Chicago White Sox are down to their very last chance to tie and force a playoff with the Twins for AL Central. And it's raining.
As something of a jinx, I avoided so much as reading Metsgrrl, who's a pretty fair wordslinger, and the standings (the baseball widget uses red type for eliminated teams, and I avoided looking at anything still in white), and any conversation that veered in that direction. In short, I did my part.
Still, I had something like a lump in my throat. William A. Shea Stadium, to give it its formal name, has always been something like my home in Queens, unlike my actual home in Queens or the school I attended for a year. When we got back, the Mets were still playing in the storied Polo Grounds, but Shea was ready for 1964, same time as the World's Fair on the other side of the railyards and tracks (the signs in the station blared "World's Fair - Shea Stadium." The "Willets Pt. Blvd." designation was always "Oh, right."). It was decorated, if you want to call it that, with orange and blue corrugated steel rectangles suspended on cabling. I think that was supposed to suggest confetti. It certainly looked wonderfully festive. My (then) beloved Mets played there, and I thought of it as a shrine.
Although the first time I got to visit the shrine, it was not for a baseball game.
It was to see (what felt like) 70 one-hit wonders opening for The Beatles.
I think I got to my first game in '67. I think my uncle was supposed to have taken me, but I never found him, and I had four dollars. Heh.
Up until then, I'd never seen a live baseball game. Isn't that weird? I watched games on TV or listened to them on the radio (Bob Murphy, Lindsay Nelson, Ralph Kiner--how's that for Tinker to Evers to Chance?). So I spent the whole afternoon not being able to tell what was an actual hit and what was just a long fly ball because wherever I was sitting hid the left(?) fielder, and I didn't know how to follow the ball.
In '69, I vocally rooted on the Cubs. That's right. It was my fault. Neener neener. After the miraculous victory, I walked all the way around Shea with the sort of feeling that normal people take alcohol to attain.
I remember noticing that the colors on the confetti squares were fading, but it was still a shock whatever year it was when I took the 7 and discovered them gone.
This really wants to be an essay about baseball's loss of soul, but I'm not ready to go there yet, and besides, that probably happened back in the 1800s; baseball has never been particularly pure. But, y'know, I'd enjoy going to Seaver Park or Metropolitan Stadium or Hodges Field (hell, or even Strawberry Field, although that really is not an option. Really!); thinking of going to Citi Field feels like visiting a cousin to whom you owe money.
4 comments:
I bought a ticket to Shea Stadium once. I still have it, in its entirety, unused, because they wouldn't let me go to that Beatles concert.
"sitting next to a cousin to whom you owe money" exactly.
I wish it would be Hodges Field.
Ooo! My first comments! Avedon, eRobin, thank you!
You know, we could, in that sneaky adamant New York manner, just call it Hodges Field; many years ago, I took to referring to the somewhat expensive neighborhood supermarket that had undergone a few changes of ownership as "The Pirate's,", and I have to say that it tickled me when (a few months before it closed) I heard a total stranger calling it that.
Found your observation on Shea in link from The Sideshow. It’s tough to lose a stadium you love. Mine was Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium, which rarely if ever sold out – but was a great place to be a fan, and where I first vividly remember attending a game with my father around 1955 celebrating “George Kell Night” (pre-Brooks Robinson).
One person’s cheering could spread and ignite the entire crowd. Then it was torn down, and replaced by the vastly overrated Oriole Park at Camden Yards – to my mind, one of the worst modern stadiums ever built. Its defects, from a fan-viewer standpoint, are numerous. They include thousands of seats angled toward the outfield (only some of which were later slightly improved); a low-rise design that forces people to watch the game between the heads of the fans in front of them; view-obstructing metal bars, aisles and exit ramps; and acoustics so bad that fans can’t hear each other and only respond when cued by boom-chukka music. The low-rise design was intended to bring in the surrounding city skyline, but now the city has blocked much of that view by allowing highrise construction, including a glitzy Hilton hotel that hovers holdly over left field. And now that the novelty of the place is long gone, and the team has been horrible for more than a decade, attendance is down by 50 percent or more.
Sadly, it seems that the places we grow up with that gave meaning to our lives become, as Joni Mitchell observed, parking lots.
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