A Personal History of Shea Stadium, part two
Shea Stadium is all concrete and boiled hot dogs, but a formidable team is being assembled there; I acquire ticket-getting skills in a seller's market; the Queen of Shea shows me how it's done
Enjoy this occasional series, weaving together my life in NYC with the vicissitudes of baseball as it was played within the brutalist-adjacent concrete walls of Shea Stadium.
part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | part 6 | part 7 | part 8 | part 9 | part 10 | part 11
Shea had already been standing for twenty-two years before I first entered its gates.
It opened in 1964 (the Mets had to play at the storied and bizarrely shaped Polo Grounds for their first two years) as part of a wave of cookie-cutter stadiums—Shea, Fulton County Stadium, Busch Stadium, RFK Stadium, yadayadayada, all of them gone now except Oakland Coliseum, entering its last year of use in 2024—that popped up around the country in the mid-60s. They have often been described as looking like giant concrete ashtrays. They reminded me of parking garages. The stadiums were sold to the public as multi-purpose venues, good for concerts and other sports. To be as friendly to all events as possible, these new stadiums all had round floor plans, opening up great tracts of unnecessary open space for foul territory. The round shape also ensured the fans would be far away from the action.
Shea was a dump, but it was our dump. I remember my first time: I walked out of the 7 train at the Willets Points-Shea Stadium subway stop with my friend John in the early afternoon for a day game in 1985. I turned the corner, and there was Shea, a huge round concrete shell with improbably blue walls. Through a cutout in the concrete, bright green grass shone through like summer itself. I literally jumped up and down, excited at the prospect of seeing a game under a bright blue sky.
The Mets had been lovable losers since the mid-70s and the “You gotta believe” run of Tug McGraw and Rusty Staub et al., back in 1973. In 1985, the year I walked into Shea Stadium for the first time, they were building a winner. 1985 not only brought Dwight Gooden to the team for a second year, but an all-star first basemen from the Cardinals named Keith Hernandez, a power-hitting catcher in the form of Gary Carter from the Expos, and a right-fielder with questionable defensive skills but a prodigious left-handed bat and a catchy name that was instantly memorable in star-bedazzled New York City: Daryl Strawberry. Like Gooden taking the mound, when Strawberry walked up to the dish, love him or hate him, you watched.
The two other baseball stadiums I’d been in were horrible examples of how to build a baseball park: the Astrodome in Houston, and the Metrodome in Minneapolis. Both had the word “dome” in their monikers, and both were indoors: no sunlight, no clouds to look at between innings, no seagulls hanging out on the field. It was like watching baseball in someone’s garage, fully cut off from the world around you. It didn’t help that the Astros and the Twins were both awful teams at the time I saw them (the Twins would turn it all around and win the World Series eight year later).
Shea was open to the elements. It was the first stadium I’d ever been in they had a real sky over it. It was the third stadium I’d ever been to, but it was the one that made me a baseball fan. Yankee Stadium, across town and way up in the Bronx, held a similar appeal, but the Yankees seemed in my short experience to be the official team of stockbrokers and assholes. They were also owned at the time by George Steinbrenner, who had been convicted for illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon, and was later pardoned by Ronald Reagan (he was also kicked out of baseball three separate times, but I digress) (I invite you to linger on the photo below, it is an absolute favorite of mine).
The food was ballpark basic and mostly flavorless—boiled hot dogs, Budweiser beer, pretzels, popcorn, peanuts—and they sold it from concrete enclaves embedded within the larger brutalist-adjacent concrete semi-circle. Early and late season, the stadium was often cold. The restrooms, particularly the Women’s restrooms, were inadequate for large crowds (sometimes the crowd in the Women’s room became so frustrated they’d storm the Men’s room). During rain delays, you needed to hop over the puddles of rainwater that collected on the acres of concrete floor.
Still, there was much to love about the ballpark. All that bright Royal Blue draped over those dull concrete walls seemed a metaphor for something, though I’m not sure what. That concrete shell had two great advantages. It focused the noise of the crowd so that, when the place was full and the Mets were winning, it was one of the loudest stadiums in the country. And, if the place was full and the Met were winning and the crowd noise was at a fever pitch, the stadium shook. Literally: it shook. The fever of fandom and becoming one with a crowd of sixty thousand as it roars and shakes the stands is instantly intoxicating, and it’s hard to resist being seduced by it. And why would you want to? It’s a delicious feeling.
