have fewer of them. The death of Shea Stadium will make baseball more of a luxury product than it is now; that does no one but the Mets any good.

Worse than this practical effect, though, is a simple aesthetic one. Shea Stadium is an ugly and impractical place, but then that reflects the ugly, impractical borough and city of which it's a part. Along with adoration for the Mets, one of the things I always took in at Shea as a child was that the world is not always a beautiful and comfortable place — or, to phrase it moralistically, that it's what happens in a place rather than where it happens that matters. You can only get so sentimental about Shea. It's like getting sentimental about the decaying stations connecting the LIRR to the subway that punctuate Queens's irregular intersections. In 1964 or 1987, though, New York wasn't explicitly referred to by the mayor as a luxury product, and whose emporiums of cheap mass entertainment were designed and meant for the masses — that might be worth getting at least a bit wistful over.

tmarchman@nysun.com