Remembering Shea Stadium

I just published a “guest” blog post at “C70 At The Bat” for my friend, Missouri resident and and Cardinals fan, Daniel “Champ” Shoptaw, who is on holiday for two weeks and has asked a number of bloggers to keep his blog active while he is camping. I was honored to be asked and decided my piece would be an appreciation of the St. Louis Cardinals. I’ll publish it here in the near future. Writing it got me in a nostalgic mood, so I decided to give Shea Stadium the same treatment. After all, I grew up in the New York City metropolitan area, the Mets were my team and I saw a lot of games at Shea. 

I’m starting with the 2009 Topps baseball card that you see just below and to the right. There are two things that I noticed immediately about this card. First, I love that the only player who appears on it is Tom Seaver. This is as it should be. No other Mets player is more strongly identified with Shea Stadium than Tom Terrific. Those of us old enough to remember how he burst on the Mets universe like a dazzling comet will never forget him or the impact he had on the franchise. Several years later, when the Sporting News put him on its cover, only four words appeared next to the picture: Tom Seaver, Prince Valient. It was appropriate at the time, and to graybeards like me, it always will be.

The other thing that jumped out at me is what appears to be a soda can on the right side of the card, just next to Tom’s elbow. I was curious and put out a hail to my friends at the True New York Mets Fans Facebook group to ask for some insights about it. As usual, the gang came through. After the game the Mets set up large cardboard pictures of players in the outfield as part of the farewell ceremony. This one looks like a picture of a player with a large # 1 foam finger on it. I can’t make out who the player is. One person mentioned that it took a long time to set them up and the fans got tired of waiting for the ceremony to begin. However, once the ceremony got started, they really got into it. That, ladies and gentlemen, sounds like a common Shea Stadium experience; learning to take the good with the bad. I give Topps Company kudos for this card, and hope they give other stadiums finishing their run a similar treatment.

I have fond memories of my last game at Shea. It was on Friday, June 2, 1989, when the Mets hosted the Pittsburgh Pirates. I know that was long before the curtain came down, but I was living in San Francisco and wasn’t going back east very often. Dad, my brother in law Sid and I went to the game. It was a classic night for us. Off from the family home in Huntington, stopping at a diner in Queens for a bite, then on to the Big Shea for the contest to commence, as Casey Stengel used to say. It was a good crowd, not quite a sellout, but the lower rim where we sat was full. In fact, we were in the last row, right above the kitchen where the hot dogs were prepared, which explains why I felt hungry in the first, third, fifth, eighth and tenth innings.

Rick Aguilera started for the Mets. The Pirates scored a run early in the game, and the Mets tied it later. It was still knotted at one apiece after nine innings so the game went into extras. The Pittsburghs scored a run in the top of the eleventh, which brought some smiles to their dugout; I remember seeing them on some of the players’ faces. Many fans in attendance were displeased at this turn of events, included a nasty, nearby group of so called Mets supporters, one of whom uttered a loud and sarcastic “they suck” as the inning concluded. The same group was all smiles a few minutes later when the home-town nine scored two runs in the bottom half to win the game, 3 to 2. We three believers were mighty pleased and listened to the post-game wrap up as we drove back to “6,” which was what we called the family home. Once there, we sat down at the kitchen table and had another bite while we talked about the game. That was a classic night for us; eat, Mets game, eat.

Another memory really turns back the clock and centers on the coupons Borden’s used to put on their milk cartons. If you were 12 and under and collected ten of them you were admitted to a Mets game in the designated “Borden’s” nose-bleed section. I remember being treated well by the Mets when I went to these “free” games. There was a gate where we kids congregated outside Shea, so that we could be admitted en mass. On at least one occasion we were escorted to a spot adjacent to the Mets dugout and a player came over and talked to us. The player was Larry Bearnarth, a relief pitcher from 1963 to 1966. He spent a lot of time giving autographs as well. He signed my program on the cover, which was a real treat back then. After a short time a couple of grown-ups escorted us to our section, where we watched the Mets lose, which they did a lot back in the day.

I have a fuzzy memory of one such loss. I was home watching the game on the TV in the den, which was next to the kitchen. After what was at that time a typical Mets game development, I screamed “On darn!” My Mom, who reading at the kitchen table, was so startled she immediately asked what was wrong. I quickly replied that the Mets had just done something incredibly stupid, and now the other team was going to score a lot of runs. When she asked how I knew the other team was going to score a lot of runs, I answered with one of the most logical things I ever said in my entire life, “it’s a rerun.”

I’ve got a Darryl Strawberry story, too. This one occurred the first time I saw him play. It was during a twilight-double header on June 22, 1983. The first game featured Tom, back home again, pitching against the Cardinals. In the bottom of the first, the Mets got a couple of guys on. That’s when Straw came up to the plate. I leaned over to the fellow next to me, and said, “Dad, they say this kid has good power.” With that I stood up and yelled in the direction of home plate, “hit the sucker out!” On the very next pitch, Strawberry unleashed a monster home run to deep right field. From that moment on, I always thought of Darryl Strawberry as a good listener.

Just thinking about these moments makes me smile and laugh. As I sit here now, I realize I have so many memories of my time in the old yard that it’s difficult to sort them all out. I’ll work on, however, and share a few more of them in another post.