A handful of times, as the crowd roared and the stadium shook, I forced myself to stop cheering and clapping. I stood apart from the crowd, silent, as I listened and watched and felt all that power wash over me like the climax of an evangelical church service, when they ask you to step forward and accept Jesus into your heart. I wanted to not only witness the moment, but mark it in memory. Whatever mental trick I used, it worked.
And, of course, there was that big, dented, lopsided apple just beyond the right field wall that came out of a top hat whenever a Met hit a home run (unless it was broken). My friend Francis always said, “Make that apple dance!” The old Home Run Apple even has its own Wikipedia page, which tells us that the motor-and-pulley mechanism that raised it broke from time to time. “Over time the Apple became misshapen,” the page continues, “due to periodic harsh weather conditions. …It was hard to maintain, with a Mets executive stating, ‘It was just totally fabricated out of plaster layered on top of a metal screen with a wood frame inside’.”
Shea Stadium is gone. They tore it down to make room for parking at the new stadium. The new stadium if fine, and so is the new, hydraulic Home Run Apple. The naming rights of the ballpark were sold to a bank, but I continue to call the place Shea Stadium. If I’m alive when they build a third stadium, and they name it after a corporation, I’ll call that one Shea too.
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A galling aspect of being a Mets fan back in the days of Shea Stadium was the jewel across town in the Bronx: Yankee Stadium. The House that Ruth Built (Babe Ruth, for the non-baseball fans out there). The first time I walked in I literally got goosebumps, surrounded by all that history, as I walked up the dangerously steep stairs of the upper deck of the old Yankees Stadium (I never got good seats to a Yankees game).
One of my visits to Yankee Stadium was late in the summer of 1995, just after Micky Mantle died. In an unexpected show of good taste, the Yankees put the number 7 on the Jumbotron, no other announcement, no greatest hits reel. Just the number 7. The crowd hushed, and the hush turned to a silence. That’s no mean feat: hushing tens of thousands of beered-up sports fans. I know I got a lump in my throat, and I’m sure a sizable percentage of the crowd was similarly moved.
One of the traditions surrounding seeing a Yankee’s game at the time was visiting Stan’s Sport’s Bar, across the street from Yankee Stadium. Just try wearing a Met’s jersey into that place. They would serve you, but you’d be relentlessly hounded. I didn’t often wear my Mets fandom on my sleeve while in there.
Stan’s Sport’s Bar was loud and rowdy and profane, particularly after a Yankee’s win, but they were surprisingly disciplined in their chanting. The most common chant was, of course, “Let’s go, Yankees (clap clap, clap clap clap),” closely followed by, “<INSERT TEAM NAME HERE> suck!” Others were nearly as common. One side of the bar would sing “Tastes great!” and the other side would sing back “Less filling!” (This was a popular Miller Lite beer commercial at the time.) There were many anti-Met’s sing-alongs. Many involved Daryl Strawberry. Most are unprintable.
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I didn’t go to a single game at Shea Stadium in 1984. I barely had money for subway fare.
In 1985 tickets to Mets games were a relatively easy get. The Mets sucked in 1984, so as the team began to rebuild in 1985 crowds were slow to follow.
In the following years I acquired several ticket-acquiring skills. I learned how to slip the ticket guy a ten-dollar bill and ask if he had “anything special.” I don’t know if the ten actually got me better seats, or merely made the ticket taker a little pocket change. But I usually ended up with reasonably good seats, if not actually special.
I also learned that the ticket scalpers hung out in the parking lot. If I couldn’t get a seat at the ticket booth, I wandered out to the parking lot. There, hanging out between the cars, old men (though probably decades younger than I am now) loitered, eyes sharp for potential customers or security. Scalping was illegal, unless you were selling the tickets at face value. These tickets were NOT going for face value. I couldn’t afford much, but they usually had cheap seats available.
