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Shea was blue collar arena for blue collar fans

Wallace Matthews

September 28, 2008

I had to look up the date - Aug. 14, 1964 - on a Web site, but I can remember the day as if it were yesterday. The Mets played the Phillies in what used to be known as a "twi-night" doubleheader, two more losses in what would turn out to be a 109-loss season.

But the results didn't matter. Some guy named Ed Kranepool hit two home runs in the nightcap and my brothers and I figured he must be one of the best players in all of baseball.

That was my first visit to Shea Stadium, and the place has never looked better than it did through 7-year-old eyes that day: the dizzyingly high escalators, the dazzling blue sky, the seats that went on forever and the impossibly green grass so far below.

I'm told I am the only man in New York who will miss the stinking, rusting junkheap along the banks of the lovely open sewer known as the Flushing River after they close it down, but I don't believe that.

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I'm just one of the few who is not ashamed to admit it.

After all, that stinking, rusting - and did I mention noisy? - junkheap was my field of dreams. It may be a dump now, and it may have been a dump then, but to me and those of my generation, it will always be what Bob Murphy told us it was: Big Shea. Beautiful Shea. Not a bad seat in the house. If you're in the neighborhood, stop in for the second game. Plenty of good seats left.

What did we know from beautiful? What did we know from good seats? Thank heavens, we had never heard of luxury boxes or PSLs. If we had, we wouldn't have believed it any more than we would have believed that within five years, a man would walk on the moon.

All we knew was that there was a ballfield down there, and a ballgame, and a team we loved despite its flaws, which were many. We could see the game fine and the prices were reasonable. Even into the 1970s, five dollars bought train fare, a seat in the upper deck, a hot dog, a scorecard and a day to remember. That's how much it cost me to see Willie Mays - in a Mets uniform! - in 1972.

Aside from the prices, much of that is still true. So tell me, what exactly is wrong with the place? And why does it have to go?

The answer, sadly, is because it does not "generate enough revenue" to keep the Wilpons happy, or offer "the amenities" modern sports fans have come to expect and value, even above the quality of play on the field.

It wasn't always thus. In 1964, the Mets truly were New York's blue-collar team, loved by its blue-collar fans, the ones who swore they'd never watch baseball again after being jilted by the Dodgers and Giants.

To my brothers and me, sons of a Brooklyn Dodgers fan who considered rooting for the Yankees like rooting for Khrushchev, the so-called Cathedral of Baseball up in the Bronx was enemy territory, dingy and old-fashioned and faintly snooty, the kind of place sissy kids from Westchester and Connecticut went with their bow tie-wearing fathers. The kind of place we wouldn't be caught dead in.

"You want a knish, go to Shea," a grumpy Yankee Stadium vendor said to a friend of mine in the 1960s. "This is the home of champions." The Yankees could have their stadium and their championships. We took the Mets and the knishes.

In fact, before I became a sportswriter, I had been in the place only twice - once for the Ali-Norton fight, and the second time, admittedly, for a Yankees game, but only because Tom Seaver was pitching for the other team. He was going for his 300th win, and in case you hadn't heard, he got it.

To me, Yankee Stadium was never more than a workplace. Shea Stadium was a playground. Yankee Stadium was Lincoln Center. Shea was Coney Island.

And that 1964 season, to my mind, was the greatest in the history of the park. In May, the Mets played a 23-inning game against the Giants, the second game of a doubleheader, no less. They lost. Of course. On Father's Day, Jim Bunning pitched a perfect game. The Mets lost. Of course. In July, you had the All-Star Game, and Ron Hunt - a Met! - started at second base. And in August, I saw my first game there - and my second. The Mets lost both, of course, but who cared?

The sights and sounds and smells of the place are permanently etched into the memory: The Serval Zippers building, the huge neon Delta Air Lines sign, the incredibly ornate RKO Keith's movie house on Main Street in Flushing, all visible beyond the outfield fence. The jets roaring, either on their way up or down but always, it seemed, directly overhead.

To us, it seemed as if great, mystical things always happened there. In 1967, a fastball left the hand of Nolan Ryan, glanced off the bat of Johnny Bench and somehow wound up under our loge seats, where my brother Chris came up with it.

We saw Seaver and Koosman and Gentry and Grote and Jones and Clendenon and Harrelson. Those were our Mets. The 1969 championship was our championship. Shea Stadium was our ballpark.

Admittedly, after that miracle season, the place never seemed quite the same. The crowds grew more demanding of victory, more impatient with defeat. Gil Hodges died, Seaver was exiled to Cincinnati, Banner Day was abolished, Karl Ehrhardt - the guy with the silly Oktoberfest hat and the perfect sign, it seemed, for any occasion - was run out of the ballpark by the new, crass Mets ownership. They put up some cheesy apple behind the wall and brought in mercenaries like Hernandez, Knight and Carter to bully their way to a second world championship.

Soon, Shea, too, became noth- ing more than a workplace, and a not very pleasant one at that.

When I look around it now, I can see why so many will be glad to see the place go. It is dirty and smelly, rusting and noisy, and to a generation brought up on iPods, HDTV and luxury suites, hopelessly antiquated.

But to me, it's always 1964 there, when the park was new, the fans and players relatively innocent, the ballpark experience what it originally was intended to be.

Fun.