A Personal History of Shea Stadium, part nine
Baseball is theater
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
1999 NLCS, Game 5
The next night, Sunday night.
Francis and I take our Mezzanine seats at Shea. The Mets fans we encounter on the 7 train and the long walk up to our seats are still fatalistic about our chances. The fact that no baseball team has ever come back from a 0-3 deficit to win a seven game series is mentioned more than once.
Daylight fades, gradually replaced by the lights on the field, overtaking the natural light in a wonderful piece of stagecraft that happens at every baseball game played at night: the moment of equilibrium when artificial light overtakes the light of day and focuses the crowd’s attention on the game about to take place in front of them. I love this moment. It reminds me of the darkness and hush the moment before the curtains open and the stage lights flare.
Baseball is theater.
The Mets score two runs at the bottom of the first inning, which gives us a little breathing room, right at the beginning of the game. In the top of the fourth, The Braves score two and tie the game up. The crowd quiets a bit, but a buzz has been in the air since first pitch.
It begins to rain, and the drizzle continues for the next several hours.
Tie game. 2-2 in the fourth.
The score doesn’t change in the fifth inning. It doesn’t change in the sixth inning, the seventh, the eighth, the ninth. The game goes into extra innings (there is no phantom runner on base, as there is in today’s extra inning games, in a misguided attempt by MLB to speed up games). Neither team scores in the tenth inning. No score in the eleventh, the twelfth, the thirteenth, the fourteenth. The game is now five hours old, but no one has left Shea. We’re still in our seats, hanging onto the scant hope of victory in this tied, extra-inning game.
At the end of the fourteenth inning the scoreboard informs us we are watching the longest post-season baseball game in the 100+ year history of baseball (this record has since been broken). The crowd cheers. The crowd also wishes the Mets would score.
The drizzling rain continues to fall.
In the top of the fifteenth inning, with our pitcher, Octavio Dotel, working his third inning and beginning to tire, the Brave’s Walt Weiss hits a single. One batter later, Weiss steals second. Keith Lockhart hits a triple and scores Walt Weiss. The Braves are up 3-2. The ESPN website I’m looking at pegs their probability of winning at 84%. The wind goes out of the sails of the gathered fans, and the stadium falls to a hushed Mets-ian fatalism.
Bottom of the fifteenth. Mets at the plate, down by a run. Faint murmurs of life are heard from the crowd. If we lose this game, we have to watch the Braves celebrate winning the NLCS.
Roger Cedano, that swift runner who was a key to winning game 4, gets a base hit up the middle. The Mets have a speedy runner on first, no outs. Everyone in the stadium, and on the field, is expecting him to steal. Sure enough, Cedano steals second. Win probability goes to 44%. Our next batter walks. Our odds of winning climb to 50%. We have runners on first and second. A sacrifice bunt puts them on second and third. The assembled crowd at Shea finds it voice and begins to make some serious noise.
One out. The Braves intentionally walk the next batter to load the bases and create the possibility of a double play.
One out, bases loaded. Incredibly, our next batter, Todd Pratt, walks, forcing in the tying run. 3-3. Shea Stadium is shaking, the entire crowd is standing and screaming. The drizzle in the air mixes with the bright lights to lend the baseball diamond a fuzzy, surrealistic glow. Nothing seems real.
One out, bases are loaded, the game is tied. Everyone is standing, expectant; even between batters there is an audible buzzy chatter. I keep reminding myself that the game is tied, and even if we hit into a double play we won’t lose, we’ll just proceed to the next inning. I’m barely admitting to myself the possibility of winning.
Robin Ventura steps up to the plate, and if you are a Mets fan you probably know what happens next.
Shea Stadium seems filled with light, spilling out into the rain-soaked night, uncontained. Francis and I have been sitting in these seats for nearly six hours (and three more hours the previous night). The Mets don’t even need a hit to win the game: a walk will win the game, even a long fly ball will score the winning run.
Kevin McGlinchy, the Braves’ reliever, rocks and deals. First pitch. BOOM!
