A Personal History of Shea Stadium, part six
I am gifted a free beer on a hot day; Terry Pendleton hits a soul-killing home run; Rey Ordonez makes a stunning defensive play; Pascuel Perez throws an Eephus pitch
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
Snapshots from Shea Stadium:
On a hot Saturday afternoon, my friend Francis and I watched a crowded ballgame from the fancy-pants field box seats, which we’d bought from scalpers in the parking lot. I’d gotten one beer upon entering the game, but after a few innings I was done with my beer and wanted another. At crowded games, in field box seats, any attempt to get a beer at Shea was a half-hour process at minimum, ensuring you’d miss a full inning. Early on in the game, I expressed my regrets to Francis that I’d not be able to get another beer, even though sitting under a hot summer sun watching baseball was the perfect moment to experience one.
A kindly voice behind me said, “Did you say you wanted a beer?”
I turned around. An older woman (though almost certainly younger than I am now) sitting behind me said, “My husband bought us two but I don’t want mine. Would you like it?”
I offered her money, but she insisted the beer be free. And so that is how I ended up being handed a (free!) cold beer on a hot sunny day, watching a baseball game under blue skies.
The Mets won.
#
Another moment at Shea, another set of fancy-pants box seats. I know the year—1988—because it was a playoff game, and there was no way I could have afforded, or had access to, field box seats for a playoff game without some help.
My boss, Julie, helped me out. She had six tickets to a playoff game between the Mets and the Dodgers, and offered one to me. I believe I again literally jumped up and down, as I did when I first saw the green outfield grass of Shea Stadium.
I’ve looked up the games online and I can confirm this must have been Game Five. I saw Sid Fernandez start, but he only went four innings. Kirk Gibson, the eventual star of the World Series that year, hit a three-run homer off of Sid in the fourth inning, and the Dodgers never looked back.
The Mets lost.
Days later, during Game One of the World Series, with the Dodgers down to their last out, Kirk Gibson pinch hit for the Dave Anderson, and jerked a two-run homer into the seats of the right field stands.
This Hollywood ending was the only at bat by Kirk Gibson in the entire World Series.
The Dodgers won.
#
My friend Toby—the one whose couch I slept on when I first arrived in New York City—always said that he could never go to Mets games, because they always lost when he attended (as an aside, when Toby finally got married to his lovely wife, we joked it was so people would stop sleeping on his couch upon their arrival in New York; he was a common first stop prior to getting an apartment).
I told him I didn’t believe in bad luck, and invited him to a Mets-Cardinals game on September 11th, 1987. It was the first game of an important series. The Cardinals had been leading the National League East division all year, but had blown a 10.5 game lead, so that when they entered the weekend, their lead had shrunk to 1.5 games. If we swept the series, we could take first place.
Toby and I went to the first game of the series, and got scalped tickets to a front row in the Upper Levels, along the third base line. I shushed Toby several times when he brought up being a bad luck charm for the team. “We’ll switch up that bad luck tonight!” I told him, forever optimistic.
My optimism certainly seemed warranted when the Mets took a three-run lead in the first, and tacked on another run in the second. Ron Darling pitched six innings of one-hit ball. The rowdy, beery Friday-night crowd sensed victory.
Ninth inning. 4-1 game, Mets in the lead. You can watch the game on Youtube. If you want, you can even queue it up to 2:23, the exact moment in the ninth inning where Roger McDowell walked the great Ozzie Smith. No big deal. We had a three-run lead, right? Roger got a first out, then a second out. One out to go.
When Willie McGee singled and brough home Ozzie, things still seemed fine. We had a two-run lead, right?
Terry Pendleton walked up to the plate. I’ll admit Toby’s bad luck curse had occurred to me at this point.
Roger threw a sinker, and Pendleton hit it foul. Strike one. Two strikes to go.
Roger threw another sinker. And Pendleton’s home run, in memory, looks exactly like the home run I just watched again on Youtube, floating slow and dreamlike over the center-field fence as the crowd falls to a stunned, hushed silence. I remember standing during the entire at bat, tightly gripping the metal handrail in front of me, and just collapsing, dropping to my knees, my hands still on the handrail, as I watched the ball sail into the New York City night.
That home run only tied the game, 4-4, and the Mets could have come back to win it. But momentum had turned in the Cardinals’ favor. They won the game in the tenth inning. It’s still considered, among Mets fans of a certain age, to be one of the great losses in Mets history. All you need to say is “Pendleton,” and those fans’ eyes will widen in saddened understanding. The Cardinals went on to take two out of three games, and ultimately win the division.
