A Personal History of Shea Stadium, part ten
The 2000 Subway Series; Ticket prices ensure normal human beings cannot attend; Derek Jeter does Derek Jeter things; Prostitutes laugh at me; New York City celebrates a World Series win
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
Subway Series
When the Mets ultimately lost that game to the Braves in 1999, they were denied the World Series.
The next year, 2000, the turn of the century, with a divisive election months away and rumors of Y2K swirling in the air, the Mets made it all the way to the World Series. Not only did they make it, but they were facing their crosstown rivals, the Yankees. In a World Series that was ignored by most of the rest of the country, my two baseball worlds were colliding. This was a Subway Series.
How the rest of the world reacted to the series was best typified by the bar my wife and I strolled into a sports bar to watch the game. It wasn’t even playing! Game one of the World Series, and the sports bar we were at didn’t have the game on. They turned it on, of course, after I asked.
The Mets lost that first game, after a blown save and twelve grueling innings.
I left for New York City the next day.
#
I told my friend John, who lived in LA at the time, that if he could make it to New York City, I would find a way to get us into the World Series. My theory was that my ex-employers in NYC had deep enough pockets and enough remaining good will for the work I did for them, they’d get me tickets. In my defense, they had gotten me two tickets to the All-Star game in Denver the previous year.
“You promise they’ll get us tickets?”
“Yes!” I promised.
“You don’t even work there anymore!” John sounded skeptical.
“They owe me!” I promised. “Show up, I’ll get us in.”
It turns out my former employees owed me nothing. They had little desire to find me access to the hardest tickets to get in the city.
I made a valiant attempt to get tickets another way. Games were sold out, and the only way to snag a ticket was through a broker or a scalper. But this wasn’t like the old days, buying seats from a scalper in the parking lot of Shea Stadium. Prices were shockingly high, thousands of dollars per seat. These prices were not set with actual human beings in mind, few folks could afford it. I got the sense, combing through offer after offer, that the buyers of these seats were primarily companies buying the seats and giving them out as perks. It ensured the stands would be filled with suits and stockbrokers, and the fans would have to stay home and watch it on TV.
John made it to New York City, but he would had to watch the Subway Series in bars.
#
I watched most of the Series in bars too, but I did get to attend one World Series game, with Francis, who still had his season ticket connection. I was honored to be his guest. These tickets were worth more than their weight in gold.
By the tine we showed up to Shea, however, the Yankees had won the first two games of the series, at Yankee Stadium. The Series shifted to Shea, and Mets won the first game there. It takes four wins to win a seven game series. The Yankees had two wins, we had one.
Francis and I showed up to the game several hours early, to soak up the atmosphere. What we ended soaking up was merchandise. A sea of pop-up stores and tents filled with tee shirts and hats and balls and memorabilia stamped with Mets-Yankees World Series 2000© (all verified with a small square holographic sticker) stood between us and the ballpark.
I bought a couple of tee shirts and a couple hats. Francis did the same. By the time we arrived on the far side of the merch gauntlet, we were feeling a little used, and significantly poorer. We trudged into Shea along with the rest of the gathering crowd. Two thirds were Mets fans, the rest were Yankee fans.
Sheryl Crow sang the National Anthem.
This was the high point of the evening.
Derek Jeter—THAT Derek Jeter, the Uber-Yankee, hero of more than a handful of post-season games, and behind one of the greatest plays in post-season history (most baseball fans and all Yankees fans know exactly what play I’m talking about; if you don’t, here’s a clip)—stepped up to the plate to begin the game.
He jerked the first pitch out of the park, well beyond the left field fence. Shea fell to a depressed hush, as Mets fans endured the indignity of listening to the Yankee fans in the stadium celebrate.
The Yankees never looked back. The Mets scored two runs at the end of the third inning, off of a Mike Piazza home run, but it wasn’t quite enough. By then the Yankees had scored two more runs, and still led 3-2. We never regained the lead we gave up on the first pitch of the game.
Neither team scored again after that third-inning Piazza home run. The Yankees won, 3-2.
The trudge to the subway platform was silent (except for the sound of celebrating Yankees fans, which made everything worse). No one sung songs on the 7-line ride back into Manhattan. The beer buzz had long faded by the time we stepped onto the subway platform at Grand Central.
We took the escalator and stepped out into the neon New York City night, weary and sullen, still wearing out Mets hats and Mets jerseys.
Two prostitutes walked toward us as we stepped onto the sidewalk. I thought perhaps they were going to offer us their services, but instead they asked, “Who won?”
“Yankees,” we said in unison.
Both prostitutes started laughing at us. We’re not talking about a sympathetic chuckle here. They were laughing at us, standing on the sidewalk, wearing the uniform of losers.
This was New York City, I reminded myself. Not lot of sympathy for losers out on these streets.
#
I’m confident I’ll never see a World Series game again. The tickets are just too pricey, and the logistics are formidable. My only World Series game will be remembered by the events bookending the game: when Jeter hit the first pitch of the evening over the left-field fence, and when we arrived home to get laughed at by hookers.
The game we saw was the Yankee’s third win. The next night would hand their fourth win, and thus the series.
John and Francis and I watched it at a bar, of course. It was one of the few Mets bars on the Upper West side, and I wish I remembered the name of it. We watched every game (except the one we were at) there. Mets fans gathered at the bar like it was religious sanctuary, a safe place in hostile territory, and in a Yankees-obsessed town, it was. The bouncer for the place temporarily acquired my plush Mr. Met doll (long story) and anointed each customer that walked into the bar by tapping them on the forehead with Mr. Met. Assumedly, were a Yankees fan to be touched by the doll, their Yankees fandom would flee their body like a demon forced from its host.
Al Leiter battled this legendary lineup of Yankees hitters for nine full innings, throwing over 140 pitches, as the game stayed stuck on a 2-2 tie for inning after inning. It was valiant performance, and I’ll remember forever the sweat and strain on Leiter’s face as we watched him on the television. If we lost this game, we lost the Series, and that sword hung above his heroic performance that night.
He gave up two runs in the top of the ninth, and that was the game, and the World Series.
We stepped outside and watched Yankees fans rush out onto the street, celebrating (winning the World Series is a very big deal in NYC, it’s a baseball town). Cars honked, people screamed from the sidewalks and windows, fireworks and gunshots sounded, yadayadayada. The whole nine yards, and it went on all night long.
I remember telling John and Francis, “Well, at least we got to be in New York City to see a New York team win the World Series.” Even as I said them, the words rang pretty false.
I believe John’s response was this: “Bullshit.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Peace.
To be continued…