The best way to get seats involved the American Legion. Legion members would sell poppies to raise money. They weren’t always around, but when they were, they often had tickets (well-meaning ticket-holders would give them their extra tickets for resale, I assume). As I mentioned before, it was illegal to sell tickets above face value. What the American Legion guys would do is sell the ticket at face value, and then ask you to buy a poppy as a way to donate to the American Legion. So, the $10 I usually gave to the ticket booth for “something special” went to the poppy guy instead. The difference: they always had better tickets than the ticket booth
Nearly every ticket I bought was in the upper sections of Shea, because I couldn’t afford anything better. Seated that high up above the action, it was hard to make out detail, so I’d focus on the big picture, always easier to see that high up, and that alos played into my burgeoning love for the game. I’d watch the outfielders change positions from hitter to hitter and try to figure out the reasons why. Similarly, when runners were on base, I’d watch the fielders playing behind the runners, and the runners’ leads, and the dance of timing and distance and stealth taking place between the fielder and the runner and the pitcher. I’d crowd-watch. I’d cloud-watch. I’d pray for a foul ball would come my way (I’ve been to probably a hundred games and never caught a foul ball).
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I went out with a girl for a summer who OWNED Shea Stadium. She was a Brooklyn girl, born and bred, and she swore continually and creatively and profanely, at a level I’ve not often heard from any person, man or woman. I recall a Brooklyn bartender commenting, “She swears more than anyone I’ve ever met.” Let’s linger on that statement for a second. This was a Brooklyn bartender noticing the level of her profanity, enough to comment upon it. Brooklyn barrooms set a pretty high standard for inventive swearing.
Our second date was a Mets game. We bought cheap eight dollar seats in the Uppers, the cheapest seats we could get, and the kind of tickets I was used to buying.
“Fuck that shit, we not gonna be sitting there,” she told me. “Follow me!”
I followed her. I was way out of my depth. She led me down into the Field Box section of Shea. I’d never been there before. These were the rich people seats, the stockbroker seats, forever out of reach. These people wore suits to the game! I felt uneasy even being there; usually this section was off-limits, and all gates to it from the Uppers were either locked or guarded.
She went down there like she was the owner’s daughter. We reached our first big gate that led to the Field Boxes, and all that impossibly bright green grass beyond. She walked right up to the ticket taker.
“Hey, Mike!” she said. She smiled brightly, and he returned the smile. They may have even hugged. Not particularly surreptitiously, she slipped him a five-dollar bill.
“Got anything for us today?”
He led us to what were easily the best seats I’d ever sat in. He wiped down our seats with a cloth, we tipped him again (it was my turn this time), and sat down. We were sitting in field box seats, with a little metal bar around them, the infield only a few hundred feet away. I could see the player’s faces! I could watch them warm up in the batting circle. I was close enough to maybe, just maybe, catch a foul ball. And all for a palmed five dollars! I was in awe.
I didn’t truly understand how awe-worthy this arrangement was until later in the game. A well-dressed couple arrived at our section in the second or third inning. We were in their seats.
“Bummer,” I thought, but I figured at least we still had our original eight-dollar tickets for nosebleed seats. All we had to do was trudge all the way up there.
We stood. Mike ushered us out of the seats, and wiped down the seats again for the actual owners (who tipped him as well, I didn’t notice how much). Then, Mike motioned for us to follow him. He led us down the aisle, towards the field, closer to the action, and offered us even better seats. He wiped them down again, I tipped him again. Apparently, that initial five dollar buy-in guaranteed you seats for the entire game, provided you tipped after each seat wipe-down.
It was a fun date. The Mets won.
We went out for a few weeks in that sweltering Brooklyn summer. We drank a lot of beer, and we watched a lot of baseball. She eventually broke up with me to go out with an up-and-coming screenwriter (he wrote one movie you may have heard of).
That same year, after the break-up, a friend of mine and I went to a Mets game, and I told myself that I was going to try the five-dollar bill trick. We bought cheap nosebleed seats and snuck down to the partially closed gate that led to the field boxes.
The guy manning the gate was not Mike.
I approached not-Mike with a five-dollar bill visibly sitting in the palm of my hand.
“Uh, is Mike here?” I asked.
“I don’t know a Mike,” he replied, rather gruffly. I wasn’t positive he had seen my money, but I thought he had.
There must have been some specific phrase my date had used to let Mike know what she wanted. I wracked my brain trying to remember that phrase. I thought about just openly offering him the five, but I didn’t think bribes should be proffered so brazenly. I didn’t know what else to say, and my bravado was quickly ceding to awkwardness. This was well out of my comfort zone and experience.
“Okay, thanks,” I said. I pocketed my five and we turned around and walked the stairs that led from the field level all the way up to the legendarily steep slope of stairs of the upper levels.
I think the Mets won that game.
Peace.
To be continued…