It may look like Ebbets, but Kahn knows better
Photo credit: UPI Photo | Mets 3rd baseman Ed Charles does a dance and pitcher Jerry koosman and catcher Jerry Grote hug each other after the Mets won the 1969 World Series 10/16 from the Baltimore Orioles.
Regardless of whether Mets fans will be lured to the team's new showplace by the catnip of nostalgia, Roger Kahn's recollections of Ebbets Field on Friday reinforced the sense that virtually every aspect of Brooklyn baseball is as gone as the Dodgers.
The Mets, of course, have evoked the home of their National League forebears in designing the new $800-million playpen that hosted its first Mets game Friday night. Team owner Fred Wilpon, a Brooklyn native, brought to fruition the exterior Ebbets Field look with the arched entryway and honored Dodgers pioneer Jackie Robinson with the enormous rotunda suitably marked by a large block "42" sculpture, for Robinson's uniform number.
But in a telephone interview from his Ulster County home Friday, Kahn, 81, the eloquent author who celebrated his native borough and his childhood team with the sentimental 1972 memoir "The Boys of Summer," spoke of an atmosphere and a feel impossible to replicate in the modern big leagues.
Kahn asked if there is a scoreboard on the rightfield wall, "one of the wonders of Ebbets Field." There is not, though the wall does ascend at an angle toward right-center, with "a bunch of angles" that Kahn recalled at Ebbets, where "it was one of the perks watching Carl Furillo play those angles."
He recalled the famous Abe Stark sign in right-center - "Hit Sign Win Suit" - on the bottom of the scoreboard, small enough that "the only way to hit the sign was if the rightfielder had a heart attack."
In 2009, the ad displays are so mammoth and so omnipresent that it is impossible to adequately defend them against fly balls. In his first at-bat, Fernando Tatis hit the Verizon sign in distant left-center (hit sign, win phone?).
"You could hear very clearly at Ebbets Field," Kahn said. "The players could hear what you were saying to them and you could hear them, this constant infield chatter: 'Hey batter heybatterheybatter!' Hilda Chester would come with her cowbell and sit in centerfield, ring her bell, and in this huge booming voice would call to Pee Wee Reese loosening up at shortstop: 'Hey Pee Wee, have you had your glass of milk today?' Pee Wee would turn and say, 'Yes, Hilda, I had my glass of milk.' "
From the Mets' luxurious digs in their lushly carpeted, windowless, multiple flat-screen-TV-equipped clubhouse, there was no chance they would throw buckets of water out open windows onto heckling fans outside, as Kahn recalled the Dodgers doing occasionally at Ebbets Field.
Still, some evidence of the great circle of baseball life exists. The new Mets joint, after all, is a baseball-specific building, unlike Shea Stadium and the other "concrete coffee cups" - as Kahn called them - of the 1960s and '70s. Gotham's National League team played in the open air Friday night, more than a half-century after Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley entertained thoughts of a domed stadium in Brooklyn to replace Ebbets.
"He had a model of it in his office," Kahn said. "I was one of those who made fun of it; I called it 'Walter's Pleasuredome.' "
Yet Friday night, mixed in with the usual cacophonous 21st century rock 'n' roll blasts during pauses in play, there briefly was real, laid-back organ music, the kind Gladys Goodding used to play at Ebbets Field.
"As long as I've known baseball," Kahn said, "there's been a nostalgia craving. Baseball is the game of nostalgia; God knows why."
And if the Mets should ever invite him, he said, he'd be happy to watch his Brooklyn Dodgers heirs at their ersatz Ebbets.
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