September 11th has a very different meaning to most Americans, and most Americans, and I don’t mean to lessen the poignancy of that memory. But September 11th was a date already tinged in darkness for Mets fans.
The Mets lost.
I still don’t believe in bad luck.
#
Opening day, eight years later, 1996, but still the Mets and the Cardinals, a sizzling rivalry at the time. It was cold and raining, but my friend John and I figured that meant we could get good scalped seats. We did, in the Mezzanine, along the third base line My friend Francis, was at the game too, with his Mom (a huge baseball fan). They were sitting in the Uppers.
Our shortstop that day was a rookie, making his major league debut. His name was Rey Ordonez.
The Cardinals took a fast 6-0 nothing lead in the game, and the cold and rain made the prospect of leaving the game and watching it on TV somewhere warm and dry seem mighty appealing. But we were all young and stupid and believed in big, improbable comebacks.
I learned later that Francis and his Mom were tempted to leave, but Francis quotes me, of all people, saying, “Jeff says a true fan never leaves early.” (I don’t remember saying this, and have, in fact, left several games early.) They stayed to the very end. We did too.
The Mets had sliced that lead in half by the seventh inning. The score was 6-3, Cardinals. In the top of the eighth, the Cardinals had Royce Clayton on first when Ray Lankford hit a ball down the left field line. Clayton took off and had rounded second by the time our man Bernard Gilkey fielded the ball near the base of the left-field fence. He was headed home by the time Gilkey threw off-line to the cut-off man, Rey Ordonez, whose job it was to throw the ball home.
Keep in mind that I was sitting on the third base line, so this whole play was happening right in front of me.
The throw to Rey was not accurate, so he had to go to his knees to field the ball. The runner barreled toward home. From his knees, Rey fired the ball 150 feet to our catcher, and he tagged Clayton out.
It’s the best, most spectacular defensive play I’ve ever seen in person. I’ve just looked on Youtube, and incredibly, there is no clear footage of Ordonez’s throw, though it is a storied play. Go on, look, I’ll wait. (This is the best I can find.) I derive great pleasure in having personally witnessed a throw which is not fully documented by modern technology. It lives on only in my memory and in the store of Mets’ lore about that throw, and that game.
Rey had a mediocre bat, but he was probably the best defensive shortstop in the history of the Mets.
The Mets went on to win that game, 7-6.
#
I was sitting with Francis in the upper decks of Shea, watching the Expos play the Mets. Pascuel Perez was on the mound, Daryl Strawberry stood at the plate. Mr. Perez, one of the more idiosyncratic pitchers in baseball at the time, sometimes threw what he called his “Pascuel Pitch,” and what the rest of us called an “eephus pitch.” The eephus is second to only the knuckleball in terms of entertainment value, but unlike the knuckleball, you can only throw the eephus pitch a few times a game.
Why? Because it looks like a wiffleball pitch, and if you throw it more than once, you are going to get caught: someone will turn on it and hit it over the fences. The eephus is a very slow, very high arcing throw, like a lazy curveball. It would be a novelty pitch except for the fact that if you get it over the plate, it’s a strike.
Pascuel’s first pitch to Daryl Strawberry was, of course, a 50 mph eephus pitch. The stadium reacted with incredulity and laughter; it’s a rarely thrown pitch, and we just got to witness it. I love baseball.
Daryl, for his part, dropped the barrel of his bat to the ground and glared at Pascual, angry at the disrespect. Pascual glared back. The baseball diamond was a theater.
I turned and tell Francis, “He’s gonna hit the next one out of the park.”
Pascuel rocked and dealed, and slung a fastball. Daryl leveled that perfect, power-loaded swing at the ball and deposited it over the right field fence.
The stadium erupted. The Mets won the game.
#
Pascual Perez had a pretty good career, but when he is remembered at all, he is most likely remembered not for the eephus pitch, but rather for missing his debut start, as an Atlanta Brave. He showed up to the game three hours late. His excuse? He got lost.
Sports Illustrated covered the story: “When I get lost, I been in Atlanta for four days,” said Perez. “I rent a car and get my driving permit that morning, and I leave for the stadium very early, but I forget where to make a turn right.”
Thus handicapped, Perez made an afternoon-long ordeal out of what is normally a 15-minute ride. Circling helplessly, he finally pulled off the freeway at about 7:10 p.m., well north of Atlanta and running on fumes, and using gestures and his minimal English, persuaded a gas-station attendant to pump $10 worth of free gas for him.
“I forgot my wallet, too,” says Perez.
He was suspended from baseball in 1992 for testing positive for cocaine. Sound familiar?
Peace.
To be continued…