The ball flies high into the air, a great parabolic white blur of an arc stretching from home plate to beyond the bright improbable blue of the right field fence. I can see it so clearly in my mind’s eye, right now, in real time. Roger Cedano crosses home plate to win the game. Meanwhile, Robin Ventura is mobbed by his teammates as he rounds first. He’s just hit—and we’ve just witnessed—a grand slam home run, but because he’s surrounded by a mob of celebrating teammates, he never gets past first base, and the hit is officially scored a single. The crowd cheers and just keeps on cheering.
No one leaves. Again: no one leaves. The game is over, but how can any of us leave the place? We’ve never witnessed a game like this before, and probably never will again. Leave? Please.
The speakers play We Will Rock You, not just the “Boom! Boom! Clap!” part that always get played, but the whole song. Everyone sings along. It’s loud, but the crowd is louder. It’s not the beer talking, they quit selling beer seven inning ago. It’s the enormity, and improbability, of the win we’ve just experienced. The air is electric; Shea is, at least for a night, charged with wonder, thick with light and luck and a shared love. We’d be fools to leave. This was the longest post-season game in the history of baseball!
Soak this all up, I think to myself. You may never experience anything like this again.
I call my Dad (also a huge Mets fan, and he’s certainly been watching the game, back in Pueblo, Colorado). He can’t hear me, the crowd is just too loud. I hold the phone up and let the noise tell the story. I don’t hang up for long minutes, and just hold the phone out on an outstretched arm. He listens to the crowd roar from thousands of miles away. It’s too loud to talk.
On his deathbed, twenty years, later, my Dad told me how much that moment meant to him.
Eventually, the speakers quit playing music and a voice urges us to find a way to the exits. After some continued exhortation we do, but no one is in a hurry. We sing and cheer and even hug as we walk down the exit ramps to the subway. In the papers the next day the final play is referred to as “the grand-slam single,” but that night, even having witnessed the game, we’re still trying to piece together what happened at the very end of the game. We knew we’d won, but was it off a fly ball? A base hit? A home run? How many runs actually scored? The scoreboard says 4-3, but shouldn’t it be 7-3? Excited conversations about possible endings spring up all over the exit ramps at Shea and in the trains rumbling back to Manhattan.
The excitement of the win lasts the entire ride to Grand Central, and the crowd spills out of the 7 train and into the streets and the bars. For Mets fans, at least for a night, the city is ours.
We close down the bars and arrive home just as the first fingers of sunlight are rising up from the East are signaling the rise of a brand-new day.
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I have to fly home the next afternoon. My hangover is nearly crippling, but I’ve been able to grab newspapers recording the win. The Daily News, the Post, the Times (I still have the back page of the Daily News, framed and hung on my wall). I remember looking out of the window of the plane, exhausted and headache-y and grinning stupidly over all the great baseball I’d just witnessed.
When I return to New York, my friend Benji, a Braves fan, tells me, “That game must have been better than sex.”
It wasn’t Benji, but it was close.
It’s the best baseball game I’ve ever seen. Few people outside of Mets and Braves fandom even remember it.
The Mets lose the series two days later. The Braves move on to the World Series, while the Mets are left in the dugout. I witness this on television, back home in Colorado. In some important way, the enormity of the win we witnessed at Shea is heightened by the fact that it happened in the midst of a larger loss.
I’m not the first to point out the obvious: baseball is just as much about losing as it is about winning. It’s an old saw of the sport, but it a cliche because it is true. At the end of a season, with all teams and all games counted, there are exactly as many wins as there are losses. That’s the nature of the game. It’s how baseball works.
You can win a battle but lose the war, and the larger loss does not diminish the joy of the victory. This night, we win the battle. The shared drama we witness, as a group of faithful fans gathered at Shea, is unchanged by the games that follow, win or lose.
All that matters in the moment is this game, the one we have gathered to watch, right here, right now.
Baseball is theater.
Peace.
To be continued…